Exerted from Raising Hell, The author talks about how The Divine Comedy is a modern

piece of literature that deserves to be read. This could be used to argue that the middle
ages wasnt all bad and actually did have some ups to it.
If Western literature boasts a single poem the very dynamics of which embodies the idea
of a literary tradition, if three millennia of European poetry contain a single chef d'oeuvre
which braids together the most strands that lead back to antiquity and forward to
modernity, that work must be in my opinion Dante's Divine Comedy. Thus the
appearance of a major new translation that brings into contemporary American English
verse the most influential third of Dante's greatest achievement represents a signal event.
At a time when all too many people who should know better seem to think that
unraveling European literary traditions is a strike in favor of egalitarianism and
outwardness rather than a capitulation in the face of corporate-driven mass-culture and
cultural isolationism, there can be no more independent gesture than to raise hell by
modernizing Dante's Inferno precisely as a poem.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27560341.pdf

Exerted from Voices of the Divine Comedy, (how do I summarize this?)

Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice of course speak very often. Well over a hundred other
individuals speak once or twice or oftener in a single canto or in two or more successive
cantos, and then recede into memory; and a considerable number of larger or smaller
groups of persons speak in virtual unison. Brief spoken passages are often combined to
form a continuous vor virtually continuous series of verbal exchanges of various kinds.
The longest such series are that in Purg. XVI, containing eleven passages spoken by
Dante and Marco Lombardo, that in Purg. XXI, containing twelve passages spoken by
Statius, Virgil, and Dante, and that in Par. XXIV, containing fifteen passages spoken by
St. Peter and Dante.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40165976.pdf

The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew (1308-1311)

Painted surface 42.7x45.5 Cm
Tempera on panel (Water, egg yolk, Color supplement)
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.282.html

What do you want us to do for a summary for the poem?

Quando l pianeta che distingue lore
When the heavenly body that tells the hours has returned to the constellation of Taurus,
power from the burning horns descends that clothes the world with new colours: and not
only in that which lies before us, banks and hills, adorned with flowers, but within where
already the earthly moisture pregnant with itself, adds nothing further, so that fruits and
such are gathered: as she, who is the sun among those ladies, shining the rays of her
lovely eyes on me creates thoughts of love, actions and words; but
whether she governs them or turns away, there is no longer any Spring
for me.
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Italian/Petrarch.htm