From this review
There is still a tendency among not very attentive readers – not to mention people who have read almost nothing of the work but have picked up the odd juicy morsel – to think of the Inferno as the really “interesting” section of the poem, the part where recognizable human emotion is most dramatically depicted and evoked: guilty love, transgression, punishment, tragic disaster and horror. It is salutary to remember that we as readers are not meant to linger in Hell and that, for all Dante’s obsessional score-settling in the Inferno, this is not what he intends to write about. The first part of the Commedia represents a terrifying descent towards complete stasis, the frozenness of Lucifer: the circles of Hell put before us a more and more total paralysis of energy and movement, and it is only by way of the extraordinary acrobatic feat that takes Virgil and Dante into Purgatory that the poem is enabled to continue. Hell is where the damned stay, immobilized by their choices; and for just that reason it cannot be where the poem stays. The choices of writer and reader alike have to be released, thawed out, if the poem is not itself to be silenced like the appalling figures of Satan and the three traitors in the Ninth Circle, who can neither move nor speak.
Séamus Sweeney 