Robert Ferrier began The Dante Dreams in 2008 as a poetic homage to the 14th century Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, and his epic, The Divine Comedy, written in three volumes: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Ferrier, who is himself a novelist and an award-winning poet (he was nominated in 2007 for Poet Laureate of Oklahoma in the United States) is fascinated by dream poems depicting meetings with famous persons in history. He believes these give free rein to the writer’s imagination. What if a modern-day poet – a devotee of Dante – falls asleep at his journal and dreams of souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise?
The first two volumes of The Dante Dreams took five years. Volume 3, Paradise, is in progress. In Inferno, some of the souls from modern times sense and attack the poet’s weaknesses. In Purgatory and Paradise, dreams feature characters and settings from the original cantos.
Ferrier never set out to tread in Dante’s footsteps, but he hopes that his work will encourage new readers of the original epic. The Exhibitionist is honoured to be the home of The Dante Dreams Project.
Inferno
Journal Entry: Envy
Ernest Hemingway
Cain
Journal Entry: Pride
Benedict Arnold
King Herod
Journal Entry: Gluttony and Greed
William Tweed
Mammon
Journal Entry: Sloth and Lust
Cleopatra
Pan
Melanthius
Journal Entry: Anger
James Earl Ray
John Wilkes Booth
Jack The Ripper
Adolf Hitler
Josef Mengele
Pol Pot
Jim Jones
Timothy McVeigh
Richard Speck
Journal Entry: Redemption
Satan
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