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“... and significant whole, nor the work of a poet who repays as much close study as Sophocles, Dante or Shakespeare. Book XXIV starts after Achilles has avenged his beloved friend Patroclus by killing Hector, and has dragged Hector’s body round the tomb of his friend, having threatened earlier to throw it to the dogs. The gods decide that Hector’s ...”

“... winds of ‘All creatures of our God and King’. The negative, as Eliot has it in his essay on Dante in The Sacred Wood, ‘is the more importunate’. Which perhaps explains why Walcott’s poetry remains a challenge to taste: either his work is too rich, or our palettes are too ...”

“... How the Danish nobleman Brahe or, rather, Tycho – his fame was so great in his time that, like Dante and Galileo, he is known in ours by his first name – came to expire of a burst bladder in Prague is explained, along with much else, by John Robert Christianson. The centre of gravity of Tycho’s Island is Danish social history: in irresistible ...”

“... of responsibility, putting the slightest link on a par with the most obvious crime. And where Dante used this verse scheme’s endlessness for his voyage into the eternal, here, as the next verse is generated in the middle of the previous one for an unbroken 58 pages, the terza rima works to underline colonialism’s unstoppable chain of ...”

“... in the alternative allegation that it was a ‘poet’s fable’. This is not a reference to Dante, who does not appear in the controversy, but to the generally fabulous character it shares with much other pre-Reformation religion. There follows, naturally, a chapter on the multiplicity of purgatorial images and stories of the same ...”

“... through democracy: Gregorio has lost faith in activism. One night, at a meeting of Carol’s Dante reading group, Gregorio meets Vin, a dishevelled, computer-savvy fiftysomething who secretly houses the country’s largest anarchist archive. Vin claims never to have paid income tax and has a series of fake IDs that allow him access to the libraries of ...”

“... the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, that little football scholarship guy from Lowell, Massachusetts, had wanted his name on the wall too. Yes he did. A few years after his appearance on the Steve Allen ...”

“... complexion. Her father, Swynfen Jervis, was a country gentleman, a Radical MP and scholar; both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti knew the family, where their father had also been a tutor. Agnes was the eldest child; she lost her mother young and had two stepmothers. Rossetti, a boy of 12 when he knew her, admired her looks and her good nature; she was ...”

“... of astrological discourse. It is a world perhaps more recognisable to us than those of Aquinas, Dante and Kepler, despite modern reverence for their achievements and disciplines. On more than one occasion in Duke Humfrey’s Library in Oxford I have lifted my eyes from an immersion in astrological casebook and manuscripts to experience a jolt as I reenter ...”

“... with each other,’ and The Tenor replies, ‘It is always the way when we love an artist. We say Dante. We say Michelangelo. We say Elvis.’ Startled, Lucchesi says, ‘You’ve read me, too?!’ The artistic director, in full tumescence now, trots out front to announce the replacement for the Tenor. The Tenor says, ‘Why not? The fetching flight attendant ...”

“... where Heaney is consonantal, guttural and purposefully rough. Heaney’s recent excursion into Dante was unexpected, but it is no surprise to find that Mahon’s new poem ‘The Poet in Residence’ (he was resident poet at the New University of Ulster for a couple of years) is a version of Corbière’s ‘Le Poète Contumace’. Fascination with High ...”

“... the poetic art and ‘in the small/Rooms of stanzas’. That phrase comes from ‘Mandelstam, on Dante’, a poem in four parts, in which one poet imagines another writing poems about a third. Rhyme, you once said, only   Points it up, tags it, the blue Cabinet-making of Heaven   And Earth, the elegant joints All of them flush as given! ‘The Stopping ...”

“... generation (like Moses on Pisgah) or the life in heaven which is to be obtained after death (like Dante). One might at first think the second only was meant, but Marina, after all, was a real daughter; is now at sea, like himself, rather than already in the Promised Land; and is to live ‘in a world of time beyond me’, which can scarcely be a description ...”

“... didn’t have this trust in the other side of reason. It’s as if Lewis Carroll rather than, say, Dante were the measure of the world we have lost – the mood seems later because it is less nostalgic. The modern interest in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing ...”

“... Butler ‘did more than either of the other two to help me look at life the way I do’. He named Dante, Gibbon and Tolstoy the greatest of writers and repeatedly expressed his love for War and Peace. He also spoke with reverence of Dostoevsky, on whom he comments with real fervour. More generally, he spoke of three generations of significant novelists, the ...”