The Poets' Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374235368 ISBN 13: 9780374235369

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

Contains a collection of essays on Dante by poets including Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Seamus Henry.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Hawkins is Professor of Religion and Literature at Boston University and director of the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts. Rachel Jacoff is Professor of Italian at Wellesley College.

From Booklist:

After 500 years of neglect, Dante surged into cultural prominence in the nineteenth century when he was rediscovered by poets such as Shelley, Coleridge, and Whitman. The astonishing persistence of Dante's renascent claim upon the poetic imagination provides the substance for this remarkable collection of essays. The editors here combine previously published commentaries on Dante from deceased twentieth-century poets (Pound, Eliot, Auden) with newly commissioned pieces from living talents such as Seamus Heaney and Robert Pinsky. Though only a few of these poets share Dante's Christian faith, all of them feel the transforming power of his artistic gift. Some contributors recognize in the sublime architecture of the Commedia a cosmic structure that--purged of its metaphysics--can still reflect our deepest fears and aspirations. Others reject the grand design of Dante's work but fasten on its unpredictable and humanizing details. But whether praising Dante or quarreling with him, this august company of poets all perpetuate his marvelous practice of conversing with the dead. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0374235368
• ISBN 13: 9780374235369
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406
• Editor: Hawkins Peter S., Jacoff Rachel