This is a Text investigation. Consider your essential question in the context of at least two outside sources you have identified that connect to your essential question. How do these ideas resonate with or challenge your own beliefs, experiences, or practices? Be sure to give concrete and specific examples. You may want to address: ways the sources answered parts of your Essential Question, what additional questions were raised, or how your essential understanding of your project was altered or confirmed by the readings you did. Make sure to cite your sources.

One of the components of my project is meeting with other individuals who have read Dante’s Inferno in an effort to engage in a dialogue regarding the text and the experience of reading it. Through these conversations, I have grown an eagerness to revisist particular passages as I garner more understanding and perspective. When I spoke with Theo Rand, we began to dissect the impact Canto 5 has on a reader, how the vividness of its language and the accessibility of the sin (lust) makes it an experience in which the reader can’t help but imagine themselves suffering the same contrapasso as those in the Second Circle. This discussion brought me back to the text, to one of my favorite parts of the poem, Dante’s repetition of “Amor…”: “Love, which is swiftly kindled… Love, which pardons no one… Love led us on to one death” (Inferno 5). The personification of love, as a force that cannot be muted, tamed, or escaped, begs the reader to not only empathize with the souls in the Second Circle, but naturally to return to themselves. In regard to my essential question, Dante’s entire poem lends itself to this very purpose: for the reader’s reflection on their own journey. In addition to Theo, I also had the wonderful privilege to talk Dante with my friend Bay Dotson, who shared with me a poem that she perceives draws from Inferno: “Tar” by C.K. Williams. Using imagery from Dante’s description of the boiling pitch in Hell, C.K. Williams examines and communicates his own experience during the Three Mile Island accident. This utilization of Dante’s work to explore a personal experience is very inspiring to me for my own project.