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The Harvard Classics 20: The Divine Comedy by Dante is unavailable, but you can change that!

When Charles William Eliot assembled The Harvard Classics, more commonly known as “The Five-Foot Shelf,” and later the “Shelf of Fiction”, he gathered this epic collection of key works which he thought would best represent “the progress of man… from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” In his introduction to The Harvard Classics, Eliot likens the collection to a...

object of his ideal devotion. She became for him, especially after her death in 1290, the center of a mystical devotion of extraordinary intensity, and appears in his masterpiece as the personification of heavenly enlightenment. The “Divine Comedy” was entitled by Dante himself merely “Commedia,” meaning a poetic composition in a style intermediate between the sustained nobility of tragedy, and the popular tone of elegy.” The word had no dramatic implication at that time, though it did involve a
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