The greatest long poem in the Western tradition after Homer, and arguably the most architecturally perfect. Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as a cosmological journey through which Dante maps the entire moral universe of medieval Christianity. The Inferno (with its psychological precision in imagining torments fitted perfectly to sins) has never been equaled as a work of moral imagination. T.S. Eliot put it plainly: "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third."

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.