The Walls Of Dis And The Limits Of Virgil's Imagination: Inferno, Canto VIII, Lines 64 - 96

Dante-the-pilgrim and Virgil have made it across Styx, leaving behind Filippo Argenti and the wrathful. They've come to the iron walls of Dis, the city of hell.

These walls are more than that a geopolitical barrier in INFERNO. They're a literary barrier, too. Because this is the farthest point in the afterlife Aeneas got to. Here is the farthest Virgil's imagination could go.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we watch the poet come up to an important wall: the one Virgil couldn't (or didn't) pass. The poet must decide to go on. This is the point at which our poet's folly is bearing in on him. Maybe at the start of this canto, there was a break. But THIS is more of a moment of true change in the poem.

Here are the segments of this episode:

[01:23] My English translation of this passage from INFERNO: Canto VIII, lines 64 - 96

[04:00] One way to think about hell: a two-part structure of the moments outside of Dis and the moments inside this city.

[08:31] The minarets of Dis are the poet's one last brushstroke on a completely Virgilian landscape painting. From here on out, we're leaving THE AENEID behind.

[13:21] Our first Christian demons! It can't be a mistake that we encounter them here, on the walls of Dis, the farthest point Aeneas (and maybe the poet Virgil) reached.

[14:41] Dante's folly without Virgil--a writer's insecurity writ large.

[19:13] The first direct address to the reader in COMEDY. There will be seven in each of the three parts of the work. And that the first occurs here can't be a mistake. This is the moment in which the poet's folly is beginning to bear in on him.