Abstract

This investigation focuses on the relationship between Dante and Virgil in “The Divine Comedy. This study uses Holmes' Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Criticism in Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” to determine the applicability of his critical approaches to visual poetry. It uncovers Dante's ideas that emphasize his reliance on the poet through the reader's perspective and examines Pierre's interpretation of the poem who sees a literal reading of the poem as “a beautiful deception “which have carved meaningful twentieth-century debates about Dante's theology and the secularization of Dante studies. 
This qualitative descriptive study concludes that, according to Alighieri's allegory, the “Divine Comedy”, the path to God for the soul involves traversing three otherworldly realms of Hell (confession of sin), Purgatory (atonement for sins), and Heaven (holy life) echoed in the poem’s structure and in Dante’s invented verse “Terza Rima” and its rhyme; aba, bcb, cdc.This study recommends future comparative studies that could examine the influence of Dante’s triadic patterns on later literary works, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost or T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Such studies would highlight the enduring legacy of Dante’s structural and symbolic innovations in Western literature.