In Praise of Vagueness

Richard Poirier, 14 December 1995

Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction 
by Tony Tanner.
Georgia, 92 pp., £20.50, May 1995, 9780820316895
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“... adventurousness in the world, their healthy-minded attitudes, or, as he says in commending Dante and Wordsworth, for their ‘tonic and consoling power’. Early on, in Principles, he engages in a bizarre diatribe against ‘the habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going ... even the habit of excessive indulgence in music’, aside from ...”

Genius in Its Pure State

Mark Ford, 22 May 1997

“... glory would one day outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon, that he felt himself the equal of Dante and Shakespeare. His final testament more modestly hopes that, ‘faute de mieux’, his books may one day gain some measure of posthumous recognition. It was while composing La Doublure, which he always believed to be his ultimate masterpiece, that Roussel ...”

Always the Bridesmaid

Terry Castle: Sappho, 30 September 1999

Victorian Sappho 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 278 pp., £40, May 1999, 0 691 05918 7
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“... by the licentiousness of her subject-matter, put her books to the torch in 380 AD.) Neither Dante nor Chaucer refers to her. Only with the recovery and translation of certain ancient texts in the Renaissance – Longinus’ On the Sublime, for example, in which the famous and much-admired Fragment 31 (‘He seems to me equal to the gods’) appears as a ...”

Indigo, Cyanine, Beryl

Helen Vendler: Jorie Graham’s Daring, 23 January 2003

Never 
by Jorie Graham.
Carcanet, 112 pp., £9.95, September 2002, 1 85754 621 0
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“... physical world and of human identity. She has learned from both classic and modern masters from Dante to Bishop, and her linguistic resource, especially in description, is astonishing. In the long sequences, she risks everything, and perhaps cannot always keep the several parts from flying apart – but the wildness of the risk is itself exhilarating to ...”

Bile, Blood, Bilge, Mulch

Daniel Soar: What’s got into Martin Amis?, 4 January 2007

House of Meetings 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 198 pp., £15.99, September 2006, 0 224 07609 4
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“... between victims and perpetrators of violence, and to deal with them accordingly. Amis isn’t Dante. There are no heroic, reasonably virtuous political dissidents among the denizens of his Arctic inferno. Instead, there is an endless round of indiscriminate tortures, indiscriminately administered: those justly and Islamofascistically severed hands, those ...”

Go for it, losers

David Trotter: Werner Herzog’s Visions, 30 November 2023

Every Man for Himself and God against All 
by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Bodley Head, 355 pp., £25, October, 978 1 84792 724 8
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“... the evidence of destruction. Relishing the palpable hostility, he proceeded to claim Dante, Goya, Breughel and Bosch as his models, before concluding with the observation that ‘You cretins are all wrong.’ That was a long time ago, but testiness remains in his repertoire. To ‘pedantic theoreticians’ scanning Bad Lieutenant (2009) for ...”

Don’t abandon me

Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006

Borges: A Life 
by Edwin Williamson.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, August 2005, 0 14 024657 6
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“... death; his dreadful job with seven or eight hours a day free to do nothing; his reading of Dante while travelling on the tram to and from work – or perhaps more importantly his claim to have done so; the outbreak of war and his deep opposition to the Nazi and Peronist regimes; his rejection by a woman with whom he had fallen in love; his need to ...”

See you in hell, punk

Thomas Jones: Kai su, Brutus, 6 December 2018

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator 
by Kathryn Tempest.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 300 18009 1
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“... there has been plenty of disagreement over the centuries as to the moral worth of his principles. Dante envisioned Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell, being chewed on for all eternity in two of Satan’s three mouths, either side of Judas Iscariot. Michelangelo’s bust of Brutus was probably commissioned by Donato Giannotti, a committed ...”

Benign Promiscuity

Clair Wills: Molly Keane’s Bad Behaviour, 18 March 2021

Good Behaviour 
by Molly Keane.
NYRB, 291 pp., £12, May, 978 1 68137 529 8
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“... her study working on More Songs from the Glens of Antrim and a set of translations from Italian (Dante, Leopardi, Tasso, D’Annunzio). It could hardly have been less of a ‘hunt ball’ atmosphere. Keane refused to go to boarding school in England, as her siblings did, insisting on staying at home, an unwelcome intrusion into the lives of her reclusive ...”

The Shoreham Gang

Seamus Perry: Samuel Palmer, 5 April 2012

Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer 
by Rachel Campbell-Johnston.
Bloomsbury, 382 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 7475 9587 8
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“... paintings so as to improve it. Despite being Blake’s patron (he commissioned a series of Dante illustrations that were left unfinished on Blake’s death) he was splendidly unmoved by the mystic impulses of the Ancients. On one occasion he listened to Calvert describing one of his enchanted pictures: ‘These are God’s fields, this is God’s ...”

The Case of Agatha Christie

John Lanchester, 20 December 2018

“... out wanting to be a poet and in the latter part of her career dedicated years to translating Dante.) By the same token, however, the high style means that there is more to date, and a high risk of becoming mannered or obsolete. What I would say is that there’s more to ‘go off’. A greater percentage of writerliness involves a higher risk of ...”

Love-of-One’s-Life Department

Terry Castle: The lesbian scarcity economy, 21 October 2004

Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks 
by Diana Souhami.
Weidenfeld, 224 pp., £18.99, July 2004, 9780297643869
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“... that would destroy the old class structures and consign to oblivion the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch, Galileo, Michelangelo and herself. Now Barney had Fascist leanings too – most of the Left Bank women did – but, no doubt thanks to superior social skills, also knew what a right-wing rich lady needed to do when the going got tough. As soon ...”

Wigging In

Matthew Bevis: On James Schuyler, 23 April 2026

A Day like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 
by Nathan Kernan.
FSG, 503 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 0 374 28117 5
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“... beneath them. His own style was fed by a curious amalgam of classical and contemporary influences: Dante and Leopardi, whom he translated; Pasternak, who ‘has meant more to us than any American poet’; Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese (Tu Fu in particular); Apollinaire, whose ‘Hôtel’ was one of his favourite poems. What comes out of this ...”

When the beam of light has gone

Peter Wollen: Godard Turns Over, 17 September 1998

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard 
by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
SUNY, 290 pp., £17.99, March 1997, 0 7914 3285 8
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Speaking about Godard 
by Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki.
New York, 256 pp., $55, July 1998, 0 8147 8066 0
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“... Vague, as Kaja Silverman notes, ‘virtually every line is a quotation, from sources as diverse as Dante, Proust, Chandler, Schiller, de Rougemont, Marx, Hemingway, Lacan, and Rimbaud’. But Wheeler Dixon, like many critics, remarks that the beauty of the landscape in Nouvelle Vague seems more important than the actions of the characters, for whom, as he puts ...”

Feast of St Thomas

Frank Kermode, 29 September 1988

Eliot’s New Life 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Oxford, 356 pp., £15, September 1988, 0 19 811727 2
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The Letters of T.S. Eliot 
edited by Valerie Eliot.
Faber, 618 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 571 13621 4
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The Poetics of Impersonality 
by Maud Ellmann.
Harvester, 207 pp., £32.50, January 1988, 0 7108 0463 6
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T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism 
by Richard Shusterman.
Duckworth, 236 pp., £19.95, February 1988, 0 7156 2187 4
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‘The Men of 1914’: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism 
by Erik Svarny.
Open University, 268 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 335 09019 2
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Eliot, Joyce and Company 
by Stanley Sultan.
Oxford, 326 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 19 504880 6
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The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot 
by Robert Crawford.
Oxford, 251 pp., £25, December 1987, 9780198128694
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T.S. Eliot: The Poems 
by Martin Scofield.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 30147 5
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“... implications. But one ought to reflect that among the poet’s preferred models are Aristotle and Dante, Pascal and Baudelaire; impersonality and intelligence, as he understood them, are the achievement of heroic personalities, and it is hard to see that they necessarily imply political wickedness. What Eliot himself says about the topic in ‘The Perfect ...”