Contexts of World Poetry to 1660 - AP English Literature and Composition

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Question

Canto I

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;

But of the good to treat, which there I found,

Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Who is this author?

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Answer

This is an excerpt from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy – specifically, the famous opening lines of The Inferno. Even if you didn’t recognize these lines, you could have noticed that the work is written in couplets and that it is a canto, both of which are identifying features of The Divine Comedy.

Passage adapted from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Eliot Norton (1920)

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