Our pilgrim, Dante, gets into the flames of lust and comes out to a call for the redeemed to enter Paradise. Except those flames don’t burn up irony. Instead, they cause us to imagine the damned Virgil inside them. And we find out that our pilgrim isn’t perhaps as redeemed as we might first think.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, stands on the brink of the flames of lust on the seventh and last terrace of Mount Purgatory. Virgil has to use every rhetorical trick in his bag to get the pilgrim to move . . . although the only thing that works is the mention of Beatrice. Her name causes our poet to try to solve the dilemma of desire in his theological context, while thinking about the beast of fraud.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante, has come to an impasse: the flames of lust. He must pass through them and finally feel the suffering (or perhaps the violence) that he has witnessed all along in COMEDY. Perhaps he thought he was going to get through unscathed. But your art must finally find its home in your body. So get into those flames!
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.
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