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“... F.R. Leavis declared that human consciousness depended on the minority who could appreciate ‘Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Baudelaire, Hardy’ and recognise their present-day successors. Williams suggested deleting Dante, Donne, Baudelaire and Hardy, and adding, among other things, committee procedure and the nature of ...”

“... the fact loudly enough, is the gradual ascendancy of accident over substance. For Augustine and Dante, the world is a sacred text whose apparently accidental signs are to be deciphered as revelations of divinity. Berkeley will return to this idea some centuries later. Hermeneutics converts the random into the necessary. In Hamilton’s view, this means that ...”

“... the waters of the northern seas. Its parents would have been old enough to have lived alongside Dante; its great-great-grandparents alongside Julius Caesar. For thousands of years Greenland sharks have swum in silence, as above them the world has burned, rebuilt, burned again. The Greenland shark is the planet’s longest-lived vertebrate, but it was only ...”

“... via his literary sources (a number of sumptuous manuscripts, including a fine illustrated Dante, are on display). The difficulty is in separating the tendentious uses to which Chaucer has been put from the writer we can discern from the work. In the shifting, centuries-long history of his reception, Chaucer has been read as both irreverent and ...”

“... those ‘upstart intellectuals’ of the 1860s, and who at this stage was imbued with Dante to the extent that he found his own practice of composing poetry by mouth and often on foot prefigured in the master – ‘the step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands as the ...”

“... University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he read Dante he said all the right things (‘pure muscle, nothing superfluous’) but drew no conclusions about his own use of language, which from the beginning until the end was always stiff with thou, yon, tho’, ere, o’er, thro’, oft and (wince-inducing even ...”

“... as artists and intellectuals they stand some way back from direct action – Petrarch, Tasso, Dante, Michelangelo, Alfieri, Galileo, Machiavelli. The presiding geniuses of the poem are two memorialists of great societies and of great artists – Sismondi, the historian of the Italian republics, and Gibbon, the critic of the Roman Empire. The writer, as ...”

“... of serious speculation about the language of Eden and its possible avatars in fallen nature. Dante probably looms largest, and of course he too found a way through a dark forest to another world. There he encountered the whole range of possible forms of communication, from the babble of Nimrod, through howls, groans, greetings and songs, to Adam’s ...”

“... which tore His silver skin Before the clause of Godhead thundered in. This Lilliputian church, not Dante’s spite Brings Pisa from an untransfigured night Straight to my dreams – this is the grace of love That Dante’s terza rima cannot prove, The reconciling shape which frees mankind From murderous faction of a poet’s ...”

“... behaviour come from the mind of a raging celibate. A praed guilty of flirting with monks. Dante put some of his enemies in his Inferno while they were still living, but Luang Phor Khom’s unfortunates are ordinary folk. The Chapman Brothers’ diorama of Hell (it was burned in the Momart fire), with its multitude of tiny role-playing figures acting ...”

“... suspect that chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter in ...”

“... the English reader with an astonishing recovery of the intricate fabric of allusions, from Dante and Petrarch, through Leopardi and Foscolo to Carducci and D’Annunzio. Perhaps inevitably some allusions are passed over in favour of more recondite ones. I think, for example, that the first lines of one of Dante’s ...”

“... In Italy you can buy poetry T-shirts featuring lines by Dante, Leopardi and others. The Ungaretti shirt is good value: it gives you a whole work, though not a very long one. ‘Mattina’ (‘Morning’) reads in its entirety as follows: M’illumino d’immenso In books, those words are tethered to a particular location, Santa Maria la Longa, 26 January 1917; but there is a rightness about their transplantation to innumerable present-day torsos ...”

“... Christina Rossetti herself said that her poem was not to be taken as an allegory. Her brother, Dante Gabriel, whose illustration shows the two sisters sleeping in each other’s arms, was fascinated by the intensity of feeling between them. Children are disturbed by the sexual jostling of the goblins and by the sinfulness of the delicious. Henry ...”

“... to crack wise.’ He insists on being burly, reassuringly low-faluting: ‘everybody’s favourite Dante pin-ups’, or ‘It is hard to see why V. Nazarenko should have got his highly orthodox knickers in such a twist.’ He tilts at dons, with all the rounded audacity that names no names: ‘coldly able young academics who behave as if the arts, like their ...”