Dante again gets to speak with history. In Canto X, he got to speak to the opposing side, to Farinata. Here, he gets to speak to his heroes, the three Guelph leaders who accomplished what Dante hoped to accomplish. And who made absolutely no difference in the hell of Florentine history. What happens when you meet your heroes and they’re damned?

Still on an embankment over the burning sands, Dante and Virgil encounter three more of the homosexuals in the seventh circle of hell. These are three Guelph heroes. And they’re going to give the pilgrim—and the poet behind him—a lesson he will never forget. All the good intentions in the world don’t create a good civic society.

This episode of WALKING WITH DANTE is my interview with Kristen Hook, a Dantista writing her PhD dissertation on Inferno, Canto X. She’ll talk about incarnational poetry and the empty space that Dante’s friend and rival poet, Guido Cavalcanti, opens up inside of INFERNO.

My assumption is that the homosexuals are punished in INFERNO, Canto XV. I certainly stand with the bulk of the commentary tradition. But am I right? There are now many other ideas. Let’s talk it through and see what others have to say.

The pilgrim, Dante’s got one more thing to ask: prurient gossip. And Brunetto Latini’s got one more thing to say: Don’t forget my book! But there are deep ironies here. The two of them have been nattering on about writerly fame. And about pure Roman blood. All while Exhibit A, Virgil, has been walking right beside them.

After Brunetto Latini’s history lesson and prophecy, Dante doesn’t respond as a student to the master. He responds as one writer to another. He offers all the writerly tropes: rhetorical skill, doubt, bravado, and the hope that his text will be read, even glossed, the only way to find fame in his world. The soul may be eternal. The writer? Not necessarily.

Brunetto Latini has questions for our pilgrim, Dante. But Dante only has confessions. He has to tell his teacher what happened—using Brunetto’s own words. Do we need writer to explain what happens to us? Brunetto may not. He sets off on a history lesson and then a prophecy for the pilgrim’s (and the poet’s) fate. Inferno, Canto XV, gets stranger by the line. So many agendas, so much talking across each other!

Dante, our pilgrim, encounters the man who was his teacher (or who he wants us to think was his teacher): Brunetto Latini. Their relationship is that of a father and a son. Or an older poet and a younger poet. Or maybe those are the same thing. No wonder INFERNO, Canto XV is so fraught. It’s never easy to find your mentor, especially when he’s in hell.

We’ve come to the burning sands, not just to see them, but to walk down the levy that Virgil has called the most amazing sight of hell. We’re in Canto XV of INFERNO, starting to walk among those violent against nature: the Sodomites. But not yet. Up first, poetic excess. And pilgrim doubt. Because we’re about to enter the hellish heart of the writerly project: the quest for fame.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE as I interview J. Simon Harris, a poet who is currently translating Dante’s INFERNO (and COMEDY) into English AND in terza rima.

We finish Canto XIV of Dante's INFERNO with a brief coda: two questions from Dante to Virgil, further clarifying the hydraulics of hell—and also bringing up more problems of sewing the classical world into the Christian world. Then we move on to some fascinating listener questions that have come in via emails and DMs about Canto XIV.

Inferno, Canto XIV is often seen as a twofer: Capaneus, then the Old Man Of Crete. But Dante is surely up to more than that in COMEDY. He's getting at the classical/Christian matrix. And he’s complicating the sophistication of Inferno, Canto VII. The Old Man Of Crete is the other side of the Capaneus coin. And brings us back to the notion that hell is a human landscape.

The Old Man of Crete. One of the strangest passages in all of INFERNO. Virgil may have been excited about that burbling stream that comes out of the wood of the suicides. But nothing can compare to this bit of myth-making. Dante pulls out all the stops. Four classical/Biblical sources. Elliptical details. And an explanation of the hydraulics of hell.

This passage from INFERNO (Canto XIV, lines 76 - 93) is actually a transitional one as Dante and Virgil leave Capaneus behind on the sands and before something even wilder happens in Canto XIV. But it allows us to explore Dante’s growing poetic techniques and it offers us one knot: Virgil’s weird insistence that the stream that pours from the wood of the suicides is the most astonishing thing yet seen in INFERNO.

We finally get our blasphemer in the third ring of the seventh circle of INFERNO. A priest? A theologian? Some pesky Byzantine? Nope, a classical, even mythic figure, Capaneus, right out of Statius’ poem THE THEBIAD. Wait, can a figure who sought to overthrow Jove, a mythic diety, one of the “false and lying gods,” really commit blasphemy against the Christian God. Dante’s playing a wild game here!

Here’s a further, more detailed look at the naked souls in the third ring of the seventh circle of hell. Those who have been (or have tried to be) violent against God are prone, walking about, or hunched over. What’s the difference? So much. This is a complicated passage with references to New Testament epistles (Jude), Albert Magnus, Guido Cavalcanti, and even the Comedy itself. In other words, this is Dante at full steam ahead.

Our pilgrim, Dante, has stepped out of the wood of the suicides and caught his first glimpse of the burning sands of the blasphemers. This canto has a fascinating opening sequence: overlap with the canto just before, wild rhetorical strategies, glancing references to classical figures (Cato the Elder will come back to haunt us!), and a rare moment in which the Dante the poet seems insecure with his text.

Over the course of the episodes for WALKING WITH DANTE about Canto XIII from Inferno, I’ve had some great interactions with listeners about my interpretation of the poem and about my own biases when it comes to the text. I thought I’d share those questions with you because I think it’s important to discover more ways to see the poem than just my own from people who are walking with us.

Inferno’s Canto XIII gets wilder by the line. Now we get a second suicide, a bush torn apart by the squanderers and the dogs after them. But this guy’s even more of a problem than Pier delle Vigne. He offers a pagan explanation for Florence’s history. And he offers one last metamorphosis that settles this rhetorical tour de force into its emotional home.

Inferno, Canto XIII, is all about trust: putting your faith in your warlord to save you, putting your faith in Virgil to guide you, putting your faith in Dante to tell the truth, putting your faith in the suicides to speak clearly of their motivations. No wonder, then, that when Pier finishes speaking, we encounter a scene of utter chaos that challenges the very limits of our credulity. How far do we have to suspend belief to read COMEDY?