Critique Of Dante's Inferno.

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“Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it”1 : Lyrical Play in Dante’s Inferno 1 1 Dante’s Inferno, Durling and Martinez. 1 In his essay “Paolo and Francesca,” Renato Poggioli analyzes and interprets a piece of the fifth canto of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. The passage deals with the affair of two passion-driven lovers, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, and the readings of Lancelot du Lac which are said to have provoked their sin. Poggioli uses his research and understanding of the subject to draw conclusions about the meaning behind Dante’s choice and structure of words. He has many observations that deserve recognition, and is correct about Dante’s overall use of the romantic episode as a parody between his feelings of sympathy and compassion toward the sinners paired with his sound and harsh judgment toward the sin. In the opening of canto five, Dante takes us into Minos. Minos is the second circle of hell, which represents the layer of the lust (Durling and Martinez 87). After mentioning a few historic lustful figures, Dante creates an encounter with Francesca and Paolo. This occurrence, according to Poggioli, is Dante’s “double mirror trick” (Freccero 76). Poggioli discovered that while Dante used Francesca’s story to show his sympathy for those lost to lust, he used his poem as a whole to show his zero tolerance of the subject. As a student of the Inferno and

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