“... entertainers in the direction of Europe. Eliot’s notion of a coherence which somehow links Dante and Laforgue with Shakespeare and Donne is, of course, a vulgar transatlantic fiction. Derived from wishful thinking and a grab-bag of Harvard survey courses, it led him to extraordinary delusions about confections called tradition, sensibility and ...”

“... the house in which Paul had lived in Tarsus. Since the detailed geography of heaven and hell, pace Dante, is still little known, I make few apologies for recounting what this apocryphal Paul tells us. Heaven has golden gates, with golden pillars inscribed in gold with the names and faces of the righteous few. There are angels with shining faces, and loins girt ...”

“... first decade of the 14th century, the age of Duccio, Giovanni Pisano, and above all of Giotto and Dante. Holmes’s aim is not to explain this achievement (an enterprise he criticises as reductionist) but to make it more intelligible by describing its social environment. This environment includes the rise of the Franciscans in Central Italy as well as the ...”

“... friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante Gabriel Rossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has moments of blazing eloquence. At his first meeting with Lucinda, on a ship to Australia, he is swept away by a Pascalian vision: We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the ...”

“... on the one hand this is the voice of an insular sensibility that preferred Langland to Dante, on the other hand this insularity, recognising Church-Latin and Brythonic Welsh as tongues of the insula along with Middle English, is more notable for what it disconcertingly invites in than what it comfortably shuts out.’ ‘Disconcertingly ...”

“... dark shirts are taking up the width of the sidewalk with their excited movements.’ The Italy of Dante and the Vatican is also evoked, so that we may sympathise with Sir Julius Stein – a visitor from Britain, ‘his feet burning, his mind dazed by the patter of the guide so that he now confused Julius Caesar with Pope Julius II’. The characters in the ...”

“... language were one, whose writing attained the fullness and presence of speech. To the pantheon of Dante and Shelley, Browning added Elizabeth Barrett. ‘You speak out, you,’ he announced in his second letter to her, ‘– I only make men – women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in ...”

“... see how we can assert that it is a higher and fuller form than that used by Homer or that used by Dante. Even the most capacious of the ancient genres, epic and tragedy, are vantage-points from which certain things – and only certain things – can be seen and shown; other vantage-points, those of epigram or comedy (or lyric), are living reminders that the ...”

“... imagination and in painting. Another instance is Purgatory, familiar to the theologians and Dante, but having no popular imaginative acceptance until the 16th century; prayers for the souls in Purgatory, like the Mass for the Dead, are a relatively late innovation. The notion that one needs the help of intercessors at the time of judgment also appears ...”

“... after taking courses which included some comparative literature and Grandgent’s course on Dante. Even then, ‘Harvard had a long tradition of emphasis on writing, especially creative writing,’ and students ‘were encouraged to write verse and fiction as well as good expository prose’. We are told – for what poet’s biography now would be ...”

“... and lecturing all over the States, intoxicating himself and his audience with large thoughts about Dante, Dostoevsky and Homer, while contrasting his subject-matter with his environment – years before he began forcing his physical and spiritual experiences into novels of British life. What happens in New York is that Richard takes up with an old flame, a ...”

“... moving rapidly back and forth between real and imaginary, present and past. Just as Virgil urges Dante to keep moving when ‘ghastly wounds’ threaten to ‘intoxicate [his] eyes’ in the Inferno, so Tišma never settles for too long on the violence that wrenched these lives apart. At one point in The Use of Man (1976), Vera, an Auschwitz survivor, is ...”

“... talents, which are in any case so formidable that he needs a big-time author (Sophocles, Virgil, Dante) who will give him a run for his money. In his introduction, in a typical piece of lushly over-fanciful Heaneyspeak, he writes of the poem as having its keel ‘deeply set in the element of sensation while the mind’s lookout sways metrically and ...”

“... while devils plummet down like Lucifer or, like Milton’s Satan, plane over Pandemonium. In Dante’s Inferno the serpentine Gerione, a monster with the counterfeit face of a beautiful man and a sting in his scorpion tail, carries Dante and Virgil down to hell on his back. Gustave Doré gave him the wings of a giant ...”

“... quirky, archaising versions, Pound favoured the verse of the bellicose Bertran de Born (whom Dante condemned to hell as a fomentor of strife) and the virtuosic Arnaut Daniel (Dante’s miglior fabbro or ‘better craftsman’ – a compliment T.S. Eliot borrowed in dedicating The Waste Land to Pound). Despite moments ...”