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“... wrote down everything the great man said over meals, so a son kept the minutes for the dead. Dante, it seems, congratulated Victor on his poetry. Jesus Christ conceded that the French genius’s new religion would replace his own. Juliette Drouet, arguably Hugo’s first disciple, addressed her unfaithful lover in daily letters as ‘my Christ’.Bellos ...”

“... for revealing how Shakespeare ‘leads us to the same point’ as the ‘Catholic philosophy of Dante, with its stern judgment of morals’. Chesterton’s influence endured. In Knight’s 1948 book Christ and Nietzsche, he wrote that when we judge the Third Reich ‘we should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies ...”

“... a Clive James feature in a colour mag to find himself confronted by names such as Contini, Croce, Dante and Hofmannsthal. This is not to say that James’s popular and populist side is not important to him: only that he has never seen any reason why a chat-show host and TV annotator should not also be a serious essayist, novelist and poet. His marginalia on ...”

“... the poem, from line to entirety, more precise. Allegiances too, are more discreetly signalled: to Dante, Villon, Chapman’s Homer, among others; to the King James Bible and, in ‘The Spoils’, his last big poem before ‘Briggflatts’, to an array of Arabic, Jewish and Persian materials – Bunting served in Persia during the war and later became the ...”

“... as a reader. The intensity of that experience puts more fitful readers to shame. ‘I am reading Dante in Italian for the first time. O what force!’ The fusion of his literary and emotional experience is most baldly revealed in a sequence of diary entries for a week in February 1851 when he was courting his future wife, Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’), in the face ...”

“... does, from taking seriously what is being talked about by Guinicelli and Cavalcanti as well as Dante. But how was any of this to be brought to bear on the condition of being an American in the 1930s? That was Pound’s problem, and it was no good telling him that there couldn’t be a connection, for the connection was there, in him: he was both a devotee ...”

“... Verdenal,’ Eliot’s inscription runs, ‘mort aux Dardanelles,’ followed by an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Or puoi la quantitate/comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,/quando dismento nostra vanitate,/trattando l’ombre come cosa salda’ (‘Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our ...”

“... persons rather than the works of Ford’s family circle. James’s deduction from the fact that Dante Gabriel Rossetti once received him at tea-time in what he thought was a dressing-gown is that the eminent artist had been ‘disgusting in his habits, never took baths, and was insupportably lecherous’. What’s worse, Rossetti habitually devoured ...”

“... Tristan with its ‘Liebestod’; the fana’ or annihilation-in-God of the Sufi poets; and Dante’s beyond-the-grave vision of Beatrice. Great artistic meditations on impossibility, so it appears, are our best consolation for the distinctly bad lot our brains have landed us with. Splendours is both swankily cultured – our FRS hobnobs with Herbert ...”

“... Shelley was ‘the one English poet of the 19th century who could even have begun to follow’ in Dante’s footsteps, which sets the level of praise remarkably high. The poem is Shelley’s version of Hell, in which all the flickering uncertainties of the world of appearance evoked in the earlier poems have become an imprisoning nightmare of ...”

“... on liceo students – made life bearable for Levi: one thinks of his beautiful account of reciting Dante to his uncomprehending companion in the most unpromising of circumstances. Memory recalled Ulysses’ reminder to his shipmates that that they were men, not beasts. (All this has a general import but is also idiosyncratic: ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ did not ...”

“... Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases because so much of their best work was done outside the period, and there is a ...”

“... Malamud...), and back with equal self-assurance to the monuments of the European tradition (Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes...). Although the range both of his current sympathies and of his remembered literary pleasures is astonishing, there is little ostentation in his manner. What most excites him, and is most contagious for his reader, is the ...”

“... rearrangement of both the role and effects of this concept.’ His exemplary readings – of Dante, Sade, Bataille and others – all have to do with the textual traversal of limits which unlooses a writing beyond all grasp of traditional notions like ‘literature’, ‘authorship’ and ‘meaning’. Writing becomes the very practice of radical ...”

“... interest of thinkers from Pound and Rougemont to Bataille, Klossowski and Lacan (not to speak of Dante and il dolce stil novo), where it is often linked with transgression. Courtly love has indeed always been associated with asceticism, continence and abstention, things wholly absent from these books, which do, however, insist on the uniqueness and ...”