Walking With Dante7 Sep 2025

Sweet Becomes Truthful Becomes Poetic: PURGATORIO, Canto XXVI, Lines 115 - 135

Dante has found his poetic father, Guido Guinizzelli, burning in the fires of lust on the final terrace of Mount Purgatory. Our pilgrim-poet has praised his poetic father for the sweet art that will last.

Then Guinizzelli takes the discussion further, morphing that sweetness into truth, offering a metaphysical meaning to a physical sensation. He then proceeds to speak exactly in this sort of poetry, which our poet Dante picks up and uses to conclude this fascinating conversation.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through this second and final conversation about the nature of the new poetry and Dante's synthesis of traditions into COMEDY.

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Here are the segments for this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:

[01:28] My English translation of PURGATORIO, Canto XXVI, lines 115 - 135. If you'd like to read along or continue the conversation with me, please find the entry for this episode on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[05:00] Corporeal and airy manifestations of the body.

[07:55] Girard de Borneil, having been praised, now dismissed.

[10:25] High and low poetry v. Dante's synthesis.

[12:29] Unpacking too-tight lines about poetry.

[15:00] The sweet morphed into the truth.

[19:44] Dante's possible hesitation over his own poetic fame and his wild invocation to the truth of it.

[23:53] Guinizzelli's validation and expansion into metaphoric space.

[28:01] The ending of the conversation: a great example of the sweet new style.

[29:50] Rereading the passage: PURGATORIO, Canto XXVI, lines 115 - 135.

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