Why Dante

Every years thousands of people go to the movie theaters to watch people get chopped up with knives and chainsaws. Why do people go watch these films. The question seems unanswerable, yet it is the same question as why we love Dante and his Inferno. People have an obsession with gore and Dante is the father of this genre. However, Dante is not as vulgar as these movies, which is really saying something. Between the fact that Dante had to write his visions and that Dante used beautiful language his book of gore is bearable to everybody and made his book immensely popular.
"As the man I saw split open from his chin/Down to the farting-place, and from the splayed/ Trunk the spilled entrails dangled between his thighs." Canto XXVIII line 24
This gives proof of how vivid Dante was. A very grotesque image, but yet captivating at the same time. Its like trying to tell a child not to look at the man with one leg in the supermarket, the kid is still going to stare. As humans we cannot help to be captivated by these disgusting images. We don't want to be part of them but we sure do like to watch from afar. And Dante's form of media alleviates the reader so they don't become sick. When you read, your unable to smell the rotting flesh, become mesmerized by the swinging of the organs falling out of the body: the really gross stuff.
Our society discourages us from this kind of stuff. As children we always want to poke the dead squirrel in the road with a stick. Watch its guts ooze out of gash we create. Then our mothers slap our wrist and yank us away. Dante's Inferno lets us continue on this path. To investigate the unimaginable horrors that could be done to the human body, yet it is odd how easy it is to visualize these unimaginable horrors. We are repulsed, and would never dare do this to another human being, this is literature, it doesn't actually happen. We tell ourselves this as we read to make ourselves feel better, yet we keep turning the next page, and generation after generation continues to read it.
Dante isn't called the supreme poet in Italian just because it is gory. His work is considered to be the greatest piece of Italian literature ever and it helps to have excellent control over a language to accomplish this feat. I feel that I can't truly appreciate Dante's work unless I am fluent in Italian but even in English, the book shows masterful art in word choice and syntax. The fact that Dante is readable to the average educated person has also increased his books popularity, but being easy to read and sound good isn't what makes a book legendary.
It is important to note that Dante's Inferno was only part of his actual book which also included Purgatory and Paradise, yet it is the Inferno that remains most popular among the masses. The Divine Comedy is an amazing work as a whole but the first part is what captures readers. The question raises itself again: why, why, why? Is it the christian elements, or the references to great poets of old. Maybe the answer is that all humans just have a little evil in them that needs to be quenched, and Dante's Inferno is the perfect nectar.