This week's episode begins a series of episodes on the extraordinary  work composed at the outset of the fourteenth century by the great  Italian poet Dante Alighieri.  With his Christian understanding of the  soul, Dante's epic poem is an imaginative and moral vision of this  earthly life in the light of what will happen after death.  

The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of souls after  death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due  punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell,  Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem  represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the  recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent  Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent  to God (Paradiso).   

The first episode is a general overview of the verbal architecture of  the poem, looking at some of the many extraordinarily well-wrought  poetics and its basic motifs.  As a humanist, we will emphasize how  different Dante's theological and philosophical premises are from a poet  who believes that poetry is first and foremost a mode of  self-expression rather than an engagement with ultimate reality.