Polyhymnia

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In the twenty-third canto of Paradiso, Dante invokes Polyhymnia, one of the Muses, together with her sisters, as possible poetic aid to describe Beatrice's smile. The mention occurs in the context of a passage in which the poet, still under the effect of an intense vision, attempts to recall to memory what he has contemplated. Polyhymnia is called upon in a classical rhetorical movement, in which it is hypothesized that not even all the tongues of the greatest poets, nourished by the milk of the Muses, could fully render the reality of that vision. The figure therefore belongs to the Greek mythological tradition of the Muses, here invoked as a tutelary deity of poetic inspiration in the context of Paradiso.