The Moving Finger
9781613107935
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Dante ever sat down to write, first the whole Inferno, then the wholePurgatorio, and finally the whole Paradiso, consecutively one after the other. It is far more likely that when he began to write the first Canto of the Inferno, he had already decided, in his symmetrical mind, that there were to be one hundred Cantos in the Commedia, thirty-three to each Cantica, with Canto I. of the Inferno as the Introduction to the entire subject-matter of the Poem.