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“... quotations that suggest high standards (Mann, Conrad, Forster, Shakespeare, both Eliots, Colette, Dante, James, Ibsen, Shaw, Proust, Shelley, Burke, Milton) her sentences are generally lethargic. Here’s some of Sylvie’s back story: ‘They sank into genteel and well-mannered poverty. Sylvie’s mother grew pale and uninteresting, larks soared no more for ...”

“... continues the serial poems begun in earlier volumes and includes suites dedicated to Thom Gunn, Dante and the metaphysical poets. ‘Passages 36’, a 1971 poem, records Levertov’s appearance in an early morning dream. The poem starts by suggesting a return to another dream, Duncan’s childhood vision of Atlantis: ‘I know but part of it and that but ...”

“... Wilde’s Salome, Shaw’s Man and Superman were bought in 1949. These were followed by Dante, The Greeks by Kitto, Spinoza by Stuart Hampshire, Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist, all the way to Sophocles and Rousseau in 1953. A very European selection. Also on the shelf is Three to Get Married, by Bishop Sheen. I thought this was about a ménage à ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... wrote down everything the great man said over meals, so a son kept the minutes for the dead. Dante, it seems, congratulated Victor on his poetry. Jesus Christ conceded that the French genius’s new religion would replace his own. Juliette Drouet, arguably Hugo’s first disciple, addressed her unfaithful lover in daily letters as ‘my Christ’.Bellos ...”

“... for revealing how Shakespeare ‘leads us to the same point’ as the ‘Catholic philosophy of Dante, with its stern judgment of morals’. Chesterton’s influence endured. In Knight’s 1948 book Christ and Nietzsche, he wrote that when we judge the Third Reich ‘we should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the poem, from line to entirety, more precise. Allegiances too, are more discreetly signalled: to Dante, Villon, Chapman’s Homer, among others; to the King James Bible and, in ‘The Spoils’, his last big poem before ‘Briggflatts’, to an array of Arabic, Jewish and Persian materials – Bunting served in Persia during the war and later became the ...”

“... as a reader. The intensity of that experience puts more fitful readers to shame. ‘I am reading Dante in Italian for the first time. O what force!’ The fusion of his literary and emotional experience is most baldly revealed in a sequence of diary entries for a week in February 1851 when he was courting his future wife, Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’), in the face ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Verdenal,’ Eliot’s inscription runs, ‘mort aux Dardanelles,’ followed by an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Or puoi la quantitate/comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,/quando dismento nostra vanitate,/trattando l’ombre come cosa salda’ (‘Now can you understand the quantity of love that warms me towards you, so that I forget our ...”

“... persons rather than the works of Ford’s family circle. James’s deduction from the fact that Dante Gabriel Rossetti once received him at tea-time in what he thought was a dressing-gown is that the eminent artist had been ‘disgusting in his habits, never took baths, and was insupportably lecherous’. What’s worse, Rossetti habitually devoured ...”

“... 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 ...”