INFERNO, Episode 102. Flying By The Seat Of Your Pants (Also, Geryon): Inferno, Canto XVII, Lines 100 - 134

Geryon’s flight: an imaginative tour de force. But there’s more here. How can this unnatural act of flying be described in the middle of a canto about those who sin against art, the usurers. Is the poet hedging his bets? Or winking at us from behind the text? Either way, he offers us tragic examples of overreach in a canto in which he imagines flight that ends with a minor comedic ending halfway through INFERNO.

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Mark ScarbroughComment
INFERNO, Episode 95. Cords, Leopards, Medieval Poets, And Medieval Pilgrims, All Straightened Out By Classical Poetry: Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 106 - 123

Dante the poet is rewriting COMEDY as Dante the pilgrim is providing the raw material only a classical poet can straighten out. COMEDY is getting more complicated, more meta by the line. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for an exploration of this tough passage from Inferno, Canto XVI, on WALKING WITH DANTE.

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Mark ScarbroughComment
INFERNO, Episode 90. When History Speaks, It Doesn't Always Tell The Truth: Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 28 - 45

Dante again gets to speak with history. In Canto X, he got to speak to the opposing side, to Farinata. Here, he gets to speak to his heroes, the three Guelph leaders who accomplished what Dante hoped to accomplish. And who made absolutely no difference in the hell of Florentine history. What happens when you meet your heroes and they’re damned?

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Mark ScarbroughComment
INFERNO, Episode 89. Brunetto Is Gone But Not Forgotten On The Burning Sands: Inferno, Canto XVI, Lines 1 - 27

Still on an embankment over the burning sands, Dante and Virgil encounter three more of the homosexuals in the seventh circle of hell. These are three Guelph heroes. And they’re going to give the pilgrim—and the poet behind him—a lesson he will never forget. All the good intentions in the world don’t create a good civic society.

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Mark ScarbroughComment
INFERNO, Episode 85. A Pilgrim Walking Across Hell? Not Really. More Like A Writer: Inferno, Canto XV, Lines 79 - 99

After Brunetto Latini’s history lesson and prophecy, Dante doesn’t respond as a student to the master. He responds as one writer to another. He offers all the writerly tropes: rhetorical skill, doubt, bravado, and the hope that his text will be read, even glossed, the only way to find fame in his world. The soul may be eternal. The writer? Not necessarily.

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Mark ScarbroughComment
INFERNO, Episode 84. Unanswered Questions and Unasked-For Prophecies: Inferno, Canto XV, Lines 46 - 78

Brunetto Latini has questions for our pilgrim, Dante. But Dante only has confessions. He has to tell his teacher what happened—using Brunetto’s own words. Do we need writer to explain what happens to us? Brunetto may not. He sets off on a history lesson and then a prophecy for the pilgrim’s (and the poet’s) fate. Inferno, Canto XV, gets stranger by the line. So many agendas, so much talking across each other!

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Mark ScarbroughComment