Dante is aghast when Guido Guinizzelli identifies himself. This poet from one generation before is Dante’s poetic father. The pilgrim is at first so amazed that he gets lost in a crabbed classical simile. But he and Guinizzelli eventually straight things out and come down to the sweet, new, clear style for which Dante wants to be known.
Read MoreGuido Guinizzelli steps out to identify himself as our spokesperson for the penitent lustful. He answers the pilgrim Dante’s questions about who is on the seventh terrace of Mount Purgatory with a dense net of classical allusions and the creation of new words, the best work a poet can do in Dante’s theory of poetry.
Read MoreWe may have known who the penitents in the fires of the seventh terrace of Purgatory are, but our pilgrim certainly doesn’t know! He can only get out of his confusion by pulling out a manuscript, ruling the paper, and getting ready to write his way into the revelation.
Read MoreThe pilgrim can’t answer the question for why he’s in Purgatory while in his corporeal body because he’s interrupted by a new group of penitents. Moving in the opposite direction to anyone on the mountain, these are the homosexuals, placed right at the end of the climb to heaven. Love has truly moved the fence in Dante’s understanding of the world.
Read MoreAs Dante the pilgrim walks along the narrow path between the flames of lust and the drop into the abyss on the seventh terrace of Mount Purgatory, his shadow makes the flames more colorful, about the way a poet in the troubadour tradition always makes the flames of lust glow hotter.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante arrives on the seventh terrace of Mount Purgatory, a landscape full of flames. He, Virgil, and Statius must thread their way on a narrow path between the burning flames and the drop into the abyss off the side of the mountain . . . about as Dante the poet has to negotiate his relationship with Beatrice, the object of his own (lustful?) desire.
Read MoreStatius concludes his discourse on embryology by finally answering the pilgrim Dante’s question about how souls can take on material attributes in the afterlife . . . and by gently refining both Virgil’s unsatisfactory answers earlier in this canto and by gently correcting Virgil’s discussions of the souls in the afterlife in THE AENEID.
Read MoreStatius continues his discussion of human embryology, following the fetus through its various developmental stages until it finally forms a brain, the seat of rationality. At that point, the prime mover turns toward it and breathes a new spirit into it . . . to make it self-reflexive.
Read MoreDante asks his question about how immaterial shades can take on material properties. Virgil tries to give two answers, neither satisfactory. So he turns the lecture over to the redeemed Statius, who launches into a discussion of human digestion. Food is purified into blood, which then coagulates into a fetus.
Read MoreVirgil attempts to answer the pilgrim Dante’s question about how immaterial shades can take on material attributes (like growing thin on the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory). Virgil tries two answers but ultimately has to give up and turn the discussion over to Statius as they ascend to the seventh terrace.
Read MoreAs the pilgrim Dante, Virgil, and Statius begin to make their very fast ascent to the final terrace of Mount Purgatory, the pilgrim has a burning question about, yes, the cadaverous gluttons on the previous terrace but really about what’s been happening since almost the opening of COMEDY: How do unbodied shades experience physical sensations?
Read MoreA read-through of PURGATORIO, Cantos XXV - XXVII, the final terrace of Mount Purgatory where the lustful do their penance in the flames. We find out more about Dante’s poetics, we hear a part of COMEDY actually in medieval Provencal, and we discover the great change in our pilgrim’s character after he walks out of the fire.
Read MoreVirgil, Statius, and our pilgrim, Dante, walk along in deep contemplation, alone with their thoughts but still together. They are interrupted by a brilliantly shiny angel that points them up to the final terrace of Mount Purgatory. The pilgrim experiences a breeze without the help of his sight and the poet feels brave enough to rewrite one of Jesus’s beatitudes.
Read MoreOur pilgrim Dante, Virgil, and Statius pass on along the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory and come to a tree that's a seedling from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. It shakes them up a bit and offers a classical and a Biblical example of the problems with gluttony.
Read MoreForese Donati ends his conversation with the pilgrim Dante on Purgatory’s sixth terrace of gluttony with an apocalyptic vision of the near future—that is, the ruin of his own brother, Corso Donati. He then morphs into a glorious knight as the pilgrim is left on the terrace with the grand marshals of this world, Virgil and Statius.
Read MoreDante claime to be the poet who takes love’s inspired dictation, but Bonagiunta has more to say about ut: He names this new poetry, perhaps minimizes its impact, and passes on content. The poet Dante enters the discourse to offer a classical simile that is hardly inspired, just lifted from Lucan. A most curious passage, the one that has caused the most commentary of any in PURGATORIO.
Read MoreBonagiunta, a poet from the previous generation and one of the gluttons pointed out by Forese Donati on the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory, offers the pilgrim an opaque prophecy and then wonders if this pilgrim is the same guy who wrote a long poem in the VITA NUOVA. The pilgrim replies that he is that poet . . . and then goes onto make a wild claim about poetic inspiration.
Read MoreForese Donati continues his conversation with Dante the pilgrim by pointing out five of the penitent gluttons who surround them and by using culinary and gastronomical imagery to reinforce both the thematics and the irony of this terrace (and perhaps to add fuel to the fire of the rivalry between French and Italian cuisine).
Read MoreForese Donati and our pilgrim Dante continue their conversation from Canto XXIII of PURGATORIO on the terrace of the gluttons. We are met with three curiosities: Virgil’s on-going silence, Statius’s apparently very strong will (that can even slow down his ultimate desire), and our first glimpse of Paradise, a classical glimpse of Forese’s sister, Piccarda.
Read MoreForese Donati has finished his screed against Florentine women and is ready to hear how the pilgrim Dante got so far up Mount Purgatory while still in the flesh. Dante obliges and also renegotiates the terms of the opening and even the plot of COMEDY as we near the climax of the second canticle, of PURGATORIO.
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