Chances are that you didn’t make it through high school and/or college without reading at least part of Dante’s Inferno. The different circles of Hell filled with sinners suffering horribly ironic punishments, the description of Satan eternally devouring Judas, Brutus, and Cassius—they’re strange but compelling images that have worked their way into popular culture. But how many of us have read past the lurid Inferno and Purgatorio to read Dante’s account of Heaven in the Paradiso? (Not me!)

At Slate, Robert Baird talks about why people find Dante’s account of Hell so much more compelling than his vision of Heaven. Setting aside some minor complaints about Dante’s writing style, Baird says the real problem that readers today have with the Paradiso is

the idea of heaven itself. T.S. Eliot noted almost 80 years ago that “we have (whether we know it or not) a prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry.” As the quote suggests, our trouble with heaven is less a problem of belief than it is a problem of imagination. From the opening lines of Anna Karenina on down, all our best literature teaches us that narrative thrives on adversity, and so heaven presents itself as little more than a blank screen of beatific blandness, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

Baird goes on to argue that it is well worth your time to read through the third part of Dante’s epic, and that Heaven isn’t nearly as boring as you might think. Anybody care to comment? Is good (as portrayed in literature, at least) forever doomed to be more bland than evil?