Nevertheless it is also medieval and also a great achievement of poetic composition. So to consider it is to discern both more of its greatness and more of medieval habit. In the current medieval lore the main lack is seen by contrast to be in the larger movement of composition. Medieval poetic carries us so short a distance toward the _Divina Commedia_ because it is preoccupied with style. Vergil is currently cited and quoted, but usually as an exemplar of the three styles.[14] Medieval romances carried nationalism back to Troy for centuries without discerning the larger art of the _Æneid_ in composition. For Dante Vergil was guide not only in a deeper sense, but also in poetic. This makes clearer why Dante turned his back on current lore. He knew that lore, not only the elaborate technic of the troubadours, but the Latin _poetria_. His ignoring of it is tantamount to an arraignment of its cardinal weakness. It had too little technic for his main poetic concern, the movement of the whole. It had too much schoolmasterly fiddling with words to carry orchestration beyond a few conventional modes. No one can study the history of poetic without finding this deficiency exceptional only in degree. In kind it is historic. Here, again and again, appears the gap between pedagogically formulated poetic and poetry. In Dante’s style the medieval _poetria_ is not merely outdistanced; it is repudiated. Matthieu de Vendôme, Geoffroi de Vinsauf, John the Englishman, might have tolerated figures of wrestlers and dogs in hell, but hardly broth, cooks, oxen, and swine. They would have challenged bellows in purgatory; they would have been shocked at rooks and a fish-pool in heaven. The decorative descriptions of a rhetoricated poetic seem nowhere else quite so futile as beside Dante’s figures of precise geography. As seems beetling Carisenda, when a cloud goes over it so as to make it hang the other way, so seemed Antæus to me as I stood watching to see him bend. I. xxxi. 136.[15] As that stream which has its own path first from Monte Veso toward the east on the left coast of Apennine, which is called Acquaqueta above before it descends to its low bed, and at Forlì has lost that name, reëchoes there over San Benedetto from the alp, because its fall has a single leap where for a thousand should be room, so down an abrupt bank we heard resounding that turbid water. I. xvi. 94.