Commentary Purg XXXIII 136-141

This seventh and last Purgatorial address to the reader opens a new subject that the poet will share with us, the formal requirements of his poem.  If he had more space (another few lines? another canto?), he would tell us what Eunoe tasted like.  The early commentators think that he means that he has run out of cantos (i.e., he cannot have a thirty-fourth as he did for Inferno).  Tozer (DDP Tozer.Purg.XXXIII.139-140) was perhaps the first to think that it was the number of verses in each cantica (4720, 4755, 4758 respectively) that Dante refers to.  That is a possible hypothesis, except that we note that he had just completed the longest canto in the entire work in the preceding one (XXXII is 160 lines long), and ostensibly thus had available at least fifteen more lines.  Thomas Hart (Hart.1995.1) reviews his copious work that would have us believe, among other things, that all the canto lengths of the poem were decided by Dante early on.  (For a rejoinder see C.Inf.VI.28-32.)

Scartazzini (DDP Scartazzini.Purg.XXXIII.139) was the first commentator (in 1900) included in the DDP to report that the poem contained in all 14,233 verses, noting that his predecessor editors, Blanc and Witte, erred when they reported the number of verses in the Commedia. The same may be said of Vittorio Sermonti, in his presentation of Inferno (B. Mondadori, 1966, p. xxxiv) and of Emilio Pasquini (comm. Inferno, Garzanti, 1987, p. lxxvii), both of whom unaccountably give the number of verses in the Commedia as 14,223. See the first words of C.Inf.I.1.