SOURCE: "Paolo and Francesca," in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965, pp. 61-77.

The following excerpt discusses the Paolo and Francesca episode in the Inferno. Poggioli's essay originally appeared in a longer form in the June 1957 issue of PMLA.

… Francesca tells her story as if she were reminiscing aloud. One day, Paolo and she were reading together, for their own entertainment, the romance of Lancelot du Lac, and particularly that section of the romance describing how the protagonist was overpowered by his passion for the fair Guinevere. Francesca alludes to all this very succinctly, through the single phrase: "how love seized him" (come amor lo strinse), where she uses a violent verb, stringere, "to grasp" or "to squeeze," to indicate the violence of the passion mastering the knight's soul. We imagine the two sitting beside each other: one listening, the other, probably Francesca, reading aloud. But...