LBST Lecture on Dante
                              
[The following pages are the text of a lecture delivered, in
part, in Liberal Studies 302, in January 1997]

Ian Johnston, 1997

A. Introduction

My purpose today is to offer something of a general
introduction to what is, by common agreement over many, many
years, one of the finest poems in our tradition, Dante's
Inferno.  Given the complex magnificence of this poem and
the enormous commentary on it, such an introduction is no
easy task, especially since I do not bring to the poem any
particular disciplinary expertise in Dante's work.

However, in spite of the obstacles, I can assist you in your
first reading of the poem.  My intention, as usual, is to
concentrate upon a number of fairly obvious things, because
here, as in many complex works, the most important first
things are the most obvious, and one needs to take a few
very basic steps before springing into more complex
interpretative possibilities.

So to start with I'd like to consider some obvious labels we
attach to Dante's great poem, explore what these mean (in a
general way), and suggest some ways in which these might
direct our initial interpretations.  In particular, I'd like
to focus on what we mean when we call this poem an epic and
an allegory.  In the process, I'll have some things to say
about the structure of the poem.  Then, I'd like to consider
some of the ways in which this poem is much more than what
these terms might at first suggest.


B. The Divine Comedy as Epic: An Introductory Comment
As we all know, The Inferno is the first section of a three-
part poem, The Divine Comedy.  Many of us have heard the
Comedy praised as a magnificent epic, the greatest epic
achievement of the late Middle Ages.  And we don't have to
read The Inferno very far before we sense a quality that we
often call epic.

What does this mean exactly?  In very general terms, an epic
work is a long narrative (traditionally in verse) which is
separated from other long narratives by its unusual scope.
For to a greater or lesser extent, the term epic refers to a
quality the poem creates that it is in some way exploring or
celebrating something much larger than the particular
characters and places it describes: it is bringing before
us, to put the matter very simply, a world view, a sense of
cultural completeness, so that as we move through the work,
we experience the exploration of some big questions about
individual and social purpose, about a system of belief,
often about the past traditions and future prospects-about
the major things which we use to define a culture.  The
breadth of the epic brings before us a comprehensive picture
of an entire culture in a way that an ordinary narrative, no
matter how exciting, does not.

We are familiar already with this quality from a study of
Homer's Odyssey, a superb adventure narrative but also the
celebration of a system of  values-individual and
cultural-and the exploration of a belief system.  Put
another way, epic adventures tend to drive home for us the
old truth that human beings imitate in action their vision
of the nature of things.  In following the adventures of the
epic characters, we inevitable explore a particular vision
of the nature of things in a comprehensive manner.

Parenthetically, it is interesting to observe that many
great epics-and Homer's and Dante's (not to mention
Virgil's) are excellent examples of this point-often appear
very late in the cultural moment that they hold up for our
examination.  This phenomenon has led to a saying to the
effect that the greatness of particular cultures finds its
most eloquent expression at the moment of their passing
away.  I leave this to you to reflect about.

I might mention, in passing, that this challenge to the epic
poet, to provide something all-encompassing about his
culture, traditionally made the epic poem the highest
achievement to which the poet might aspire.  And Dante is,
as one might expect, clearly aware of this tradition and
this challenge.  Here he is quite deliberately (as is
obvious from the opening books of the Inferno) setting out
to meet this most difficult of poetic challenges, so that he
will rank up there with Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Lucan, and
Virgil.

Before moving onto examine particular details of the poem,
I'd like to explore this epic quality by focusing on two
things in particular: on the geographical and cosmological
scope of the poem and on the historical comprehensiveness of
the time frame.  Both of these are important characteristics
of most works which we consider to have a traditional epic
quality.


C. The Physical and Spiritual Geography of Epic Visions:
Maps as Dreams
Let us consider first, then, one really significant way
epics characteristically generate in the reader a sense of
very large significance, and that is something I call their
epic geography, the scale and detail of the world which they
create for us.  It might be useful to think for a moment
about an epic as the making of a map, the creation of a
world in which the physical dimensions bring with them a
moral, spiritual, and physical sense of order.  "Dante,"
Ciardi writes, "is not just taking a walk.  He is
constructing a universe."  Yes, indeed he is, and if we wish
to understand the epic, we had better pay some attention to
the nature of that universe he is creating or, alternatively
put, the map he is drawing for us.

We need to do this because maps are not simply things we use
to orient ourselves physically; they are also symbols of our
beliefs and expressions of our desire.  Maps, in other
words, are dreams.  Thus, if we want to understand a
particular culture's vision of experience, one very useful
place to start is with that culture's maps.

This point vis-…-vis epics should be clear to us from
studying Homer's Odyssey.  That is a famous travel
adventure, but it clearly much more than that because the
organization of the geography-from Troy, to magic islands,
to civilized aristocratic homes, to the uncivilized
territory of the Cyclops, to the underworld, to the fabulous
world of the Phaikia, and so on-is establishing for us a
total spiritual, political, and moral understanding of that
world.  We, in our prosaic way, argue about where Odysseus
really went on our maps.  But doing that misses the point.
It's a complete, detailed, and closed map, whether it
matches our maps or not.

It might be worth mentioning in this regard that the
geography of the Odyssey has played a decisive role in the
European understanding of the world.  When we started
voyaging out into new territories, like North America, our
imaginations about the wilderness had been decisively shaped
to expect that wilderness and the inhabitants in it to have
certain characteristics (we were, if you like, carrying with
us Homer's map).  So it is not surprising that many of the
early explorers found one-eyed monsters, cannibals,
seductive maidens, magic potions, and so on, and reported
back to Europe (often in illustrated form) in what we now
regard as hopelessly distorted views of the new world.  What
enables us to see these early reports as distortions is that
we developed new maps.

I don't wish to belabour this point about maps, but I would
like to offer two contrasting examples in order to make this
point clear.  A third example will be an overview of Dante's
"map"

[Example 1: An OT Map]

These are two versions of a map of the world from the late
middle ages or early Renaissance-from Dante's own times.
Our first reaction to such a map is probably to dismiss it
as useless-it's hopelessly simply.  But that may be because
we are failing to see how this map functions.  If we want an
accurate way to get from A to B, say from London to Rome,
this complaint might have a good deal of weight; for this
purpose such a map is no help on the road.  On the other
hand, the demand that maps serve as aids for accurate travel
is fairly recent in some quarters.  What people demanded
from a map like this is something else-a structure of
meaning which integrates the places of the world into a
coherent vision of what the world means, a vision which
corresponds to our dreams.  This map, which might be (and
indeed was) often embellished considerably without any
compromise its basic design, is a complete and coherent
statement of the world, and those who take this as the map
of the world express in that acceptance a unified vision.
Such people have no need for accurate travel maps-they have
no desire to travel, or, if they do, then they will not be
asking this map to serve as a physical guide.

You will notice in a moment some very obvious similarities
between this common map and the one Dante is constructing
for us, even though the latter emerges as something much
more sophisticated.  Indeed, Dante is, in a sense, adopting
such a map as his basic design and extending it.  He is
taking the reader's understanding of the world and
delivering back in an enormously imaginative yet still
recognizable form.  Such maps were very current even as late
as the time of Columbus.  It's interesting to note that when
he had to give direction on how to get to America, his
instructions were to sail south until the butter melts and
then turn right.

Here's another map, produced some years after.  This is the
most important map in our culture and it will look instantly
familiar.

[Mercator's map]

This map, too, expresses dreams, values, and beliefs.  In
this case the unity and the sense of order of the OT map has
gone.  In its place is something else, the principle of
navigation-for here the basic principle is that the map
should reflect and be based upon the compass bearings one
need to take to go from A to B.  This map may well be much
more useful for travelling, but as a spiritual guide to the
unity of all, it is for many far less helpful.  Once people
start seeing the world this way, then Columbus could give
much more explicit instructions, with reference to compass
directions from particular places.

So which map is closer to the truth?  Ah, that's an
interesting question.  For us, Mercator would clearly have
the edge, because his vision approaches much more closely to
our desires and our immediate traditions, but in many
respects his image is seriously misleading in its own way.
For instance, this map clearly sacrifices any desire for a
pleasing overall circular unity and spiritually significant
organization of the data.  Moreover, (and this probably
applies to many people, like myself, sitting in this room
who were educated in front of maps like this on all the
school walls) this map seriously distorts the size of many
countries.  One would never guess from this map (or from
latter more accurate versions based upon the same principle)
that Greenland is one seventh the size of South America,
when on this map it is larger.  Some have argued that the
tendency of this map to make the northern countries much
larger at the expense of South America and Africa is an
important additional reason for its enduring popularity, for
that appeals to the dreams and imperial ambitions of
Northern Europeans (and Canadians, too, for that matter).

So in evaluating Dante's poem (even though we are only
looking at the first third of it) we might well want to
examine how this terrestrial and cosmic geography is an
expression of belief, of desire.

[Dante's cosmos]

This picture is the cosmos constructed by the total Divine
Comedy.  Although we are concerned with only a part, I'd
like to say a few words about the whole.  Clearly it is, in
some ways, closely related to the OT map--for it makes no
attempt to produce something that is useful to extended
trips, if our first desire is to be able to plot accurate
compass readings.  Both this map and the OT maps before it
are, in a sense, mandalas, geometric shapes symbolizing
spiritual meaning.

Dante's cosmos is dominated by the geometry of the circle.
This is clear enough by the general layout of hell, and the
concept becomes a dominant one in the ascent up Mount
Purgatory and the vision of the layers of the heavens and
radiant empyrean, the domain of God.  This is an organizing
principle that you will be quite familiar with from reading
Hildegard and looking at her art, much of which is directly
concerned with expressing cosmic visionary experience
ordered by the principles of circularity.

We know also from the Greeks that the circle has a special
significance, and it is not difficult to imagine why, even
though we may have lost touch with the spontaneous spiritual
responses to mathematical shapes.  The circle has no
beginning and no end; its shape is aesthetically pleasing;
and, most important, stacks of circles can be organized in
such a way that they share, in an instantly recognizable
visual manner, a common centre, obviously the organizing
principle of the shape.  Thus, a series of concentric
circles is an immediate and pleasing way to express the
apparent paradox of variety and unity in the world.  Variety
can be a function of the hierarchy; unity is achieved by the
common centre and the proportional spacing of the circles.

This principle becomes, as you will probably discover in
your readings in science next year, the basis for the
longest lasting and most important scientific and political
and poetic concept in our culture: the Great Chain of Being,
the notion of a structured moral hierarchy of everything,
from the most inert stuff right up to God.

[Two versions of the Great Chain of Being]

Hence, in Hildegard's painting and in Dante's poem, circles
become an essential way of representing the two simultaneous
truths basic to much Christian understanding: the universe
is a ranked gradation of being from the depths of sin and
non-life stage by stage up to the perfect presence of God,
and at the same time the universe is a unit, coordinated by
the central point in a manner mathematically perfect and
readily comprehensible to the scholar or to the illiterate
peasant.

Dante insists upon this metaphor and combines it with a
sense of ascent and descent.  As we read the Inferno, we are
aware always of descent-we are constantly moving from the
ground of the Earth downward into tighter and tighter
circles as we move toward the central pit, and the moral
associations of descent are made clear to us very early on.
We know that the purpose of this descent is to reach Mount
Purgatory, so that Dante can begin to climb, once again in
circles, so that eventually he may direct his gaze to the
very summit of the universe, the realm of God.

I'll have more to say about the descent later.  All I am
insisting upon here is the fairly obvious point that Dante's
geography is inextricably linked to his moral and spiritual
vision of the nature of things.  Indeed, his central purpose
might be described as getting us to recognize through the
geography the importance of a carefully graded sense of
moral organization.

We are not used to this method of understanding geography,
but responsive readers are quick to see what is going on.
And this raises some interesting questions which have
nothing to do with geography, but which the geography of The
Inferno forces us to confront.  Why are the usurers ranked
so much lower than the murderers?  By our standards, Brutus
and Cassius, even if we see them as sinners, seem less
serious offenders than some others.  But Dante's geography
makes it clear that, in his value system, they belong where
they are, right along Satan.  Wherever we are in Dante's
universe, we are always aware of the moral system of the
whole, because the geography always places us in a
relationship to what is above or below us.

I don't wish to belabour this point, which, as I shall
explain later, is in some sense less important to us that
other features.  But it is important, when we consider the
epic qualities of this poem, to recognize how Dante is, like
other writers, constructing through his physical universe
what we might call a carefully worked out system of belief,
a system of values which apply directly to our understanding
of ourselves and the conduct of our lives.

There's one more point you might like to consider about the
attractions of the circle as a symbol of the cosmic map: it
gives us a universe on a human scale.  For the radii of the
concentric circles (as we know from Hildegard's art) place
human beings within reach of all the different levels of
being.  Moreover, our position at the centre is a reassuring
reminder that, in God's created scheme, humanity occupies a
very special place and that we are all directly linked to
God who is within reach of all of us.

[All this, parenthetically, is an important part of the
resistance to the changes in our cosmological understanding
brought about by the Copernican revolution which insisted
that the most important organizing principles our map must
be abandoned.  The resistance to the development of this
metaphor, like the Cardinal's refusal to look through
Galileo's telescope, is not just the pig headed reaction of
ignorant or selfishly self-interested dogmatists.  It is
also a decision of people who recognize the moral
implications of giving up an understanding of the world and
the heavens loaded with particular spiritual meaning and
endorsed by a particular map.  For when we change our maps,
we force upon ourselves a change in beliefs-and something is
always lost in the process.]

It will be evident, too, that Dante's sense of geometrical
structure is much more sophisticated than Hildegard's,
although there are some obvious similarities.  And this
indicates to us, even if we are no specialists in the Middle
Ages, that his imagination belongs to an time later than
Hildegard's, for Dante is living at a time when wrestling
with the philosophical notions of the Greek philosophers in
order to reconcile them to traditional Christian doctrine is
an exciting and creative activity.  You have some
familiarity with that movement, called Scholasticism, from
your brief study of Aquinas.  And you are no doubt therefore
to some extent aware of the intense interest in reconciling
complex Greek ideas with the orthodox Christian tradition.

This movement, of profound importance to the development of
Western ideas, led to an immense enthusiasm among artists
and thinkers in a challenging project-to widen and deepen
the philosophical basis for religious doctrine, to reconcile
revealed truth with what was perceived as the highest
achievement of pre-Christian culture: Greek philosophy and
mathematics.  Original Christian thinking had established a
very ambiguous relationship with the Greek past.  Many early
Christian thinkers were well educated Greeks, who used their
philosophical training and experience to ridicule pagan
mythology as highly irrational; yet at the same time many
other Christians emphasized that the very essence of
Christianity had nothing to do with reason and that to base
one's faith on reason was to betray the essence of the
faith: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem," cried
Tertullian rhetorically; he knew the answer: nothing
whatsoever.

In the development of Christian doctrine in the early middle
ages, the hostility to Greek philosophical thinking led to
the closing of the Greek schools and the disappearance of
that classical tradition from Western religion.  Thus, the
energetic appropriation of Greek ideas in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries marked a decisive shift, establishing a
major intellectual tradition which is Dante's immediate
inheritance.

We can see this enthusiasm clearly in Dante's cosmological
structure.  Thus, while his world comes across as
recognizably similar to Hildegard's, it is clearly much more
complex and sophisticated, and Dante takes a wonderful and
infectious enthusiasm in communicating a sense of the
prevailing order which coordinates and provides the
structural principles for this complexity.


D. Dante's Numerology: The Number Three
These points, I think, are evident to modern readers.  There
are other features, however, which strike me as there but
without the same obvious symbolic effect.  For example, the
geometrical emphasis here is matched also by Dante's
personal interested in the spiritual power of numbers, of
which some critics make a great deal.  For example, it's
clear that Dante sets much store by the number three:

     A very useful principle to bear in mind in studying the
     Commedia is the rule of three.  The work is divided
     into three cantiche, corresponding to the three realms
     of the afterlife; it is written in terza rime; and
     there are numerous other examples of cabalistic or
     semiritualistic allusions to the pregnant number which
     had haunted Dante's mind ever since in the Vita Nuova
     he had made the happy discovery that Beatrice was a 3 x
     3.  We need not wonder unduly about the sources of
     Dante's triadomania.  He had sanction in the doctrine
     of the Trinity itself; he had the prophetic sanction in
     the doctrine of Joachim da Fiore; we have seen that his
     contemporary Bonvesin da Riva had also written a Book
     of the Three Scriptures.  Indeed, if his subject were
     to be the afterlife and its three realms, the number
     was forced upon our poet's consideration; given his
     love for symmetry and mysterious numerology, the ninety-
     nine cantos . . . and even terza rime followed
     naturally.  Carducci was right too, I think, in seeing
     in the tertiary principle an element of discipline
     pervading the whole work.  (Bergin 213-214)
     
     . . . Dante has given us three kinds of measure, almost
     three kinds of time, running concurrently and on
     different planes, yet cunningly crossing and converging
     to strengthen the fabric of the poem and enmesh the
     reader, who is captured without quite realizing how it
     has come about.  To be precise, I think we may say that
     the cantos, the physical divisions in the narrative's
     landscape (i.e., circles in hell, terraces in
     purgatory, and spheres in paradise), and the subjects
     presented (a character, a topic, an argument) are three
     measures; their manipulation, unobtrusive but
     calculated, keeps the poem moving and gives it a kind
     of vitality of fibre, a persistent resilience. .
     .(Bergin 214)
     
I call this to your attention here, because it's a common
observation people make about this epic.  But I must confess
that I'm never sure if such an observation really amounts to
very much, except perhaps to those who share the same
numerological enthusiasm.  Yes, the figure three is an
important feature of the poem, but once we have recognized
that, I'm not sure what we are to make of it.  The number
three conveys no spiritual significance or emotional
excitement to me, and although I'm prepared to concede that
there might be some people for whom this is a vital and
impressive feature of the poem, to me it amounts to little
more than a personal quirk of the poet.

This point is something you might like to consider in the
seminars-the notion that some organizing principles of a
vision of the world, no matter how important they are to the
author or his immediate audience, can cease to exercise a
decisive effect on a later readership.  What this amounts to
saying is that sophisticated structural principles are not,
in themselves, enough to make a great poem.  If they
contribute significantly to the emotional content of the
poem, then they may, indeed, contribute to the pleasure we
derive from it.  But complex numerology is no necessary sign
of poetic quality.

I want to insist on this point, because I get very tired of
people praising Dante's entirely for its mathematical
sophistication.  Yes, that is an important feature of the
poem, but much of it is for modern readers little more than
an interesting oddity, communicating no emotional
excitement.  I want to make the point more emphatically
later in this lecture that whatever the reasons for the
pleasure and illumination we derive from this poem, they lie
elsewhere than in this emphasis on number.


E. Dante's Use of the Past
A second important epic quality of this poem emerges from
Dante's treatment of the past.  For the universe he is
creating is not simply a geometric structure; it is also a
coherent and complete historical vision, giving a shape to
time.  This is commonly part of a traditional epic's
function, as Dante knows well.  So he structures his poem so
as to bring before us the entire tradition available to him:
Christian, Italian, and pagan.

A great deal of the please one derives from reading the
Inferno, especially at first reading, is meeting such a
wonderful collection of figures from the past.  Dante's
frequent references to local Italian politics may not
connect with us, but as Liberal Studies students, we meet
many old acquaintances here: Ulysses, Plato, Socrates,
Homer, Achilles, and so on, and the treatment of them is
almost invariably original and interesting.

Now, Dante has, of course, an important purpose in bringing
these figures before us.  His geographical and historical
map-the structure of understanding the universe-is going to
have a place for all of history.  This poem is going to
situate and thus account for all of history within the
poet's vision, so that part of the beauty and persuasiveness
of that vision is going to come from its comprehensiveness.
And I would suggest that one of the best indications of
Dante's poetic genius is the way in which he appropriates
that past and transforms it into remarkable poetic images or
stories.

Let me cite just a single (but very well known) example.
The passage comes from Canto XIV, Circle 7, Round 3, the
image of the old Man of Crete.  Dante has asked Virgil about
the origin of the river they are faced with.  Virgil replies
as follows:

     "In the middle of the sea, and gone to waste,
       there lies a country known as Crete," he said,
       "under whose king the ancient world was chaste.
     
     Once Rhea chose it as the secret crypt
       and cradle of her son; and better to hide him,
       her Corybantes raised a din when he wept.
     
     An ancient guard stands in the mountain's core.
       He keeps his shoulder turned toward Damietta,
       and looks toward Rome as if it were his mirror.
     
     His head is made of gold; of silverwork
       his breast and both his arms, of polished brass
       the rest of his great torso to the fork.
     
     He is of chosen iron from there down,
       except that his right foot is terra cotta;
       it is this foot he rests more weight upon.
     
     Every part except the gold is split
       by a great fissure from which endless tears
       drip down and hollow out the mountain's pit.
     
     Their course sinks to this pit from stone to stone,
       becoming Acheron, Phlegethon, and Styx.
       Then by this narrow sluice they hurtle down
     
     to the end of all descent, and disappear
       into Cocytus.  You shall see what sink that is
       with your own eyes.  I pass it in silence here.
     
This extraordinary image links the birth of Zeus (and thus
the key story in pagan Olympian religion, the mythology
basic to Homer), with the famous Greek metaphor of the four
ages of the world (from Hesiod and Ovid)-gold, silver,
brass, iron-to which Dante has added a fifth element (to
suggest the fragility of the massive structure), with a
reference to legendary King Minos of Crete, in an adaptation
of a description from the Old Testament Book of Daniel (2:32-
34) of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, concluding with an
appropriation of the rivers of the pagan underworld
(especially as Virgil deals with them in his great epic
poem, The Aeneid), and all in a way that makes a very
pointed and truly original poetical political and religious
reference: that the river of Hell originate in the tears
from a powerful but flawed and fragile statue summing up
human history, with its eyes fixed on the state of things in
Rome, the centre of the Catholic faith, as if the key to
what happens to this structure is going to be what happens
in that city.

[Parenthesis: For those interested in the Biblical source of
this image, I give below the passage from Daniel.

     You saw, O king, and behold, a great image.  This
     image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before
     you, and its appearance was frightening.  The head of
     this image was of fine gold, its breast iron, its feet
     partly of iron and partly of clay.  As  you looked, a
     stone was cut out by no human hand, and it smote the
     image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in
     pieces; then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the
     silver, and the god, all together were broken in
     pieces, and became like the chaff on the summer
     threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so
     that not a trace of them could be found.  But the stone
     that struck the image became a great mountain and
     filled the whole earth.
     
Daniel interprets the dream as a succession of five kingdoms
(identified by many as the Babylonian, Median, Persian,
Greek, and the coming kingdom of God)]

To understand the full working of this reference, we need of
course to recognize the allegorical nature of Dante's poem,
a feature that I will turn to in a moment.  This example I
introduce here just to provide some sense of Dante's
creative and wide ranging appropriation of an eclectic and
rich cultural past.

Now, incorporating the classical past into any Christian
poem is a very risky business, as Christians realized long
ago.  The risk stems from the fact that the classical
culture which the Christians wished to replace and which
they insisted was sinful and deceiving was, in fact,
incredibly rich in works of art, drama, philosophy, history,
epic, and myth.  Nothing the Christians could offer, not
even the Old Testament or the developing New Testament could
rival the richness of this Classical past.

To study, even at a very cursory level, such a treasure
house was to confront a potentially very disturbing problem,
namely, the power to undermine Christian authority.  After
all, at a very basic level, the Classical tradition reminds
readers that long before Jesus Christ came to define the
spiritual gospel, there was a magnificent civilization whose
achievements in philosophy, morality, heroism, art, and so
on set a standard unmatched since.  It might also suggest to
many people the philosophical shallowness of much Christian
thinking.

In the face of the achievements of say, Socrates or
Sophocles or Pericles or a host of others, it was difficult
to maintain that without embracing the message of Jesus
Christ one's life was insignificant or sinful.  To read
about the wonderful tributes to and achievements of Athenian
democracy was potentially to invite some radical doubts
about the very undemocratic authority of the Church and
Medieval State.  To read what Socrates says about virtue and
moral responsibility (and to become familiar with his own
conduct in the face of death) was to see a standard of non-
Christian human conduct considerably more admirable that
than of most Christian Popes, bishops, or what have you.  To
have any ambitions to be a writer or a lover of literature
was to be drawn inevitably to a tradition immeasurably
richer (and often very much more scandalous) than one's
immediate Christian culture.

So the past was a problem.  And the early Church Fathers set
up rules for how Christians (many of whom were Greek
speaking) should deal with this explosive storehouse of
pagan literature.  The most highly approved method (other
than banning the works) was to retell the stories as
Christian allegories (I'll get to that work later)-that is,
to apply to the pagan work a sophisticated interpretative
apparatus designed to demonstrate that, contrary to what
anyone might think, the work is, in fact, an anticipation of
and wholehearted endorsement of orthodox Christian doctrine.

A leading early figure in this tradition was Origen, who
established as the scriptural authority for this approach
Deuteronomy 21:10:

     When you go forth to war against your enemies, and the
     LORD your God gives them into your hands, and you take
     them captive, and see among the captives a beautiful
     woman, and you have desire for her and would take her
     for yourself as wife, then you shall bring her home to
     your house, and she shall shave her head and pare her
     nails.  And she shall put off her captive's garb, and
     shall remain in your house and bewail her father and
     her mother a full month; after that you may go in to
     her, and be her husband, and she shall be your wife.
     
This image is interesting.  The pagan cultural past, like
the captive woman, is beautifully seductive and someone we
might want to bring into our daily lives.  But we must first
deal carefully with the danger.  So the insistence on
changing the woman's clothes, shaving her head, and paring
her nails, and seeing if that will make her suitably docile.
A second Biblical authority, and one you are probably more
immediately familiar with, comes from Exodus 3:22, when the
Israelites are urged to "spoil the Egyptians"  by borrowing
gold and jewellery from them in secret preparation for the
Exodus (with no intention of paying the pagans back).  Using
the pagan money for righteous purposes in this way gave rise
the phrase Egyptian Gold to justify the appropriation and
reinterpretation or rewriting of pagan stories for Christian
purposes.

Thus, although the Christian tradition had always regarded
this Classical tradition with suspicion (for the reasons
mentioned above) and although this attitude was one of the
main reasons for the virtual disappearance of the Classical
tradition from Western culture during the so-called Dark
Ages, nevertheless, once the attitude towards this pagan
past changed, there was a tradition of how writers should
deal with it.  And so Dante's basic method has many
precedents.

What led to this change in attitude?  Well, this is too
complex a question to answer here, but one clear reason is
the increased availability of books from the pagan past.  In
coming to Dante directly from reading Hildegard, you should
at once be struck by the fact that he has had access to a
range of literature that Hildegard simply could not get her
hands on.  In fact, in reading Hildegard I get the distinct
impression that she read very little of past literature.
From now on in your Liberal Studies reading you are going to
find again and again the presence of this tradition,
unavailable to Hildegard, informing the work of
philosophers, poets, political thinkers, novelists, and
others.  As often as not, they are going to invoke the
classical past in order the encourage in the reader a strong
critical awareness of the Christian tradition of the
reader's world.  In fact, drawing on the classical past (and
particularly the figure of Socrates) becomes a vital way of
critiquing present society.

Dante, however, has no interest in setting up the Classical
past as a means of criticizing his Catholic Christian faith.
And so he has a special challenge.  As a writer with epic
ambitions, he wants to include that past into his historical
scheme (if he did not, he would simply be inviting all sorts
of questions about where these figures might fit into his
moral scheme), and as a great poet he wants to draw on and
incorporate these glorious figures and stories from the past
(in poetic terms that Classical past is the mother lode).
On the other hand, according to his moral scheme all these
figures must be consigned outside of heaven-into hell.  The
belief system which Dante wishes to illuminates offers him
no choice in this matter.

This is a problem because any sense on the reader's part
that consigning these great figures to hell, even the
outskirts, is unfair might create an ironic tension contrary
to Dante's purpose, might, that is, begin to establish a
sense that Divine justice is not as just as it ought to be.
That this problem can arise in such a situation will be
immediately clear to anyone who has dealt with Milton's
Paradise Lost, in which the treatment of Satan is the centre
of an enormous critical argument.

Dante deals with this problem in a simple yet enormously
effective manner-he has the virtuous pagans endorse their
treatment.  In other words, where we might expect one of
those great pagan philosophers to demand rather harshly,
perhaps even in the manner of Milton's Satan, an accounting
of the justice of the arrangement, we do not find it.  Quite
the reverse in fact.


F. The Role of Virgil as Guide
This, I would maintain, is the key function of Virgil in the
poem.  Whatever else we may want to see in Dante's depiction
of Virgil as the guide through Hell, it is clear that he
serves to neutralize any sense we might have that consigning
to Hell those who lived and died before the coming of Christ
is a serious injustice.  Since he sees no injustice and is
constantly reminding Dante of his Christian duty, becoming,
in effect, an orthodox Christian apologist, who are we to
complain?  Virgil, in fact, emerges as a major educating
force in getting Dante the Pilgrim to recognize his
Christian duty.

Virgil is particularly appropriate for this task because of
all the famous pre-Christian pagan writers, he was the best
known and most revered for his high moral standards in art
and in his life (the altered spelling of his name-changed
from Vergil to Virgil-stems from his medieval nickname,
Virgilius, the Virginal).  This reputation as the greatest
pre-Christian Christian rests also on the prophetic nature
of some of his work, which foretells the coming of a
glorious age (which he in the Aeneid associates with
Imperial Rome but which those who saw in the Roman Catholic
Church the continuation of the Roman Imperial Mission could
interpret as a prophetic anticipation of the glorious rise
of the Church.  Particularly important in this tradition is
the short poem Bucolics 4, which celebrates the imminent
arrival of a wonder child who will restore peace to the
earth.

Traditionally Virgil in The Inferno is interpreted as an
allegorical presentation of reason (although the poem never
actually says that).  This seems appropriate enough if by
this we do not import into the poem our own definition of
reason but let the poem do that for us, so that in Virgil's
response to Hell and his treatment of Dante the Pilgrim we
see the values of handling one's emotions in the light of
the revealed truth of the Christian cosmos (for which Virgil
acts as the spokesperson).  And that sense of reason does
not prompt Virgil or anyone else from the past to question
the justice of the arrangements which have left them forever
outside the highest ranking stations in the after life.

The other important role of Virgil, although this is not
something confined to him, is that he is a constant reminder
that the past is all simultaneously present.  That is, the
awareness and appropriation of pagan culture has not led
Dante in this poem to develop any critical historical sense
which might see present times as the result of a particular
sequence of events.  Dante's Catholic faith sees the
decisive event of history as the coming of Jesus Christ,
which brought with it a spiritual redemption for humanity.
But there's no sense in Dante of historical change-the
conditions of the cosmos and the value of the past events is
forever fixed.  All history is summed up and explained by
the story of Jesus Christ, and all historical figures derive
their significance simultaneously from the same frame of
moral reference which He establishes.  Of course, some
people lived and died before others, but the significance of
their lives is eternally the same.

[In subsequent readings, particularly in Rousseau, you will
witness just how sharp and lethal a tool our culture created
when we changed this sense of all history being
simultaneously present and began thinking about our culture
as having a historical development which has taken it
through periods with different cultural values and beliefs,
a view which becomes a way of attacking any claim to the
eternal rightness of present arrangements and beliefs.]


G. The Allegorical Basis of the Narrative
Before moving on to look at specific poetic details of The
Inferno, it might be appropriate to examine a word we tend
to associate immediately with Dante's epic: that it is an
allegory.  What does this mean?

Simply put, an allegory is a fiction in which the narrative
details "obviously and continuously refer to another
simultaneous structure of events or ideas, whether
historical events, moral or philosophical ideas, or natural
phenomena" (Frye 12).  In other words, an allegorical
narrative will display a point-for-point correspondence
between what goes on in the fiction and something coherent
outside the fiction.  The world of the fiction, we might
say, illustrates in action the systematic world to which it
carefully and faithfully refers.

How does this differ from what we might call symbolic
meaning?  Again, this is a complex issue, but, simply put,
the major difference has to do with the clarity of the
external system of reference.  In an allegory that constant
reference to an external system of meaning is generally
clear enough so that there is little dispute among readers
about it.  Or, as Frye states, "the presence of a[llegory]
prescribes the direction in which commentary must go" (13).
A symbolic meaning, by contrast, tends to be more ambiguous
and thus to generate a wider sense of interpretative
discussion.

How do writers make us aware of an allegorical structure at
work?  Well, the basic method is to appeal to a system of
belief we all share because we have been educated to
recognize a particular structure of belief.  For instance,
if I put on a play with a central hero whom I call Everyman,
and if I have two characters called Good Angel and Bad
Angel, and then if I parade some figures in front of
Everyman called Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Greed, Sloth and so
on, and have the two angels prompt Everyman in different
ways, most people with any awareness of our cultural
traditions would recognize that I am illustrating a certain
Christian belief about sin.

The opening of Dante's poem puts a strong pressure on us to
recognize that we are in the presence of allegory-the stage
of the speaker's life, the time of day, the strange animals
he confronts.  We don't have to find allegory in order to be
caught up in what is going on, but it is comparatively easy
to see that a certain pressure is being put on us to respond
to the work as an allegory.  And, just in case we don't see
this point, Dante actually informs us early on that this
work is an allegory:

          Men of sound intellect and probity,
            weigh with good understanding what lies hidden
            behind the veil of my strange allegory.  (Canto
          IX, 58-60)
          
Allegories often take their names from the belief systems
they illustrate.  So, for example, we can have Christian
allegories, Marxist allegories, Freudian allegories,
Frontier allegories, and so on.  What these all have in
common is that the narrative incidents and characters derive
their significance in large part because of their constant
reference to a shaping religious, political, or historical
vision, which the readership or audience recognizes.

This details of the Christian allegorical narrative or drama
(of the sort I sketched above in talking about Everyman)
might well be incomprehensible to someone who had no
awareness of Christian notions of sin.  But that doesn't
mean that the narrative or drama might have no meaning at
all.  If I am a competent writer, I will make the action
interesting for other reasons-funny, or scary, or full of
interesting colour, songs, special effects.  I may be
illustrating a coherent (and often simple) set of ideas, but
I need to do a great deal more than that.  I may even
interest someone quite ignorant of doctrine in the ideas by
the pleasure he or she gets in the artistic quality of what
I present.

Allegories have always been immensely popular, because, I
suspect, we all like the idea that there is a closed and
complete system of meaning available to us.  If we believe
in that system, then allegories can be reassuring to us,
confirming pleasurably our sense of how the universe
operates (or how we would like it to operate).  Hence a lot
of popular entertainment, from traditional Western movies,
to athletic events, to a great deal of poster art bases
itself on an allegorical appeal to a shared belief-or,
rather, to the inherited images we have for articulating
that belief (e.g., heroes are males, with blond hair, blue
eyes, a certain way of talking and walking, and so on).

In fact, the appeal of allegory has, I would suggest,
decisively shaped Christian religion.  Christianity is, as
you know, officially a monotheistic religion: all things
come from God.  Unofficially, however, Christianity has
always been very dualistic, presenting itself to the common
people in countless stories, art works, plays, and poems as
a contest between Good and Evil.  Creating amusing,
terrifying, or otherwise interesting drama or visual art
(the most important educational art form in a largely
illiterate community) is much easier to develop if you have
a significant conflict to communicate as a means of alerting
people to the true faith.  The enormous literature on the
development of a Devil for the Western imagination stems
from the dramatic possibilities such a figure offers for
allegorical instruction in all sorts of art.

Simple allegories tend often to be psychologically simple in
many respects, for they are often concerned with concepts
rather than complex characterization.  If you take a young
child to, say, an allegorical play in which the evil of the
world is presented to us in the form of a wicked witch, all
dressed in black, with a long pointy hat, screechy voice,
and a wand, it's unlikely that the child will understand a
question like the following: Why is that person being so
nasty?  The answer is obvious: She's being nasty because
she's a witch; that's what people who look like that on
stage do.

This, I think, accounts for the great popularity of many
simple allegories-they confirm for us a system of belief in
a straightforward way, without forcing us to challenge
ourselves with complex ironic questions.  By the same token
a writer who wishes to challenge a system of belief can
often make the readership very uncomfortable by taking a
popular allegorical form and exposing its inadequacy by
forcing complex psychological questions to emerge.

For example, above I mentioned the simple allegory of
Everyman.  If I force the viewer to attend to the subtleties
of Everyman's psychological difficulties in resisting lust
or to the pain he experiences by choosing incorrectly, I may
invite the viewer to examine the "justice" of the belief
system.  Or, to take a more modern example: in the simplest
forms of the Western movie, the allegory is often the good
people versus the bad people, and we are invited into a
black and white world where we always know how to orient
ourselves because the convention symbols of a comforting
belief system are there to tell us what each character and
incident means (good people are white, clean shaven, blond;
bad people are dark skinned or hairy, black haired, often
with beards, and so on).  However, if I want to challenge
the belief system that that allegory endorses and
illustrates I can take the same form and complicate it
(e.g., by showing the hero as deranged or the bad people as
sympathetic).

What I'm trying to stress here is that allegories can work
in complex ways, from the very simple illustration and
confirmation of a simple belief to something more deeply
challenging and ironic.  Some of you have already met some
of the latter sort of allegory if you have read any Conrad
or Hawthorne, who are masterful at shaping allegorical
stories with powerfully disturbing psychological and moral
strains.

I think we all recognize that Dante's allegory is not
ironic.  That is, his poem is not inviting us to direct a
critical eye upon the doctrine which defines so much of his
narrative.  By contrast, it is insisting on the immediate
importance of the true belief.  Yet his allegory is not
simplistic.  It does not close us off from asking important
questions about the arrangement, and if we attend to it
carefully we are going to learn some sophisticated (although
not particularly original) doctrine as well as experience
some important feelings about that doctrine.

Having said all this about allegory, I want to mention that
in many respects we are not in a position to respond to it
in the way that Dante's audience could.  Even if we see or
educate ourselves into recognizing many of the connections,
for most of us the doctrine is not a living faith, and thus
the emotional intensity we might bring to the shaping vision
of life is gone.  In that sense, the allegory does not work
for us (except perhaps at an intellectual level).  And I
would insist that we do not therefore really come to grips
with why this is such a great poem if all we do is look at
the cleverness with which Dante fleshes out his allegory
with all sorts of interesting connections or spend our time
arguing about what detail A might represent in the
allegorical scheme of things.  Scholars worry about such
things, but I don't think they need detain a modern reader
very long, simply because finding out about them doesn't
really affect significantly our ability to react emotionally
with the poem.  This is a viewpoint you might want to
challenge.

What this amount to, I think, is that The Inferno  is a
great poem for reasons other than its allegorical basis.
And the qualities which make it great, to which I now wish
to turn, have ensured that we continue to read it centuries
after the doctrine which Dante shared with his readers has
ceased to mean very much for most of us.

For it takes a great deal more than an allegorical framework
and a lot of references to the classical past, interesting
as these may be, to generate the imaginative excitement this
poem creates for us.  I stress this point, because many
people talk of Dante's great work as if its quality is most
importantly linked to the ideas it illustrates, so that they
end up talking more about medieval Christian doctrine or
scientific thinking than they do about the poetry.

It's worth remembering that in any course on the development
of medieval philosophy or science, The Divine Comedy would
not be a primary text, for it is profoundly derivative and
unoriginal in those areas.  On the other hand, this work
would clearly belong in any curriculum devoted to the
greatest poetic works of European culture.

Any work which has only an allegorical frame of reference to
recommend it (and there are lots) may win a good deal of
attention in its own time, when that system of ideas is a
lively issue for the readership.  However with the passage
of time, the poem will probably cease to engage the interest
of readers who have lost contact with the frame of reference
and will pass into a well deserved obscurity, kept alive, if
at all, by the iron lung of academic scholarship.

So what I wish to call attention to here is some of the ways
in which this work, for all its obvious borrowings, is a
uniquely great poetic work, so much more than an
illustration of doctrine, something well worth out attention
here in Nanaimo in 1997, to what we may call its eternal
poetic quality.


H. The Pace and Variety of the Allegory
One of the most noticeable features of this poem,
particularly if one compares one's experience of reading it
with that of reading, say, Paradise Lost or the Faery Queen,
is the rapidity with which the story progresses.  Dante
sustains our interest in large part by keeping us moving,
never lingering too long before we are confronted with
another detail.

He can do this without strain because he has cast the story
in the form of a journey through strange territory (a common
enough narrative convention).  The journey to the underworld
may be a very traditional story (and you have already met it
at least twice: in the Odyssey and in the Myth of Er in
Plato's Republic; of course, it had been explored many more
times than that, most famously in Virgil's Aeneid).  Dante
exploits the story far more fully than any of his
predecessors to produce visions of horror, scatological
humour, pitiful agony, gothic monsters, dramatic
interchanges of all kinds.  The story permits of this
variety and Dante makes the most of it.

One thing almost all readers experience in reading this poem
is a sense of anticipation: we know something surprising is
coming up, and we have no sense of what that is going to be.
Dante does not permit us ever to get into a sequence where
we are comfortable with a particular emotional mood; his
variety here is as rich as the geographical detail and the
nature of the punishments.

What adds to this sense of rapidity, too, is Dante's
diction, a colloquial language frequently punctuated with
dramatic exchanges.  There is no attempt here, as in so many
other epics, is create and sustain some elevated epic
diction, to generate a sense of epic significance by
freezing the style into conventional artifice.  Dante keeps
the language simple direct, often downright slangy, letting
the importance of what he has to say emerge from the
pictures and the events he presents to us.  This poem does
not insist upon its importance, but, like all good poetry,
lets us make up our own minds.

An important part of this sense of pleasing motion is the
verse form Dante adopts, the so-called terza rima, in which
there is a very pronounced repetitive rhyme scheme: ABA BCB
CDC, and so on, with a light iambic rhythm.  The lines are
not end-stopped, and the sentence may run many lines,
generating considerable momentum, or may be very short
colloquial exchanges.  The effect is a much more flexible
and rapid verse than the conventional epic hexameter or
pentameter, especially one with heavy punctuation.

[This last point is particularly a feature of Ciardi's
translation.  Dante's Italian usually stops the sentence
after every three lines, but he breaks with the practice
frequently, so that the sense of rapid progress is always
sustained.  Ciardi's decision to leave a gap after every
three lines also contributes to this effect]

There is not much point in pursuing the qualities of Dante's
diction, because we are not dealing with the text in
Italian.  But we might want to pay tribute to Ciardi's
translation, which emphasises the terza rima quality and
captures that sense of colloquial variety and pace.

An important sense of the variety and the pace comes also
from Dante's treatment of the sinners.  Many of them we see
only in a crowd, in a description which emphasises the
punishment and the visual details of the scene.  But he
frequently brings us very close to others, allowing them to
speak to the poet-narrator or to each other, to reveal
something of themselves, and thus to generate in us a
response to a human situation.  Some of the most memorable
moments in the poem come in these justly famous dramatic
interactions (e.g., most notably, Paolo and Francesca in
Canto V, Circle 2, or Farinata Degli Uberti in Canto X,
Circle 6, or Pier delle Vigne in Canto XII, Circle 7, or
Ulysses in Canto XXVI, Circle 8, Bolgia 8, or Count Ugolino
in Canto XXXIII, and so on).  We may be largely removed from
the allegorical details, but we don't need to know them to
derive delight from Dante's treatment of all these people.

It's worth paying close attention to how much Dante gets out
of playing with our perspective and focus on what is going
on.  We are constantly sensing the huge dimensions of hell
and the numberless hordes of sinners everywhere; at the same
time we are confronting a series of very particular images
and often eloquent dramatic exchanges.  There's an enormous
skill at work here: this may be a linear journey, but our
perspective on what is there is constantly shifting from the
big picture, to the particular, to the dramatic, to the
disgusting, and so on.  This quality is particularly
remarkable if you start comparing the experience of reading
Dante with the experience of reading, say, Milton's or
Spenser's epics, where the sense of getting bogged down is
frequent.

To bring us this close to the sinner involves a certain
risk, of course, for there's a great danger that our
sympathies and our response to the complexities of the
characters may challenge the doctrine which is shaping the
allegory and which insists that all this is happening by
divine justice.  After all, the more we can sympathize with
the complexities of their situations and their motivations,
the more pressure there is on us to question the nature of
their punishment.  But Dante keeps a very sure control on
this possibility and even makes it clear to us that part of
the moral instruction we are to derive from this allegory is
the need to control our human sympathies for those suffering
God's punishment.  The characters thus serve, not just to
enliven the poem with all sorts of dramatic, comic,
pathetic, horrific, and pitiful episodes (with a
corresponding range of emotional responses to the fiction),
but also to remind us of the need to educate our emotions in
order fully to comprehend the nature of God's justice.

Thus, one of the major purposes of the poem, to create in us
a certain moral tension, so that we come to understand our
own Christian faith better, is delivered not in sermons
directly from the narrator, but through the events and the
characters of the fiction.  Like the narrator himself, we
must learn to understands God's justice properly.


The Narrator as Pilgrim
The most fully realized character in the poem, however, and
our immediate contact with the details of the experience is
the narrator himself.  In a sense he is inviting us on a
journey of spiritual awareness.  At the start of the poem he
is in a position in life not unlike ours, in the middle of
life's journey and feeling rather lost and in need to
spiritual guidance.  His descent into the pit of Hell is the
preliminary stage in a journey of self-discovery which can
only come from a deeper understanding of the nature of God's
justice (or at least that part of it which is concerned with
eternal punishment).

In such voyages of discovery one of the biggest challenges
facing the writer (and, if successfully met, one of the
greatest attractions for the reader) is the process of
transformation in the central character.  There's no denying
the richness of the Narrator-Pilgrim's experience-the
variety puts even Odysseus in the shade:

     Dante has seen one hundred and twenty-eight sinners
     specifically mentioned by name . . . and has had
     conversations with thirty-seven of them.  He has met
     thirty monsters and five hybrid creatures.  He  has had
     two boat rides; he has ridden a centaur and a winged
     dragon.  He has twice fainted.  He has been exposed to
     excessive heat, bitter cold, strong winds, fearful
     sights, terrifying sounds, and foul odors. . . .  He
     has felt compassion, pity, scorn, resentment, anger,
     vindictiveness, courage, and even, once in a while, a
     touch of amusement.  And all these emotions are
     superimposed on the constants of terror, wonder, and
     lively curiosity. (Bergin 221)
     
And we will not be far from the centre of the poem if we
keep before us throughout the text the following question:
Just what is Dante the Pilgrim learning stage by stage
through this experience?  How has the man who emerges at the
end of the Inferno different from the normal person who
entered hell at the start.  One particular feature to watch
for is the attitude of the Pilgrim-narrator to the
sinners-the way the moments of pity gradually give way to a
much sterner sense (and on one occasion active hostility to
the sinner) brings out what is the most important central
theme in the poem, and one still very accessible to us, even
if we are wholly ignorant of the allegorical system to which
it refers.


Dante's Imagery
The final point to which I wish to call attention is for me
the most remarkable-one that most of you will probably agree
at once.  That point is Dante's extraordinarily eloquent
imagery.  Quite simply, this poem is filled with
unforgettable scenes, given to us in such vivid, sharp
detail that it is easy to understand why The Inferno has,
ever since its appearance, provided a major inspiration to
visual artists.

This quality particularly recommends itself to modern
readers, because we are educated to appreciate poetry that
lets the imagery do the work, which does not tell us what to
feel or lecture us about how we ought to think, but which
allows whatever the poem has to say to emerge from the
quality of the imagery.  And this quality of the poem makes
it speak very directly to us in an emotionally moving way,
without any reference to medieval beliefs, numerology, or
cosmic structures.  Dante is, in other words, a great modern
poet.

It is not possible here to offer a prolonged analysis of
Dante's style of presenting images.  Such generalizations
would probably be misleading anyway.  I would suggest that
the best way to appreciate this aspect of Dante's style is
to focus on particular images and consider in detail how
they create their effect.

One quality I particularly admire is Dante's skill in short,
evocative descriptions which pack into a minimum of space a
maximum of descriptive power.  One never gets in The
Inferno, as one does so often in Paradise Lost, a
descriptive passage so overloaded and so long and so inert
that one loses contact with its purpose long before the
ending.  Instead one characteristically gets passages like
this:

          I came to a place stripped bare of every light
            and roaring on the naked dark like seas
            wracked by a war of winds.  Their hellish flight
          
          of storm and counterstorm through time forgone,
            sweeps the souls of the damned before its
          charge.
            Whirling and battering it drives them on,
          
          and when they pass the ruined gap of Hell
            through which we had come, their shrieks begin
          anew.
            There they  blaspheme the power of God eternal.
          (Canto V, 28-36)
          
          And they, too, howl like dogs in the freezing
          storm,
            turning and turning from it as if they thought
            one naked side could keep the other warm.
          (Canto VII, 19-21)
          
          Their eyes burst with their grief; their smoking
          hands
            jerked about their bodies, warding off
            now the flames and now the burning sands.
          
          Dogs in summer bit by fleas and gadflies
          
            jerking their snouts about, twitching their paws
            now here, now there, behave no otherwise.
          (Canto XVII, 43-45)
          
The way in which these images come instantly alive in a
powerfully visual way is the surest tribute to Dante's
powers as a poet-this hell is full of an astonishing and
immediately accessible movements, smells, lighting of
various sorts, all given in a vivid detail which is
astonishing.

Dante will frequently generate a powerful sense of the
emotional components in a scene by focusing our attention,
not directly on the scene but on its side effects.  Few
passages in the poem, for example, give us a stronger sense
of the power of the Divine Omnipotence that the arrival of
the Heavenly messenger to open the gates of Dis.  And yet
Dante never describes the Messenger directly:

          Suddenly there broke on the dirty swell
            of the dark marsh a squall of terrible sound
            that sent a tremor through both shores of Hell;
          
          a sound as if two continents of air
            one frigid and one scorching, clashed head on
            in a war of winds that stripped the forests
          bare,
          
          ripped off whole boughs and blew them helter
          skelter
            along the range of dust it raised before it
            making the beasts and shepherds run for shelter.
          
The attributes of divine power symbolized in the Messenger
are here evoked by an image taken from nature, from the
common experience of the reader, and given with a rhythm and
momentum in the language itself, so that we fully comprehend
the pilgrim-narrator's extreme emotional reaction, without
ever being told a specific detail about the figure himself.
Ciardi's translation here, especially the consonantal sounds
and the punctuation really brings out the emotional effects
that Dante and Virgil are witnessing.

One of the best ways to appreciate Dante's poetical genius
is to consider an extended section of the poem with great
care, paying close attention to the interaction of the
various things I have mentioned: the sense of epic scale
paired off against the clarity and variety of the immediate
details, the dramatic quality of human conversations paired
off against the sections of doctrine, the shifting emotional
tone (humour, terror, disgust, anger, fear), the constant
sense of movement up and down and around, all of this
coordinated by the developing awareness in the Pilgrim-
Narrator who has to make emotional and conceptual sense of
it all.  You will have great difficulty finding any other
poet who can provide this sense anywhere.

Finally, and most significantly, Dante is capable even in
translation of generating unforgettable lines, putting into
one's head lines that stay there for reasons we may not
entirely comprehend.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

That without hope we live on in desire

Wherever I turn/ away from grief I turn to grief again.

Her changes change her changes endlessly

That harlot, Envy, who on Caesar's face/ keeps fixed forever
her adulterous stare.

One can multiply these examples many times over.  Yet one
cannot precisely describe this quality, let alone provide
some analytical formula for it, other than to use Ezra
Pound's observation that the best poetry is language charged
to the highest degree.  That quality, so rare in poetry, is
everywhere present in Dante's Inferno.  And it, more than
any other single quality, transforms the complex and
interesting structure of his allegory, the theoretical basis
for his beliefs, into some of the greatest poetry we have in
our culture.

Or, to use the point made by the most famous recent English
admirer of Dante, T. S. Eliot, Dante's poetry has an
unparalleled capacity to surprise us (Eliot 208).  In the
Inferno, as in very few other poems, all the resources of
poetic, narrative, and dramatic skill appear together in a
way that holds our attention throughout, filling us with a
sense of delight and wonder at the transforming powers in
evidence here.  If I seem to be labouring here because of a
lack of words sufficient to analyze this quality more
clearly, that may be because, in the last analysis, after we
have attended to epic geography, classical references,
number patterns, and the like, what really makes this poem
so wonderful (the most appropriate word) is the eloquence in
the language, phrase by phrase, stanza by stanza, canto by
canto.  And the best way to understand that is to read on.





                     List of Works Cited
                              
Bergin, Thomas G.  Dante.  New York: The Orion Press, 1965.

Dante.  The Inferno.  Translated by John Ciardi.  New York:
Mentor, 1982.

Eliot, T. S.  "Dante."  Selected Essays.  New Edition.  New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.

Frye, Northrop.  "Allegory."  In Princeton Encyclopaedia of
Poetry and Poetics.  Edited Alex Preminger.  Enlarged
Edition.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Highet, Gilbert.  The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman
Influences on Western Literature.  New York: Galaxy, 1957.

The New Oxford Annotated bible with the Apocrypha.  Revised
Standard Edition.  Edited Herbert G. May and Bruce M.
Metzger.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.