Dante vs. Milton

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Recommended: Satan as hero by literary devices

Hell is a place full of wonder and mystery. No one is quite sure as to what it is like, but many people have an opinion as to the mystery that is the dark underworld. Hell is a place one would imagine with suffering and punishment for the damned, ruled by Satan. Satan is almost as much of a mystery as Hell is. There are many images that give an idea as to what Satan may look like, but no one is true certain of the real face of the beast. Many people have theorized the structure of Hell, but two poets have captured two centralized ideas of how Hell is set up and the images of what Satan may look like. Dante Alighieri and John Milton have created two different yet universal depictions of Hell and Satan. Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet who based some of his book after Milton, The Inferno was a literary piece who depicted Hell as many levels and Satan as a suffering monster. Whereas John Milton, an English poet, showed Hell as a dungeon beneath the Earth created to imprison Satan for his betrayal against God. These two poets had very different opinions on Satan and Hell, but also showed similarities in their description of the two.
In both poems Satan is depicted as a once beautiful angel, who then betrayed God and became a hideous monster. In Paradise Lost Satan is seen as a large and powerful being. He is still strong even after betraying God and rebelling against him. Satan was very angry and set on rising up again to defeat God. He felt as though it would be more shameful to beg for forgiveness rather than continue to fight against God. When he was punished he decide to continue to do evil no matter what saying, “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell. A Hell of Heaven.” Satan believed one day he c...

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...wful version, although I would picture him with more rage. I always considered Hell to look like the version portrayed in Milton’s poem, I never thought of Hell being divided into levels depending on your level of sin. These poems have really opened by eyes to a new version of Hell.
Dante and Milton both had opposing views of Hell and Satan, although they did share some similarities. Their views of Hell was set up completely differently from one another. There are many reasons as to why both of these authors viewed Hell the way they did. These authors lived in two very different time periods with different situations occurring around them. There are plenty of people who argue who is right and who is wrong, but there is no true way of telling which depiction of Hell is accurate. Until death, Heaven and Hell are both a mystery to us all that we can only wonder about.

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