The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1308)

Midway along the road of life, the path simply gives out: the poet wakes in a dark wood, no memory of how he strayed, three beasts barring the way back. What saves him is a descent. Down through nine circles of Hell he goes, past popes and Florentine neighbors fixed forever in weather Dante built to fit their sins, the lustful blown like starlings on an endless wind, the traitors locked in ice. Virgil walks him through the dark; Beatrice, the girl he loved and lost when she died at twenty-four, waits to carry him up. This is the astonishment of it: a single exiled poet mapped the entire afterlife, Hell and Purgatory and Paradise, and set his own grief at its center, all in the Florentine speech he was helping to invent. He climbs until language nearly fails him, and then names what he sees: the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.