Words Unbound ― Teaching Dante's Inferno in the High School Classroom

Words Unbound draws on Milton Burke’s thirty years of teaching experience to help educators bring Inferno alive for today’s young reader. In a conversational, “colleague-to-colleague” style, Burke shares the interpretations, questions, and exercises he found effective in his high-school classroom, emphasizing group discussion and helping students engage meaningfully with the notoriously difficult text.

Burke employs what he calls an “inclusivist” approach, meaning that all readers, no matter their religious or philosophical moorings, can find it rewarding to ponder Inferno’s account of how God’s moral system works. It was Burke’s goal as educator to convey that the thorny issues of Inferno are timeless, and to guide students into communicating across the boundaries young people can sometimes build around themselves. Words Unbound is a special book: a dedicated teacher’s attempt to help a younger generation of teachers make Dante’s Inferno a fruitful subject in the classroom.

Milton Burke is a retired high-school English teacher. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.