“... structured story), I wish I had defended an approach to making art which can claim Bach, Dante and Joyce among its dupes. There is an element of arbitrariness in every artistic choice. The reason that (say) Beethoven’s Fifth is in C can never be as strong as the reason (say) water boils and freezes at particular temperatures. Formalism welcomes ...”

“... chunks of traditional Italian culture: her former culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, hailed Dante as the father of right-wing thought. Since coming to power Meloni has made aggressive use of decrees and votes of confidence to keep members of her coalition in line. But she has also promoted a long-standing goal of the MSI and the AN: the introduction of ...”

“... of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.’ Moreover, Eliot was sceptical about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary ...”

“... ass’. His letters now begin to go on about usury, and the dissociation of sensibility between Dante and the Impressionists. With the appearance of The Mechanical Bride McLuhan, at forty, was set on a course he never changed. It treats of advertising, comic strips and so on, with the intention of showing us how we are shaped by these and other modern media ...”

“... worth noting that Santayana got his full measure of experience. He understood Whitman as well as Dante. But he refused participation in life for his own special reasons, and we should be cautious in accepting his renunciation without considering its human sources, along with its philosophical justifications. Santayana thought of himself as detached in some ...”

“... no doubt looking for a design of Beardsley’s, pitched on Blake’s Anteus Setting Virgil and Dante upon the Verge of Cocytus as grounds for refusal, and when Arthur Symons pointed out that Blake was considered “a very spiritual artist”, replied: “Oh, Mr Symons, you must remember that we have an audience of young ladies as well as an audience of ...”

“... when Modernist rewritings of the classics (Ulysses, Eliot’s bits and pieces of Spenser and Dante) often served as entry points to new readers. What is Post-Modern here is Zeitlin’s sense (following Lyotard, Jameson and Baudrillard) that this literary enfilade produces a ‘bottomless hierarchy of texts … an intertextual ...”

“... In the fifth circle of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet and his guide Beatrice encounter the spirit of his Florentine Crusading ancestor Cacciaguida. Together they discourse on the contrasts between Florence as it is now and as Cacciaguida knew it, in the mid-12th century. The city then was only a fifth of its present compass, Cacciaguida tells them ...”

“... presumably, the Lord’s) as a result of her loving subjection. As Thomist in its way as Dante, the poem tries to insist that passion is a precondition of the servitude which is founded on voluntary submission. And the most anguished moments in the poem derive from a recognition, hard and honest at once, that this form of service is all but ...”

“... and which are not particularly prized today, except by cognoscenti: the Gran Mass (1856); the Dante Symphony and Faust Symphony (1857); the Christus oratorio (1866); and very late, nearly atonal piano music, including Nuages gris (1881) and La Lugubre gondola (1882). And he is particularly expansive on – and appreciative of – thematic ...”

“... and fall were devoted to learning Italian, or just enough Italian, to get profitably through Dante in the original with the help of a crib. He wasn’t big on poetry in translation. I was a prime beneficiary of Thom’s perspicacity over the years, but so were thousands of students at Berkeley over his forty years or so of teaching there. I tried to get ...”

“... Tristan with its ‘Liebestod’; the fana’ or annihilation-in-God of the Sufi poets; and Dante’s beyond-the-grave vision of Beatrice. Great artistic meditations on impossibility, so it appears, are our best consolation for the distinctly bad lot our brains have landed us with. Splendours is both swankily cultured – our FRS hobnobs with Herbert ...”

“... does, from taking seriously what is being talked about by Guinicelli and Cavalcanti as well as Dante. But how was any of this to be brought to bear on the condition of being an American in the 1930s? That was Pound’s problem, and it was no good telling him that there couldn’t be a connection, for the connection was there, in him: he was both a devotee ...”

“... a Clive James feature in a colour mag to find himself confronted by names such as Contini, Croce, Dante and Hofmannsthal. This is not to say that James’s popular and populist side is not important to him: only that he has never seen any reason why a chat-show host and TV annotator should not also be a serious essayist, novelist and poet. His marginalia on ...”

“... Shelley was ‘the one English poet of the 19th century who could even have begun to follow’ in Dante’s footsteps, which sets the level of praise remarkably high. The poem is Shelley’s version of Hell, in which all the flickering uncertainties of the world of appearance evoked in the earlier poems have become an imprisoning nightmare of ...”