ABSTRACT
Poets as well as philosophers reacted to Aristotelian world view, an all-pervasive aspect of their culture, and reflected it in their poems. Dante’s literary career began with his association with a group of Tuscan poets who wrote in what would later label the “dolce stil novo.” The cosmos of The Divine Comedy is based on a simplified Aristotelian model. The visible structure of Dante’s universe is deceptive in that the journey toward heaven seems to be a journey away from a center and toward a circumference. Attempts to develop a realistic model of how the universe was actually constructed commanded great interest during Middle Ages. The sphere of the primum mobile receives the impetus for its great revolution from penetration of a single point of light, seen as surrounded by wheels of sparks representing angels. The journey through the stars to arrive in the Empyrean is by no means the extent of Dante’s examination of the physical cosmos.
