“... on to an anecdote about Coleridge, and stutters out with short meditations on Frost; Petrarch and Dante are shoehorned into the afterword). There are sexy deaths and dull deaths, early deaths and lingering ones, uncanny predictions, like Auden’s, and deaths where poets lost their words first, like Stevie Smith after her stroke. There are disappearing acts ...”

“... book is littered with hopeful falsehoods. There is Lear’s bare forked animal, plenty of Milton, Dante (that proto-Catholic with his slightly confusing ideas about purgatory) and possibly Yeats (‘Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?’). Jack carries Robert Frost around in his pocket, finds ‘good old Leaves of Grass’ in a bookshop, misses Hart ...”

“... and Corruption. In scholastic writings, Aristotle is called simply ‘the Philosopher’, while Dante honoured him as ‘the Master of Those Who Know’. In this context, Albert set himself the ambitious project of paraphrasing and commenting on every Aristotelian text he could find – an enterprise that occupied him from roughly 1250 to 1270 – to purge ...”

“... arts. In literature it is the other way round. We have never absorbed Goethe, Racine or Dante as others have absorbed Shakespeare. Indeed, not the least embarrassing feature of a visit to the Continent is the widespread familiarity there with an impressive range of English letters, and the expertise that the visitor is assumed to be able to display ...”

“... from such poets as Rilke, Antonio Machado, the Norwegian Rolf Jacobsen, and many others, including Dante, are all ‘translated by R.B.’). Mr Bly wants respect; he has plenty of bristles and prickles; like Bronco toilet-paper, he takes no shit from anyone. He is, in fact, that familiar being, the ‘strong personality’. This kind of strength is innate and ...”

“... to be endured, detested and railed against; bytie was the place where one was, and wrote, as Dante or Goethe or Tsvetaeva. Byt was what killed Mayakovsky, and we have his suicide note as proof; in the end only Marina Tsvetaeva could kill Marina Tsvetaeva. One dislikes Tsvetaeva because, no matter in what time one tries to come at her, she has already ...”

“... literal, as in Louis Zukofsky’s experiments in sound-for-sound transfer, all the way to the ‘Dante’ reprises in The Four Quartets, has played an essential part. Indeed, modern poetic translation has exhibited a prodigality and quality worryingly at odds with the weakness of much ‘original’ work. Could there be a connection? On the philosophic ...”

“... and motifs, parallels with Greek mythology or the Old Testament, quotations from Shakespeare or Dante, echoes of Mozart, a commentary on some relevant symphony or sculpture – bits of significance all over the place. The reviewer, half or three-quarters baffled, can take refuge in the thought that it is not for him to give the whole show away. To explain ...”

“... floats in a Mardi Gras parade. He was convinced he had accomplished something comparable to Dante or Shakespeare, and kept his curtains closed while writing, believing the rays of brilliance flying from the pages would disturb the neighbours and might even reach as far as China. Devastated by the lack of attention La Doublure received on publication (he ...”

“... as he was. Burne-Jones, escaping to London, entered into a star-struck pseudo-apprenticeship under Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for whom, he later said, he would willingly have ‘been chopped up’. The oddness and severe limits of this artistic education, which Elizabeth Prettejohn emphasises in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Burne-Jones’s work at ...”

“... Origo’s account of Datini’s activities, one will learn more, and more that is important, from Dante. It follows from Origo’s vain assignment to recreate an ‘age’ that, paradoxically, she is eager to discern the ‘timeless’. Timeless, so it would appear, is something that she calls ‘the Tuscan mind’, but also more universal things. She remarks ...”

“... all frame their ‘disclosures’ in relation to a literary model (the Odyssey in Meadowlands, Dante in Vita Nova and Shakespeare in The Seven Ages), thus signalling the contrived or artful character of these putatively expressive poems. To Glück, the ‘confessional’ mode is odious. In ‘Education of the Poet’, a brief literary ...”

“... a hypothetical academic discipline structured around an international ‘supercanon’ of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton and Goethe. Aware of the fatuousness of treating a single discipline in isolation, Collini traces the emergence of English in the interplay between academic subjects. The gradual ebbing of classics – once synonymous with ...”

“... keeping her distance from organised religion. ‘Ah! If you were only like Miss Barbara Smith!’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his pious and retiring sister Christina. She must have shuddered at the thought. Ironically, however, Barbara owed her extraordinary confidence and energy to her father. Bessie Parkes, her lifelong friend, recalled with ...”

“... devoid of any real interest is the picture she paints of the writer and his work. Her broodings on Dante are of the same order. Her many volumes of memoirs are shallow, self-centred, capricious and repetitive. Ocampo’s true vocation, and no doubt one at which she would have excelled, was the stage. Her parents frustrated her acting career, and Victoria the ...”