Bibliography: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

In a letter to Sergeant, Cather compares the heat felt by lovers in Dante to the heat of Nebraska.

In My Antonia, Gaston Cleric reads Dante one night to Jim Burden. Jim "can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who spoke for Dante: 'I was famous on earth with the name which endures longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the Aeneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry." Cleric also quotes from Inferno, canto 1.

In "A Death in the Desert," Katherine Gaylord refers to the Inferno, canto 5, when she says "And in the book we read no more than [that] night." There are allusions to Dante's levels of hell in both "El Dorado: A Kansas Recessional" and "On the Divide."