“... And yet Emerson wants more, even if he cannot quite name the desire: Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer ...”

“... at the end of The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), ‘is our beloved codex’: We may not see it, as Dante did, in perfect order, gathered by love into one volume, but we do, living as reading, like to think of it as a place where we can travel back and forth at will, divining congruences, conjunctions, opposites; extracting secrets from its secrecy, making ...”

“... In spite of her virulence, the figure of Medea commands our attention – and our sympathy. Dante put Jason in the Inferno for his treatment of her and few since have objected. The myth was already old when Homer was writing; the audience at Euripides’ first production in 431 BCE didn’t need to be told her back-story when she stepped onto the ...”

“... like an ingenious form of torment for the souls of wastrels. No need to sick the dogs on them, as Dante did: just stick them in a ditch, knee-deep in mud for eternity, and surround them with old betting slips. The discovery of a few modern era courtyards was a minor triumph. Even so, the explanatory panels that went up late in the day, as the dig was drawing ...”

“... only English poet noted in the Elegies, among Hölderlin, Goethe, Denis Saurat, Sorley MacLean, Dante and Ossian. Blake had written, ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau’; Henderson: Fuck on, fuck on, Verlaine, Rimbaud You blissful buggers; fuck again – For on my heart as on the town The small drops of your poems rain. Yes, he would of course ...”

“... Hunt had been far too familiar with a great poet, translating a sublime and tragic episode from Dante into his own jauntily modern terms, but that in doing so he had pandered to the tastes – and vanities – of a specifically Cockney readership, a readership Lockhart imagined to be made up of semi-educated and fashion-obsessed grotesques. Much of this was ...”

“... world’. With devastating mischief – failures of alchemy indeed – Borges suggests Homer and Dante may have reached the same insight. Borges’s poem ‘El Otro Tigre’/‘The Other Tiger’ concerns the beast that is not in the poem, that couldn’t be in the poem because it is not made of words or tropes and because even the act of naming it turns it ...”

“... In the home of his grandfather in Constantinople he continued his study of languages and read Dante in the original. More important, he began to read modern Greek poetry and to develop his lifelong interest in Byzantine and Hellenic history, from which the material for many of his poems was drawn. Among the poets in that tradition, he particularly admired ...”

“... tense pages – meticulously crafted, an intricate, many-storeyed structure that draws on Genesis, Dante, the Faust legend, Buddhism, the Kabbalah, astrology and black magic to raise the significance of its anti-hero’s tragedy from a purely personal to a universal level, to that of ‘open myth’. ‘It is hot music,’ Lowry protested, ‘a poem, a song, a ...”

“... Paradise Lost was influenced less by native examples than by classical and Italian ones: Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto. Perhaps the most serious limitation of Kerrigan’s perspective is that for a great many early modern anglophone writers, the other parts of the archipelago ultimately mattered less than the rest of the civilised world. A list of ...”

“... allowed for the ground to ‘settle’.The inscription on the headstone was to be a line from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Cast down the seed of weeping, and attend.’ With these words Beatrice checks Dante, not long after the chilling moment when she asks him how he dares to enter the Earthly Paradise, since that is a ...”

“... The seven and later eight liturgical hours of each day began with Matins at around 2 a.m. – for Dante the time of ‘resplendent lights before the dawn’ – and ended with Compline around 8 p.m. The intervals changed with the available daylight over the year, devotional time wrapped inside natural time. Monks and hermits were advised to pay careful ...”

“... that they believed necessary to make a better world.Macaulay was writing in 1824, in an essay on Dante. He wasn’t born at the time of the revolution. Grégoire, who supported the trial but opposed the execution of Louis XVI, is today most famous for his speech to the French Convention in 1794 in which he coined the term ‘vandalisme’ and appealed for ...”

“... in the foreground. Among many disturbing illustrations which stay in the mind is ‘A scene from Dante as the Argentine troops moved out of Stanley huddle on the road to the airport, trying to keep warm by burning any rubbish they can find. The Antarctic wind scythed in over the water and it was remarkable nobody died of exposure.’ Armed Forces and the ...”

“... bust of Omeros and Seven Seas appears to the narrator in a dream-vision and – a Virgil to his Dante – leads him around St Lucia to its volcanic crater, Soufrière. In the ‘lava of the Malebolge’ he’s shown the ‘traitors’ who, in elected office, saw the land as views for hotels and elevated into waiters the sons of others, while their own ...”