Violence escalates in the fifth of the malebolge (the evil pouches) that make up the eighth ring of INFERNO, the subsets of fraud. One poor barrator is about to be flayed alive. What do we make of the escalating violence in Dante’s COMEDY?

Dante the pilgrim and Virgil are strolling along the fifth pouch of the malebolge in the circle of fraud—and meanwhile, Dante the poet is working very hard behind the scenes to make sure his fraudulent poetics have all the trappings of realism.

Evil Tail has mustered the demons. They’re ready to set off. The pilgrim Dante has some qualms. Virgil is very confident. They’re both right as COMEDY descends to its lowest point—not the pit of hell but the most vulgar, street comedy of the poem.

Dante the pilgrim and his guide, Virgil, are stopped in their tracks above the fifth evil pouch in INFERNO’s eighth circle of fraud. Here, at one of the malebolge, we get some of Dante’s lowest, street-level comedy with this pack of demons whose names alone tell us they’re both a joke and a menace.

An interpolated episode in the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE, all about demons and Dante: who were these creatures, where did they come from, and what traditions is Dante using as the demons become more and more prominent in INFERNO?

The demon’s low speech, Virgil’s high rhetoric, and the poor pilgrim Dante, squatting behind a rock. This passage from Inferno, the fifth of the malebolge in the eighth circle of fraud, is full of high drama, silly comedy, and even a bit of Dante-the-poet’s autobiography. In other words, classic INFERNO.

The demons are howling and tearing apart a sinner. Virgil is preening and overly confident. And Dante the pilgrim is going into hiding. It’s a lot of drama in the fifth of the malebolge in the eighth circle of fraud in INFERNO. And there may even be some Augustinian allegory, too. Complicated? Yep! It’s Dante.

Virgil brings the pilgrim—and maybe the poet Dante—back to the plot at hand. An old-school demon is on the run with a grifter hooked through the tendon. We’re descending into one of the most chaotic, vulgar, and wild sequences in all of INFERNO. Get ready for Canto XXI the fraudsters on the political take.

We descend to the fifth of the malebolge with an incredible opening: the poet names his poem, turns coy, and then crafts a gangly, wild, unhinged simile that’s really just a complicated tautology: A = A, pitch = pitch. What’s going on in this most self-conscious of openings before the sin of barratry?

The last of the soothsayers in the 4th of the malebolge, the evil pouches, of the 8th circle of INFERNO, the giant wheel of fraud. The passage ends in a literary tour de force: irony, whimsy, careful structure, and even a final note of sheer bravado. How else do you end the damnation of those who told the future when you’re the poet trying to do the same thing?

Virgil tells the story of the founding of his hometown, Mantua. Except it’s not the story he tells in his own poem, THE AENEID. What’s more, he then dares us to call his poem fraudulent. A curious passage in which Dante either practices his own vengeance on this poetic master or saves him from the fate of being called a magician.

Virgil turns unspeakably hard on our pilgrim, Dante, while looking down at the soothsayers in the fourth evil pouch of the eighth circle of hell. But things are never as they seem in INFERNO. Virgil may be up on his high horse but he misquotes all his classical sources and garbles his references in the wizardry of poetic citations and rewritings.

We enter Inferno, Canto XX, with the most self-conscious opening of any canto in all of COMEDY—and then we meet the fortune tellers, the people who divine the future . . . you know, like Dante, whose whole poem is about telling the future of what’s going to happen to you after you take your last breath.

An overview of Inferno, Canto XIX: its structure, its engineering, its successes, its range, and its one glaring failure. This episode of the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE is meant to be a summary of the previous episodes on this canto of Dante’s INFERNO. It’s a wider and wider vision of this incredibly complex canto.

Our pilgrim, Dante, finishes his righteous rage over the popes in hell and lands right in Virgil’s arms. This last embrace may show us what Dante the poet thinks Comedy is all about. And our poet can’t help but give one last, passing slap to those popes down in their holes.

Dante the pilgrim goes on a rant against Pope Nicholas III, stuck upside-down in a hole in the 3rd evil pouch of the 8th circle of INFERNO, the landscape of fraud. Thick with Biblical and historical allusions, as well as call-backs to other parts of INFERNO, this screed is difficult, illusive, and even incoherent. What else would you expect if you think the popes are bringing on the apocalypse?

Pope Nicholas III reveals himself, confesses his sins to Dante, and anticipates the arrival of another pope, Clement V, who took the papacy to Avignon. This passage is fraught with periphrasis and Biblical allusions. But it also helped expose my own unexamined assumptions about COMEDY as a whole. Dante is always one step ahead of us. Or maybe several.

Popes in hell! How can this be possible? Also, how can this be so funny? And so beautifully constructed! Canto XIX of INFERNO is an amazing feat of poetic craft, tonality, artistry, and even a glimpse into the pilgrim’s (and the poet’s!) interior space. There’s not much better writing in INFERNO. Dante is at the top of his game!

Dante and Virgil descend into the third evil pouch. It seems like a fairly straightforward narrative passage. But this is Dante and his COMEDY! Interpretive questions abound. What’s Virgil’s role in the third of the malebolge in the 8th circle of hell? Why does Dante need Virgil for this descent? And why does Dante need to go down into this pouch in the first place?

Amid the condemnations of the church, just after a prefatory poem and before the denunciations get into full swing, the pilgrim Dante feels the need to make a confession to us, the readers. And in doing so, he establishes a priestly role for his reader and turns the act of interpreting his text into a sacramental activity, all while loading up on Christian imagery in every direction.