The Great Poets Of Limbo: INFERNO Canto IV, Lines 85 - 114

We follow our pilgrim, Dante, into Limbo. He sees four great shades coming toward him: Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. They welcome Virgil back and do something more shocking: They admit Dante to their company.

Then it gets weirder still as they walk on to a beautiful castle, with green grass and fresh water . . . while still in hell!

How can this be in hell? Is it the Elysian Fields? Maybe. But if so, the poet's put it in hell and thereby may be sticking his thumb in Virgil's (poetic) eye.

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Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:53] My English translation of INFERNO. Canto IV, lines 85 - 114. If you'd like to read along, find a more in-depth study guide, or even leave a comment for me so we can continue the conversation, please find the entry for this episode on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[03:46] Is this hell? It seems kind of nice, especially after the wasps and maggots of the neutrals.

[04:39] Here come Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.

[08:43] Interpreting the four poets. Or a little bit about my neo-rationalist, Anglo-American interpretive stance v. a more traditional Italian reading of this passage.

[13:26] Is Limbo a shining example of human achievement?

[14:03] Virgil's smile and the pilgrim's welcome into the circle of the great poets. He's sixth. That's not a great number in medieval numerology.

[21:05] A castle, seven towers, a little brook. It seems allegorical. It seems like the Elysian Fields. It all seems so strange in hell.

[22:52] The problem of corporeality in the afterlife (or at least in this part of Dante's notion of the afterlife). And the problem of hell's pleasant aspect.

[27:17] Limbo is a civic vision of the afterlife.