The Changed Form of Poetry: Dante’s Interaction with Ovid in the Divine Comedy. Taryn Power, McGill Ovid refuses to be left in Hell, or perhaps Dante refuses to leave him there. He first enters the Comedy’s stage as Dante enters limbo: he is third of the five great pagan poets who invite Dante to join their number and whom Dante must abandon to continue his journey. Ovid is mentioned by name only one more time, and then only for Dante to bid him “Taccia” as Dante’s poetics of transformation outmatch his own. However silenced Dante may bid him be, Ovid’s words find their way into Dante’s verse throughout his climb up Mount Purgatory and into the earthly Paradise, which appears as a ghostly reflection of Ovid’s Golden Age. At the outset of the final cantica, as Dante — both as the pilgrim within the story and as the poet who tells it — prepares to step into Paradise, he performs two metamorphoses, very much in the Ovidian mode. To express the transhumanization of the pilgrim, Dante uses Ovid’s Glaucus; to express the apotheosis of the poet, he turns to the tale of Marsyas. These two allusions within the Paradiso’s first canto provide a starting point for examining Dante’s relationship to Ovid as one which goes beyond mere allusion, but one in which he is actively engaged in competition and in subversion of the pagan poet’s work. Through his interactions with the Ovidian themes of metamorphosis, exile, and the nature of poetry, Dante presents his vision for an evolved poetic tradition, which itself becomes a means of Christian apotheosis. Dante’s transformation of the theme of changing forms is perfectly exemplified by the story’s crowning moment of transformation: Dante the pilgrim’s ascent into heaven. After the Purgatorio, whose theme is essentially “spiritual metamorphoses” and which, fittingly, uses the
71
