Virgil The Poet Becomes Virgil The Prophet: Inferno, Canto I, Lines 97 - 136

In a previous episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE, I talked a lot about how Dante defines Virgil as a poet, not a philosopher, and why that was important in Dante's medieval context.

But there's more to Virgil than just poetry. There's prophecy. Because the most important part of being a poet is being a prophet, too.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we now find out why and how being a prophet is so crucial to a poet's role in this episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE.

We'll hear Virgil predict not only Dante's immediate future but the future of Italy itself (which means, for Dante-the-poet, the future of Rome, his real concern).

This is a tough passage, made especially tough because of centuries of commentary on it. I'll lead you through four standard interpretations, then offer my own, a fifth possibility, that basically doesn't try to clear up the passage but claims it's opaque on purpose.

Here are the episode segments:

[01:24] The passage in English for this episode from INFERNO: Canto 1, Lines 97 - 136

[03:46] Virgil's got a new role. He's not only a poet. He's a prophet. What is a prophet in the Biblical tradition? And what exactly does Virgil say will happen in the future?

[09:55] Virgil and his greyhound--what can we make of this strange, opaque prophecy? I'll offer you five readings, four from the commentary tradition and one (the last) under my own steam. Maybe the difficulty of this passage is its point. It's not hard to understand the words. It's hard to know what they mean. And maybe we should just sit with that concept for a bit.

[18:34] Virgil simplifies things by telling Dante-the-pilgrim's future (that is, not the future for the Italian peninsula but just the road ahead for the pilgrim). But does he really? In telling Dante-the-pilgrim about the journey ahead, Virgil reveals his misunderstanding (or maybe his limited understanding) about what's ahead. And Dante's reply is even more curious, because Dante seems to forget where the journey's headed: heaven. Canto 1 ends in a knotty mess--until the last sentence, which seems so simple but is in fact so very profound.