An Essay on Transcendence: As evidenced in works by Dante, and by Poe

Dante Alighieri wrote La Divina Commedia in the early fourteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe wrote the “Adventure of Hans Pfaall” in the early nineteenth century. Two works with more than five hundred years of separation in creation yet, two works whose central theme is one in the same, the idea of transcending the confines of this world and rising to the unknown. The dictionary defines transcendence as 1: a state of being or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience, or 2: the state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits. In the course of these two works the main characters both make journeys to the moon, but both for plainly different reasons. One could also argue that the two works parallel the two definitions given just above. The purpose of this essay is to compare the idea of transcendence as it is presented in Dante’s “Paradiso” with the way it is presented in Poe’s “Adventure of Hans Pfaall”.
In the “Paradiso” Dan...