When Dante wrote The Divine Comedy did he have a didactic intention or is a didactic result reader-derived?

Question

The Divine Comedy presents a fertile field for critical analysis. Critics from every discipline, feminist to historic, find volumes to digest. Do we as the reader impose unintended meaning? Was Dante more fanciful and fictional than we want to believe?

Answer 1

On the one hand, Dante certainly shows off his status as a "poeta doctus", the epitome of the classically educated poet, in the Divine Comedy.
On the other hand, every work of art is attributed meaning by the perceiver. Interpretation or even criticism of a work of art is never guessing what the author "intended" with it, but posing our own questions toward it. And great works of art have been revisited and re-interpreted by generatoon after generation; that's why they stay contemporary and never really become obsolete. The Divine Comedy is no exception to that.