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“... like that in a decade’). Perhaps loneliness is to be developed as a theme in Volume III, and the Dante epigraph is setting us up for a dénouement in which Stalin becomes King Lear. Stalin biographers, of whom there are now many, come with all sorts of personal agendas and emotional predispositions. Henri Barbusse admired his subject, Trotsky and Isaac ...”

“... the wood, I go out to a spring, and from there to my aviary. I have a book under my cloak, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their amorous passions and of their loves, recall my own, and take a little pleasure in this thought. In the evening, he put on his ‘courtly garments’ and entered ...”

“... had served the country well enough for centuries, a sort of distillation of the Florentine of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, but it wasn’t an idiom for modern times – not the sort of thing you could put in people’s mouths in a novel. And it had suddenly become very important that Italian writers produce novels.‘High literature is for the ...”

“... PHS were invented by Wise.Dowden was understandably taken aback at Wise’s effrontery. So too was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, when Wise borrowed some of Shelley’s unpublished letters from him, only to copy and publish them in a pamphlet that – according to its imprint – originated in New York. Wise’s justification was that he was simply making the work of ...”

“... it all, desire of oblivion runs.’ Death as desired ease is worded by quotations from Dante Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Swift, Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas. But none of the quotations is evidence that their authors maintained a conviction in favour of oblivion; above it all, no such desire runs. The passages Ricks quotes are ...”

“... the medieval Christian universe, there wasn’t much room for alien civilisation – the cosmos of Dante and Aquinas had man at the centre, surrounded by the more perfect spheres of Heaven. The Copernican revolution changed all that. Even before it was clear that the Sun was a star like other stars, and that the galaxy was just part of a universe of ...”

“... interest in translating Classical and European poetry into Irish English. To translate Tibullus, Dante, Nerval and Apollinaire is to offer glimpses of a new landscape, a fresh cultural initiative which may in time be embodied formally and institutionally. Again, translation can be seen as an ambitious type of Neoclassicism which helps to form conscience. The ...”

“... all, Ficino’s ideas are ‘themselves closely related’ to a tradition ‘starting forward from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’. The trouble is, of course, that we know very little about what Michelangelo read: Summers is painfully aware of this. It is also hard to be sure of what he said. Condivi’s biography is a valuable source and clearly reflects ...”

“... And yet Emerson wants more, even if he cannot quite name the desire: Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer ...”

“... at the end of The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), ‘is our beloved codex’: We may not see it, as Dante did, in perfect order, gathered by love into one volume, but we do, living as reading, like to think of it as a place where we can travel back and forth at will, divining congruences, conjunctions, opposites; extracting secrets from its secrecy, making ...”

“... In spite of her virulence, the figure of Medea commands our attention – and our sympathy. Dante put Jason in the Inferno for his treatment of her and few since have objected. The myth was already old when Homer was writing; the audience at Euripides’ first production in 431 BCE didn’t need to be told her back-story when she stepped onto the ...”

“... like an ingenious form of torment for the souls of wastrels. No need to sick the dogs on them, as Dante did: just stick them in a ditch, knee-deep in mud for eternity, and surround them with old betting slips. The discovery of a few modern era courtyards was a minor triumph. Even so, the explanatory panels that went up late in the day, as the dig was drawing ...”

“... only English poet noted in the Elegies, among Hölderlin, Goethe, Denis Saurat, Sorley MacLean, Dante and Ossian. Blake had written, ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau’; Henderson: Fuck on, fuck on, Verlaine, Rimbaud You blissful buggers; fuck again – For on my heart as on the town The small drops of your poems rain. Yes, he would of course ...”

“... Hunt had been far too familiar with a great poet, translating a sublime and tragic episode from Dante into his own jauntily modern terms, but that in doing so he had pandered to the tastes – and vanities – of a specifically Cockney readership, a readership Lockhart imagined to be made up of semi-educated and fashion-obsessed grotesques. Much of this was ...”

“... world’. With devastating mischief – failures of alchemy indeed – Borges suggests Homer and Dante may have reached the same insight. Borges’s poem ‘El Otro Tigre’/‘The Other Tiger’ concerns the beast that is not in the poem, that couldn’t be in the poem because it is not made of words or tropes and because even the act of naming it turns it ...”