Inferno1814 · public domain
The Dante the Romantics read. Cary casts the poem in Miltonic blank verse, grand and knotty, and it was his 1814 version that first carried Dante deep into English literary life, with Coleridge lecturing on it and Keats taking it up the mountains. It is markedly archaic now, its word order twisted for the metre (“In the midway of this our mortal life”), and freer with the plain sense than a modern crib. Read Cary as a monument of early nineteenth-century English verse and for its sheer sonorous weight, not as a transparent window onto the Italian. Public domain.