Word: infernos
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...TIME'S otherwise brilliant and stimulating article on Dante perpetuates some 19th century misunderstanding of the poet. The most debatable point is that Dante used the Inferno for personal vindictiveness, to damn his political enemies, while demonstrating extreme lenience toward old friends like Brunetto Latini. Dante's work is primarily an inward journey into the soul of everyman and an exposure of the possibilities of evil therein. The figures that Dante encounters, therefore, symbolize evils that the poet condemns in himself as well as in others...
Simplicity of language, on the other hand, does not prevent what Critic Erich Auerbach described as "artful and meticulous composition unequaled in the whole of literature." The last canto of I'Inferno, for instance, descends to the depths of despair through a brilliant cacophony of rhymes that snarl, snigger, squeak, squitter, screech like a sackful of demented imps. And the structure of the entire poem is a miracle of symmetry; all its canticles are consciously articulated in a great Golden Section, an ancient system of proportion in which the nature of God and the structure of the human soul...
...generally good news of a still-shimmering voice. Not all the high reaches are easily secured, but her warmth, womanliness and pleading pianissimos are most touching in some of the other roles, notably that of the mother in Cilea's L'Arlesiana singing Esser madre è un inferno...
...green (Monica Vitti) stands staring desolately across acres of black sludge. Obviously in a state of shock, she has recently attempted suicide following a minor auto accident. But there is no comfort to be had, for here within walking distance of Dante's tomb sprawls a 20th century Inferno. Above her, towering smokestacks throw flame into the sky, while the pipelines of industrial Ravenna belch steam onto the wasted earth...
...Murray Schisgal, sends three very modern and morose souls through a slapstick, tongue-wagging, satirical inferno of cocktail-party griefs. Under Mike Nichols' brilliantly inventive direction, Actors Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin produce constant and rib-aching hilarity...