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“... tense pages – meticulously crafted, an intricate, many-storeyed structure that draws on Genesis, Dante, the Faust legend, Buddhism, the Kabbalah, astrology and black magic to raise the significance of its anti-hero’s tragedy from a purely personal to a universal level, to that of ‘open myth’. ‘It is hot music,’ Lowry protested, ‘a poem, a song, a ...”

“... Paradise Lost was influenced less by native examples than by classical and Italian ones: Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto. Perhaps the most serious limitation of Kerrigan’s perspective is that for a great many early modern anglophone writers, the other parts of the archipelago ultimately mattered less than the rest of the civilised world. A list of ...”

“... allowed for the ground to ‘settle’.The inscription on the headstone was to be a line from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Cast down the seed of weeping, and attend.’ With these words Beatrice checks Dante, not long after the chilling moment when she asks him how he dares to enter the Earthly Paradise, since that is a ...”

“... The seven and later eight liturgical hours of each day began with Matins at around 2 a.m. – for Dante the time of ‘resplendent lights before the dawn’ – and ended with Compline around 8 p.m. The intervals changed with the available daylight over the year, devotional time wrapped inside natural time. Monks and hermits were advised to pay careful ...”

“... that they believed necessary to make a better world.Macaulay was writing in 1824, in an essay on Dante. He wasn’t born at the time of the revolution. Grégoire, who supported the trial but opposed the execution of Louis XVI, is today most famous for his speech to the French Convention in 1794 in which he coined the term ‘vandalisme’ and appealed for ...”

“... in the foreground. Among many disturbing illustrations which stay in the mind is ‘A scene from Dante as the Argentine troops moved out of Stanley huddle on the road to the airport, trying to keep warm by burning any rubbish they can find. The Antarctic wind scythed in over the water and it was remarkable nobody died of exposure.’ Armed Forces and the ...”

“... bust of Omeros and Seven Seas appears to the narrator in a dream-vision and – a Virgil to his Dante – leads him around St Lucia to its volcanic crater, Soufrière. In the ‘lava of the Malebolge’ he’s shown the ‘traitors’ who, in elected office, saw the land as views for hotels and elevated into waiters the sons of others, while their own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Having received a copy of Barrett Wendell’s Traditions of European Literature from Homer to Dante (1920) – a work based on Wendell’s comparative literature course at Harvard – she characteristically reports to Berenson that the first thing she did was glance at the bibliography (‘they tell so much in such books!’), and was ‘saddened’ to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... chapter of cultural history to find some very different conventions at work. To read Chaucer or Dante in the light of structuralist narrative theory is to realise that such ideas are often uncannily mirrored by texts which predate our own most basic cultural assumptions. What the critics are nowadays so busily deconstructing – the complex of attitudes ...”

“... very broadly, Paulin traces the elements of religious protest in this tradition back to Dante, and presents a brief passage from Piers Plowman in his own vigorous translation. For Paulin the high point of this tradition is Milton, who is represented mainly by lengthy extracts from Paradise Lost. Paulin seems to have encountered some doubt about ...”