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“... 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 ...”

“... that few people had read as much and as intelligently. Marx learned Italian from reading Dante and Machiavelli, Spanish from studying Cervantes and Calderón, and Russian from reading Pushkin. He was thus one of the earliest practitioners of Goethe’s concept of world literature, an idea that has produced some of the finest critical writing of our ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Apocalypse of Peter, an apocryphal text from perhaps the early second century, the damned, as in Dante, receive bespoke punishments: blasphemers hang by their tongues, adulterers by their genitals and so on. The history of this iconography, Dante notwithstanding (and Casey is a subtle and admiring analyst of the ...”

“... fund of feeling ... The content of his work ... cannot be talked about like the doctrines of Dante or the mental machinery of Blake ... It is not to be found in any book or set of books. Only in a very limited way can Mr Pound be discussed as it is necessary to discuss, say, Yeats: with reference to what is implicit and still to be said under the surface ...”

“... but everything that bears on colour in medieval Latin and Byzantine theology, for example, or in Dante, or in anyone else. We read, for instance, that: ‘What strikes the casual [sic] reader most about this passage is Dante’s self-conscious choice of the French term, alluminar (his version of enluminer), rather than the ...”

“... role’, but with a new despondency. He enlists the assistance of other artists, from Dante to James Joyce, and yearns guiltily for the ‘clumps’ and ‘clunks’ and ‘clogs’ of his most youthful verses. Not so guiltily, though, that he cannot welcome some jeering Joycean advice: ‘Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s ...”

“... reputation as a ‘serious’ composer primarily stands: the B minor Piano Sonata, the Faust and Dante symphonies, most of the symphonic poems. Walker attempts to describe the nature and quality of a handful of these works, but, unfortunately, matters of critical judgment remain on the margins of his book. What is more, in the few works he considers in ...”

“... believe in intellect in the sense in which Proust uses the word here, which is the sense in which Dante used it – though I distrust the term ‘intellectuals’ when it is used today to mean public figures who can be induced to sign manifestos. Proust qualifies religion with the precaution ‘as if’ – as if there were another world with such values. A ...”

“... exercise in canon-formation on the large scale, surveying as it does the Yahwist, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, and moving into our own century, where the light falls on Freud, Kafka and Beckett. What holds these diverse writers together is their ‘strength’, which refers less frequently now to their revisionary powers than it does ...”

“... was); it was assumed that, like a 19th-century Ottoman sultan, he had a French mother; and Dante placed him among the Noble Pagans in Limbo. His image was enshrined, like those of Robin Hood, Louis XI and Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott. In the 20th century, he has inspired that most typical of modern accolades, the debunking biography. Newby’s book ...”

“... a gifted poetess: Sue’s such a doll she’d make Professor Carey Say that she wrote like Dante Alighieri. Sue’s bubble reputation having popped Her teachers must wipe soap out of their eyes, But one would hate to see those young wings cropped Merely because her mentors were not wise. If that compulsive gush of hers is stopped It ought to be because ...”

“... design. The toils and the wiles of the hero must go on beyond his return home. (Neither did Dante or Tennyson, for whom Odysseus was above all the restless inquirer, let him stay put at home after his return and triumph.) This is the burden of Tiresias’s prophecy in Book 11, which Odysseus recalls after he and his wife have come together: he has ...”

“... of art, which exists for others. The dream-like, as practised by Yeats, not to mention Bunyan and Dante, is of course quite a different matter. Muir had a curious and dramatic experience over dreams. At a time when he was under analysis, he was overwhelmed by a flood of inspiring and disturbing mythological dreams. They were waking dreams, which he could ...”