C.S. Lewis discussed Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in A Preface to Paradise Lost. The book, published in 1942, is a critical introduction to John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and considers how readers should approach its form and subject.
Lewis was a literary scholar whose work frequently connected medieval and Renaissance traditions. Dante’s Divine Comedy provided an important comparative reference because both poems present large-scale journeys through structured moral and spiritual worlds. Lewis used such comparisons to clarify epic conventions rather than to claim that Milton simply copied Dante.
The title of Lewis’s study can cause a different confusion: Paradise Lost itself was written by John Milton, not Dante. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, whose three major sections are Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
A Preface to Paradise Lost became influential partly because Lewis challenged modern assumptions about epic poetry. He argued that readers should understand Milton’s poem on its own literary terms, including its genre, narrative voice, and treatment of supernatural beings.