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“... in the past or present. On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognised the poet Dante, banished from his home town on pain of being burned at the stake. For some considerable time he walked a short distance ahead of me, with the familiar cowl on his head, distinctly taller than the people in the street, yet he passed by them unnoticed. When ...”

“... classic which was supranational and religious. To these conservatively inclined modernists Dante’s theological and political vision was the ultimate antidote to Führer-worship and doodlebugs, providing a direct link between Christianity and the civilisation of ancient Rome. The intellectual substructure of ...”

“... In​ one of the most poignant moments of Dante’s Commedia, the exiled poet anticipates his triumphant return to Florence:Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem,to which both Heaven and Earth have set their hand …should overcome the cruelty that locks me outof the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb …then …shall I return a poet and, at the fontwhere I was baptised, take the laurel crown ...”

“... Dante in English’ is an anthology of English translations of passages from Dante (most of them from the Commedia); it also includes poetry in English by authors who have been influenced by Dante. The authors and translators range from Chaucer and other English writers to non-British poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and W ...”

“... No one, except perhaps Proust, has been able to express such a sense of totally unexpected joy as Dante, and what most often brings joy flooding through his body is the chance meeting with a revered ancestor or teacher. ‘O sanguis meus, O superinfusa gratia Dei,’ Cacciaguida greets him in Paradise, and Dante, turning in puzzlement to Beatrice, feels that ‘I had touched the limit both of my beatitude and of my paradise ...”

“... and feel aggrieved will set alarm bells ringing and have editors demanding revisions. How would Dante’s Divine Comedy have fared in an environment like this? Large numbers of his fellow citizens are named and shamed. It’s true that most of them were dead, but by no means all. Two living characters are pronounced so evil that the devil has carried their ...”

“... different vision of later poets. Milton’s works are made to bear witness against him, and so are Dante’s, but in more far-reaching and more subtle ways. These are analysed by Steve Ellis with great sympathy and penetration, and his book is one of the most interesting for all lovers of poetry to have appeared for some time. In La Poesia de ...”

“... wafers and panettone, his ‘ppandescèlo’ probably a nod to the ‘pan de li angeli’ in Dante’s Paradiso. With Dante, though, it’s a different story. In the first canto of this third part of his Commedia, he links the words valor and lavoro, ‘worth’ and ‘work’, as near anagrams and almost synonyms. But ...”

“... Throughout the 19th century, Italian critics attributed to Dante’s Commedia the formal and linguistic unity they desired for their country. It is ‘a national Bible’, de Sanctis said; ‘harmony,’ Mazzini affirmed, ‘flows throughout in full tide.’ Similar ideas flourished in Britain and Ireland, encouraged by the tendency of early translators to naturalise Dante in flattened versions of recognisable styles ...”

“... Critics​ have struggled to define Dante’s first book, Vita Nuova, written in the early 1290s when he was in his late twenties.* Here are some of the possibilities: an autobiography (spiritual and/or poetic); a religious conversion narrative; a treatise on poetry for poets, or a treatise on love for lovers; a Künstlerroman before the invention of the novel; a Bible of Love, or a Bible of Beatrice; a mystical itinerarium mentis to discover God ...”

“... on the face of it unexpectedly, given his title – he wanted to write a lot more about Dante. On Dante, as he remarked in a preface, the whole of his argument depended. But this book was itself to be merely part of a larger project, a trilogy of which the other volumes would deal with the Elizabethan drama (on ...”

“... the original than it would without them have penetrated.’ Of these three new translations of Dante (not all of them quite new, for Allen Mandelbaum’s was first published ten years or so ago), Mandelbaum’s and Pinsky’s belong firmly in the second class, whilst Ellis’s, which makes a point of the modernity of its idiom, aspires perhaps a little to ...”

“... comes and goes, faded by the sun that drew it from the unripe earth’ (Purgatorio XI, 115-117). Dante Gabriel Rossetti did not translate that particular text, but he might have; perhaps he should have, given his cultural history. For Rossetti was, according to his age’s two most imposing critics, Ruskin and Pater, the period’s central artistic presence ...”

“... about what his critical practice means. The pieces consider a wide spectrum of authors and topics: Dante, Montaigne, Vico, Racine, Pascal, Rousseau, Romanticism, Proust. The dates of original publication run from 1921 to 1958, and 13 of the 20 pieces are earlier than Mimesis. The volume is thus especially useful in reminding us of all Auerbach had done before ...”

“... aligned with the loins of Lucifer, the gigantic armature which holds the damned in their place. Dante’s Paradise is about unmitigated light, before it drains through the spheres to the earth. Nature, St Thomas explains in Canto xiii, cannot transmit these remains of the divine day, but fumbles them ‘like an artificer/Who knows his trade but has a ...”