Search Results

“... the beginning.’ He often underlines such good things.) There is an impressive chapter on Dante, who was certainly remembering Horace when he began his poem in the ‘middle way’ of his own life. Dante, like Virgil, had an imperial cause, but unlike Virgil’s it was a lost one. What happens in his poem is that ...”

“... late Henrician period), or an octave and a sestet (the Petrarchan form, actually found as early as Dante), or even a set of seven couplets. Within each of these variations there may be further variations: do the quatrains hide a couplet within them (abba) or do they make up a couplet of rhymes (abab)? Should ‘a’ and ‘b’ rhymes dominate the octave, or ...”

“... Donatus’ Life of Virgil, which Milton would have read as a student, and Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, which he owned and, as we can tell from his annotations, read with some attention. Virgil was proof that a great poet needed to spend years acquiring adequate knowledge and rhetorical skill; he was also the model for Milton’s belief that to be a poet ...”

“... contact with the outside world, admiring relatives to pet them and their mother to educate them. Dante Gabriel and Christina were the ‘storms’of the family, and, when in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial ...”

“... War fought in the near distance – is home to the blind salamander and the devil bat. They say Dante in exile visited and first dreamed up hell down here – they forget he spent his youth in ...”

“... a notorious sensualist. A few sentences later Pater widens the allusion: ‘For [Plato], as for Dante, in the impassioned glow of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused together.’ The words here are identical to those used by Pater in an earlier essay on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A superficial ...”

“... Whatever you like, only spare us the details of when You were struck by your kinship with Dante and Virgil. And don’t feel obliged to remind us just now What it was Robert Lowell appeared to be saying – You’d read him the poem you mean to read us – When the doors of the lift he was in and you weren’t Began closing. Just leave us the screams ...”

“... baggage it seems to be carrying can be discarded as irrelevant. A characteristic judgment: ‘Dante was brazen, aggressive, prideful, and audacious beyond all poets, before or since. He imposed his vision on Eternity and he has very little in common with the flock of his piously learned exegetes. If it is all in Augustine or in Thomas Aquinas, then let us ...”

“... In 1929, in his essay on Dante, T.S. Eliot wrote: But the question of what Dante ‘believed’ is always relevant. It would not matter, if the world were divided between those persons who are capable of taking poetry simply for what it is and those who cannot take it at all; if so, there would be no need to talk about this question to the former and no use in talking about it to the latter ...”

“... the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence.’ (He means ‘they must be like Dante.’) And ‘he had the finest ear of any English poet since Milton’ – an opinion that loses warmth when one recalls what Eliot said elsewhere about Milton. (Having a fine ear is not enough.) When Eliot attends to Tennysonian detail, for instance in ...”

“... small bends which history makes In the lanes of scarcely-visited villages. True, this one is in Dante, and that oleander-screened wall You take for the headquarters of the carabinieri Might be an out-station of the Piccolomini, If only you could remember which is which Among the towers that mark the lesions of the sky. Siena is as far away as London: life ...”

“... not necessarily a disadvantage for a writer to be childish and shameless. In his writing, I mean. Dante was a great genius and the master of a highly elaborated theology and cosmogony. Among the tasks to which he put his gifts was that of inventing an inferno in which he inflicted hideous punishments on persons who had thwarted and oppressed him in earlier ...”

“... crowns’ – of early Italian literature. There was a brief period when all three were alive: Dante died in 1321, when Petrarch was 17 and Boccaccio eight; the younger writers worked in his shadow. They were all Florentine, and in the phrase’s first coinage they were the ‘three crowns of Florence’. This was both a statement of civic pride ...”

“... I take Nuttall’s point to be that our age differs from that of Herbert, or Milton, or Dante, or St John the Evangelist (his chief subjects, in order of appearance), in that the matter would in earlier times have been taken for granted as a simple truth, and would not have required a Borgesian elaboration to bring it out. God the reader, if you ...”

“... by his nails. Nearby, frogs are raping women and lizards are biting at people’s thighs. As Dante was being baptised here seven hundred and forty years ago, his baby eyes might have tried to focus on this scene. Ghastly nightmares, diseased fantasies ... Never mind, reassurance is at hand. A yard or two away sits Christ the Judge. The monsters have ...”