“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... it all, desire of oblivion runs.’ Death as desired ease is worded by quotations from Dante Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Swift, Hardy, Housman and Edward Thomas. But none of the quotations is evidence that their authors maintained a conviction in favour of oblivion; above it all, no such desire runs. The passages Ricks quotes are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interest in translating Classical and European poetry into Irish English. To translate Tibullus, Dante, Nerval and Apollinaire is to offer glimpses of a new landscape, a fresh cultural initiative which may in time be embodied formally and institutionally. Again, translation can be seen as an ambitious type of Neoclassicism which helps to form conscience. The ...”

“... all, Ficino’s ideas are ‘themselves closely related’ to a tradition ‘starting forward from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’. The trouble is, of course, that we know very little about what Michelangelo read: Summers is painfully aware of this. It is also hard to be sure of what he said. Condivi’s biography is a valuable source and clearly reflects ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the medieval Christian universe, there wasn’t much room for alien civilisation – the cosmos of Dante and Aquinas had man at the centre, surrounded by the more perfect spheres of Heaven. The Copernican revolution changed all that. Even before it was clear that the Sun was a star like other stars, and that the galaxy was just part of a universe of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”