Embodying Poetry in Dante's Inferno 1

EMBODYING POETRY IN DANTE'S INFERNO

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Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri has considered the milestone of Italian heritage since

in Italy it is part of the mandatory curriculum between the ages of 15 to 18 in high schools.

However, the work by Dante is perceived, both by students and teachers, as a complex and

challenging, mostly due to its philosophical and theological epic structure, working on diverse

levels of meaning such that it seems to require much explanation. Thus, the scholastic obligation

in studying the entire heavy commentary note so as to critically paraphrase the text is

pedantically concealing the beauty and joy of the poetry, frightening and boring students, whilst

frustrating and disappointing teachers. As such, the case study is based on an Italian narrative

poem concerning imaginative vision regarding the afterlife on the medieval world-perspective.

According to Alighieri (2003), Dante Inferno uses diverse skills such as physicality,

comprehension, and imagination to speak poetic agency and text in describing the larger issue of

the afterlife. The skills provide the actual details that evoke the particularity of the modern

otherworld and the protagonist’s journey towards discovering the afterlife (Iannucci, 1997).

Focusing on the pilgrim, the audience is privy to the memories, thoughts, emotions, and

perceptions of the context that bear the imprint of their modern earthly individualism even when

they have crossed over into the afterlife (Borges, 2002). This assists a person to approach the

classical and poetic text. Dante’s shades are not earthly selves since his authentic immateriality

belies particularity on the substance that is made possible through poetry (Cantor, 1996). As

such, the audience can be excused for disregarding that theatrical technique to Dante’s Divine

Comedy has individualized bodies that relate to the pilgrim including others around them as if

they are still earthly and alive (Scott, 1996). Dante denotes this when he reveals how different

characters sometimes forgot themselves and the location they are (Morgan, 1990).
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Similarly, practitioners such as Patsy Rodenberg, Cicey Frances, and Kristin Linklater

speak very much about embodying the poetic text. For example, they use physical image-

creation to analyze and understand the poetic text. Readers can also improvise theatre play using

sensory and emotional recall when they employ pantomime and stage movement consistently to

express feelings, actions and thoughts. For instance, in the Divine Comedy by Dante, the act of

self-consciousness is seen when Virgil reminds Statius in the famous episode concerning the act

of embracing his feet (Norton, 1892). Dante is more fallible to the fiction when he explains how

the character tried to embrace his old friend’s feet, only to realize that his arms are wrapped

around the air (Dante, 2017. Thus, the corporeality of the Divine Comedy illustrates

‘fundamental strategy (Alighieri, 1909).’ Dante intentionally gives an individualized body to

represent the human soul. The poem describes various approaches in the classical and poetic text

(Doré, G., 2012). Therefore, my research intends to investigate various techniques of engaging

contemporary high school students in an imaginative and intuitive performance experience with

Dante’s poetry (Durling, 1996). More specifically, my approaches will facilitate the students to

read to read the “The Divine Comedy – in innocence” so that they can easily access happiness

and delight of it’s fairly tale texture, in accordance with the ancient Italian oral storytelling

tradition. Hence, I will report and analyze one application of the theoretical approach to Divine

Comedy by Dante I did in Fall 2019, including the five designed workshops at I gave at Redi

grammar school in Arezzo, Italy as an attempt in opening Italian secondary school for students to

get a physical and emotional connection with Dante’s poetry (Pite, 1994).
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References

Alighieri, D., 2003. The divine comedy. Penguin.

Alighieri, D., 1909. The divine comedy of Dante Alighieri: hell, purgatory, paradise (Vol. 20).

PF Collier.

Borges, J.L., 2002. The book of imaginary beings. Random House.

Cantor, P.A., 1996. The uncanonical Dante: The divine comedy and Islamic philosophy.

Philosophy and Literature, 20(1), pp.138-153.

Dante, A., 2017. The divine comedy. Aegitas.

Doré, G., 2012. The Doré Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Courier Corporation.

Durling, R.M., 1996. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Volume 1: Inferno (Vol. 1). Oxford

University Press.

Morgan, A., 1990. Dante and the Medieval Other World (pp. 108-43). Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Norton, C.E., 1892. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

Pite, R., 1994. The circle of our vision: Dante's presence in English romantic poetry (p. 161).

Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Iannucci, A.A. ed., 1997. Dante: contemporary perspectives (No. 2). University of Toronto

Press.

Scott, J.A., 1996. Dante's political Purgatory (p. 6976). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press.