Calling his poem “a comedy,” Dante uses medieval terminology: a comedy, as he explains in a letter to Can Grande, is any poetic work of the middle style with a frightening beginning and a happy ending, written in the vernacular language; a tragedy is any poetic work of the high style with an admirable and calm beginning and a terrible ending. The word “divine” does not belong to Dante—later, Giovanni Boccaccio named the poem that. “The Divine Comedy” is the product of the entire second half of Dante’s life and work. In this work, the poet’s worldview is reflected with the greatest completeness. Here, Dante appears as the last great poet of the Middle Ages—a poet continuing the development of feudal literature, while absorbing some traits typical of the new bourgeois culture of the early Renaissance.