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“... way to defend the humanities is to practise them. From my past studies, I would like to remember Dante the pilgrim, who, after climbing the mountain of Purgatory, reaches the Earthly Paradise. There he finds two rivers: Lethe, which brings forgetting – of his past sins – and is a mercy for him, though the principle in relation to history has been rightly ...”

“... of intelligence homewards; his diagnosis of ‘disintegration of the intellect’ in poetry after Dante becomes a symptom of Eliot’s fear that Vivien had ‘nearly lost her reason for a time’. So visceral and personal is Eliot’s mind, in Crawford’s account, that as ‘he likens Donne’s metaphysical “bringing to light” of “curious aspects and ...”

“... thinkers have found themselves exiled by choice or force, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Berlin, Arendt, Shklar and Machiavelli himself. Cicero was decapitated while trying to hot-foot it from Rome; according to Cassius Dio, his tongue was pulled out and jabbed with a hairpin by Mark Antony’s ...”

“... chatted prior to surgery, Simeons soothed his young patient, playing Virgil to this impressionable Dante, by dispensing consoling wisdom.’ At least half of this biography wastes the reader’s time with this sort of kapok. This raises a larger question: what is the function or purpose of such a detailed biography of a poet? Does it bring us closer or tell us ...”

“... place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the importance of ‘The Hero as Poet’ (with Dante as the foundational example) and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (culminating in the bardic example of Robert Burns), surely underpinned Pound’s deep and lasting sense of his vocation as a preacher, teacher and poet. Despite his modernism, Pound was a ...”

“... between writers who were hedgehogs, knowing one big thing, and foxes, knowing many things. Dante is a hedgehog, Shakespeare is a fox and various other figures fall easily into place: ‘Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying ...”

“... together with a rich mix of ephemera – jokes, doodles, snatches of poetry (Ovid, Horace, Dante), drafts of letters, household accounts, paint recipes, shopping-lists, bank statements and so on – which in some ways tell us more about him than those great and often inscrutable works of art and science for which he is famous. Leonardo’s manuscripts ...”

“... for Gray, a confirmed habit of mind,’ Mack says of the young Gray’s translations of Tasso and Dante. He cannot resist turning the effect of this into its cause, describing it as ‘a manner of self-expression that conveniently avoided having to direct too much attention to the self’. We are only a step away from the ‘discovery’ in the verse of all ...”

“... the walk to the top of Monte Falterona, which had been an Etruscan burial place. From the summit, Dante said he saw the Adriatic and the Mediterranean at the same time, but we never did. When we first went, towns in the valley were small, many more people lived and worked in the country and the mezzadria remained familiar, the churches were full on ...”

“... description. He is impatient with muddy or uncertain aesthetic criteria. Calvino rarely alludes to Dante, but the moments when he does are significant: he compares the critic to Minos, judge of the damned, assigning hellish placements with a flick of his tail, but ‘without ever being sure which god has assigned him that ungrateful task for ever’.None of ...”

“... glory would one day outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon, that he felt himself the equal of Dante and Shakespeare. His final testament more modestly hopes that, ‘faute de mieux’, his books may one day gain some measure of posthumous recognition. It was while composing La Doublure, which he always believed to be his ultimate masterpiece, that Roussel ...”

“... with a great many more to come. So far, Shaw is absent from a list which includes Dickens, Homer, Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Woolf, Constant, Balzac, Mann and Tolstoy: so it is as well that he is being taken care of ...”

“... by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance – Longinus’ On the Sublime, for example, in which the famous and much-admired Fragment 31 (‘He seems to me equal to the gods’) appears as a ...”

“... post-humous. Can you have immortality without Death? Let’s have another. I’d give the whole of Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci for one night with some beautiful woman I loved. Wouldn’t you?’ ‘Of course not,’ Hunty cried in horror. ‘Michelangelo?’ ‘If I saw you drowning in the Liffey shouldn’t I drown the whole world’s ...”

“... Seat’, Robert Frost’s marvellous little short tale in verse about the buzz saw, a sonnet of Dante admirably translated by Kenneth Koch, Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Giving Potatoes’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Meadow Mouse’ or a 12-line poem by James Stephens (author of The Crock of Gold) entitled ‘A Glass of Beer’, whose concluding curse on a ...”