er of his poetry but also because his most powerful work--The Aeneid--depicts the founding of Dante's beloved Rome, an act he also wishes to celebrate. Virgil thus mixes the urban and nature, for he is encountered in a natural setting while he represents the city of Rome to Dante.
Dante has a clear need for spiritual guidance in the First Canto--he has reached the midpoint of his life and has found himself in a dark wood, symbolic of the mental state in which he finds himself, enclosed on all sides by darkness and uncertainty. He is questioning himself and his spirituality. He is indeed as lost in life as he is on the path where he finds himself wandering first through the wood and then into a dismal valley. The dark wood is the dark wood of Error, and on the other side of that wood Dante meets Virgil, seeing him at first from a distance and fearing him as a stranger in
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