This lecture deals primarily with Purgatorio 19, 21 and 22. The ambiguity of the imagination discussed in the preceding lecture as the selfsame path to intellectual discovery and disengagement is explored in expressly poetic terms. While the pilgrim’s dream of the siren in Purgatorio 19 warns of the death-dealing power of aesthetics, the encounter between Statius and Virgil in the cantos that follow points to its life-giving potential by casting poetry as a means of conversion.