This chapter analyzes the poem’s maturing reflections on love and on the responsibilities of poetry as the servant of love, whether holy or profane. Encounters with poets throughout the terraces of purgatory, followed by Dante’s dramatic encounter with Beatrice at its summit, dramatize the central importance of divinely perfected love as challenging misogyny and conditioning humility, and thus preparing Dante for the third realm: only in this state of humble self-awareness can he, as a poet and as a pilgrim, enter into the exaltations of paradise.