Virgil To The Rescue: Inferno, Canto I, Lines 67 - 96

In this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE, we meet Dante-the-pilgrim's first and great guide, the Roman poet Virgil. (Bonus stuff not in the episode: long down the poem, we'll discover that Virgil may well be Dante-the-PILGRIM's guide but may not be Dante-the-POET's guide. But that's a complicated bit and far ahead of us at this point.)

For now, Virgil is Dante's master, his "author." Except he's also Virgil, a guy who has a limited understanding of the universe.

What happens when you meet your hero and he's not what you imagined? What happens when he's as fallible as you are?

Easy. You set off across the universe together. How else do humans do it?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we start Dante-the-pilgrim's journey again, a do-over, all in the first canto, this time with a guide and not under the pilgrim's (or maybe the poet's) own steam. Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:12] The passage for this episode: INFERNO, Canto I, Lines 67 - 96

[03:45] Virgil! That apparition from the last episode is the great Roman poet. Fun fact for English speakers: When you talk about the character in Dante's poem, you spell his name "Virgil"; when you talk about the historical figure, you spell his name "Vergil."

[05:59] The first shot at a much longer discussion (in future episodes) of an important tool in Dante-the-poet's kit: periphrasis, a rhetorical strategy whereby a writer walks around something without ever naming it.

[07:58] Virgil offers Dante-the-pilgrim his résumé. It's not all it seems. Or perhaps it's less than he tries to make it.

[15:11] Virgil makes a big mistake, a theological mistake, which may tell us more about what Dante-the-poet thinks of Virgil than Virgil intends to give away at this moment.

[19:43] Even so, Dante-the-pilgrim offers Virgil a little hero-worship. Does this set up an implicit tension between the pilgrim and the poet in the poem? Maybe. I don't address that in this episode, but we'll need to face this important point in future episodes.

[21:07] A final bit about the internal landscape of this poem. There's a lot of talk about how medieval poetry shows no "interiority," no inner life of its characters. But there may be a clue in this passage that COMEDY is very interested in the pilgrim's internal landscape, his interiority.