The poetics of dreaming: Virgil, Ovid, and Dante

This comparative study begins by noting how Dante's two most prominent classical literary interlocutors, Virgil and Ovid, are intimately present within and around the three prophetic morning dreams that strategically demarcate the Dante pilgrim's ascent up Mt. Purgatory. The explicit allusive involvement of these two Roman authors within Dante's purgatorial triptych of dreams leads me to pursue a topic that has not been broached before: namely, an investigation of how Virgil's and Ovid's respective literary depictions of dreams shed a formative light on Dante's oneiric vision in the Purgatorio. Focusing on the paradoxical tension-in-unity that the Commedia dramatizes between the human and divine realms, on the one hand, and the metapoetical symbiosis of truth and fiction, on the other, this study examines how Virgil and Ovid each negotiate these pairs of hermeneutical relationships.;Chapter 1 focuses on how Virgil depicts the human and divine tensions at work through his predominantly supernatural dreams in the Aeneid. I devote particular attention to Aeneas' six plot-driving divine dreams to demonstrate how Virgil's employment of supernatural oneiric encounters is both intrinsic to his teleological theory of history even as it ultimately reveals its tragic limitations.;Chapter 2 investigates Ovid's much more thematically self-conscious treatment of oneiric phenomena. After reviewing the dream landscape Ovid cultivates over his poetic career, I investigate both the analogies and tragic differences between Ovid's Corinna of the Amores and Dante's Beatrice of the Vita Nuova. The relationship between truth and fiction as it bears upon Ovid's interpretation of Virgil's supernatural approach to dreams is examined specifically in relation to the paradigmatic dream in the Metamorphoses: Alcyone's encounter with the dream-god Morpheus. In spite of its irenic ending, this oneiric interlude reveals Ovid to be an unwitting metapoetical tragedian.;Dante's three purgatorial dreams in the Commedia are assessed in chapter 3 from the theologically prospective Virgilian standpoint and the metapoetically retrospective Ovidian perspective. A close reading of the proem to the dream of the eagle discloses how both the Virgilian and Ovidian tragic oneiric approaches are simultaneously embraced yet transformed by Dante's "comic" employment of a theological metapoetics.