A look back over the the first four cantos of INFERNO: their parallels, their divisions, their structure, their movement. Plus, four reasons Dante’s COMEDY has lasted 700 years and continues to inspire so much fascination. As well as the question of love: It always moves the fence—with Beatrice, with Limbo, probably in your own life.

Limbo is Dante's first donnybrook, his first true beef with Christian theology. While the doctrine of Limbo is being codified even in Dante’s day, he boldly plays with and even changes that orthodoxy, remaking Limbo into something that better suits his poem (and maybe his poetics).

Here’s a chance to look back on INFERNO, Canto I, in all of its strangeness, its lyricism, and its knottiness. We’ll look at where we’ve been AND where we’re going: a glance out across the whole poem. And we’ll talk about Dante’s wild and incredibly difficult poetics, the almost impossible structure of the lines and stanzas he chose for this great masterpiece.

Dante remains something of a mystery, even today. We have over seven hundred years of murk between us, clouding our understanding of who he was. Let’s talk about what we know and what we don’t. And let’s set the poem in its historical context: the late 1200s and early 1300s CE.

An introductory episode to the sweep of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE. A bit about how we’ll proceed through The Divine Comedy and a bit about who I am. But mostly, just a deep breath to get you ready for the journey ahead.