A literary device helps to make a simple narrative beautiful, striking, or memorable in some other way. Dante uses imagery in these lines to enhance the reader’s understanding of the scene because it is a literary device that uses vivid description to appeal to readers senses and is often used by authors to captivate audiences and propel them into a world of fiction.
For Dante Alighieri, creator of Dante's Inferno, imagery is an understatement for what is a figurative “hell”. Utilizing imagery to appeal to every possible sense, Alighieri creates a vivid and painful hell that protagonist Dante must traverse through.
