Dante the pilgrim has three more ecstatic visions as he gets ready to depart Purgatory's terrace of the angry. These visions are all about the destructive nature of excessive wrath and may give us an indication about why anger sits at the center of COMEDY: to mitigate Dante's own anger at Florence.
Read MoreDante and Virgil see the three steps to the entrance of Purgatory proper with an angel sitting on up at the very threshold to the next realm. But these steps have caused 700 years of interpretive fury. They’re allegorical, to be sure. But maybe there’s a way to scrape the critical apparatus off the steps and see these steps in a new way.
Read MoreDante opens the incredibly important canto of the gate of Purgatory—that is, PURGATORIO, Canto IX—with a complete mess of classical imagery. This tangle has befuddled scholars and readers for centuries. There are proposed solutions, none of them quite adequate. Perhaps the difference here is that Dante is now free to play with classical imagery, rather than to be controlled by it.
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