Since we’ve come to a moment of (perhaps!) profound irony as Statius misquotes and even misinterprets Virgil’s AENEID to find his way to salvation, we should perhaps pause and talk a bit about irony, both as an artistic concept and specifically as tool our poet, Dante, uses to make meaning in his text.

In this interpolated (or interstitial?) episode of WALKING WITH Dante, we’ll talk about the two basic forms of irony: simple (or verbal) and situational. Then we’ll talk about three types of situational irony: dramatic, cosmic, and what I like to call “creative” irony.