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Larry L. Dill's
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July, 2005
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Paris to Provence, 2006
Notes on Dante, the Renaissance and the Library at Rabbit Rock
In the middle of our life’s journey I awoke in a dark wood.
-Dante
The journey is more important than the inn.
-Cervantes
We’re all ignorant, only on different subjects.
-Will Rogers
We had visitors to Rabbit Rock in June. My daughters and their mother came from Texas and New York. Other friends and neighbors came, too. At my birthday party Deborah’s mother and her friend brought fresh mountain trout which we cooked over the coals of my new wood fired Barbeque pit, a gift from Deborah. I received a pocket watch, humming bird feeders, books and games. We made peach cobbler in a dutch oven and smothered it in homemade, hand-cranked ice cream. We built a bon-fire out in front of the cabin and entertained each other with poems, stories and songs. The next day we hiked to the top Rabbit Rock Farm at the peak of Sugar Top Mountain. We toured the Biltmore House in Asheville one day, the great 19th Century Vanderbuilt Mansion, with its winery and formal gardens, and its great halls including a library of leather bound volumes to rival the reading rooms of the New York Public Library.
We have our own library at Rabbit Rock and the latest improvement is the addition of a 100 volume collection now available in the outhouse. The main lodge contains about 500 volumes including the Harvard Classics and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
One of our guests in June, a first time visitor to Rabbit Rock, was impressed with our collection. She said she “knew there were intellectuals living here when she spotted a copy of Paulo Friere’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” in the outhouse. We all laughed.
“But,” she went on, “You’re a little weak in the Renaissance.”
I said,” What are you talking about? I have everything from Dante to Shakespeare. Spenser’s Fairy Queen, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Francis Bacon!”
“Dante is not the Renaissance, I’m sorry!” she said emphatically. She seemed to want to argue that Queen Elizabeth I was the central character in the Renaissance. A notable Renaissance figure to be sure, but with so many others in the cast, I felt like saying, “Queen Elizabeth is not ‘the Renaissance’ either.” But I didn’t. There was a cocktail party atmosphere at this meeting even though we were in a log cabin lit with Victorian oil lamps. The banter moved lightly around the small gathering and the Dante issue was dropped. But I was stung by the dismissal of Dante and I wondered, still wonder, if she actually said, “Dante is not the Renaissance,” meaning “There is a lot more to the Renaissance than Dante.” Or if she had said, “Dante is not in the Renaissance,” meaning he either lived too early or was too out of touch with Renaissance values to qualify. But the exchange with this guest (which lasted only a few moments) has stayed with me and in time has produced the following essay on Dante, the Renaissance and the Library at Rabbit Rock.
Dante lived from 1265-1321. His masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, was written in the last years of his life and so can be called a product of the 14th century. Two reasons might cause my guest to have concluded that Dante was not part of the Renaissance.
First, that The Divine Comedy is the work of a medieval mind, therefore disqualifying Dante from the Renaissance. I will address that issue later in the essay. Second, that chronologically he lived too early. It is true that some conservative definitions of the Renaissance place it between 1450 and 1650. This would allow for the inclusion of the great painters Da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Botticelli, the scientists Galileo, Copernicus and Francis Bacon, the poets Ariosto, Spencer, Cervantes and Shakespeare, the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the globe, The invention of the printing press, and the development of a balance of power between the great nation states of Europe.
But there is much disagreement among scholars as to when exactly the Renaissance took place. The Oxford English Dictionary says it began in the 14th century and continued through the 16th. That would be 1300-1600, allowing the publication of the Divine Comedy to fall well within its perameters.
Preserved Smith, former professor of Medieval History at Cornell University sums up the more liberal and radical views of the dating of the Renaissance in the 1964 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica which is part of the library collection at Rabbit Rock.
Our continually growing knowledge of the middle ages has thrown the Renaissance into a very different perspective from that in which it was once viewed. Less and less are the centuries preceding the 15th seen as the “Dark Ages” in contrast to the sudden sunrise of modern times. Indeed many scholars now speak of a Carolingian Renaissance in the 8th century, an Ottonian Renaissance in the 10th, and of the Renaissance of the 12th century, in order to emphasize the constant stream of light and progress throughout the millennium once regarded as a long night of gloom and decadence. On the other hand, many scholars have emphasized even more than Symonds [quoted below] the extreme gradualness of the efflorescence of the Italian Renaissance and the long persistence in it of medieval and Germanic elements. The extreme position is taken by Mr. Henry O. Taylor, who is so impressed by the slowness of the transition from medieval to modern times that he would abolish the term “Renaissance” altogether.
So much for the chronological exclusion of Dante from the Renaissance. Let us turn now to Dante’s art, and to his thought and politics.
My daughter, Camen, and I have begun a long term project together in which we are reading and discussing Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (see the poem, Sleeping on Camen’s Couch elsewhere on this web page). We haven’t gotten very far but in the last few months I have read a good bit of Russell’s autobiography and some of his more infamous essays, including “Why I’m not a Christian.” Lord Russell went to jail for conscientious objection during World War I and was later a key figure in founding the school of Analytic Philosophy in England which is essentially a system of studying the logic of human statements and belief systems. Russell believes that mathematics, the hardest of all the sciences, is based on human logic. Logic therefore is of utmost importance to the advancement of human knowledge. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
I was curious to know just what Russell might have to say about Dante. His History of Western Philosophy was close at hand at Rabbit Rock when I began to explore my long gone guest’s assertion that Dante was not part of the Renaissance. Russell’s effusive liberalism was no where to be found in his discussion of Dante. Though he devotes 190 pages to Catholic Philosophy (almost a quarter of his book) he mentions Dante only 4 times in passing. The longest reference is this one.
Dante (1265-1321), though as a poet he was a great innovator, was as a thinker, somewhat behind the times. His book De Monarchia is Gibelline in outlook, and would have been more timely a hundred years earlier. He regards Emperor and Pope as independent, and both divinely appointed. In the Divine Comedy, his Satan has three mouths, in which he eternally chews Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Casius, who are all three equally traitors, the first against Christ, the other two against Caesar. Dante’s thought is interesting, not only in itself, but as that of a layman; but it was not influential, and was hopelessly out of date.
Russell devotes another 50 pages to the Renaissance, again with only passing mention of Dante in his chapter on Machiavelli. But much earlier in Russell’s book, in his chapter on Aristotle, he makes this startling aside about Dante when discussing Aristotle’s physics.
The heavens [according to Aristotle] are perfectly spherical, and the upper regions are more divine than the lower. The stars and planets are not composed of fire, but of the fifth element; their motion is due to that of spheres to which they are attached. (All this appears in poetical form in Dante’s Paradiso)[emphasis added] …Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had to combat Aristotle as well as the Bible in establishing the view that the earth is not the center of the universe, but rotates once a day and goes around the sun once a year….
The Aristotelian belief to the contrary, though accepted by Medieval Christians, is a product of the pagan worship of sun and moon and planets.
Reading all of Russell’s references to Dante in The History of Western Philosophy
one begins to understand how so much confusion surrounds the chronology and meaning of the Renaissance. All definitions of the Renaissance tend to begin with a general statement about how the Renaissance meant different things in different disciplines, art, literature, science, politics, etc. But only when watching a modern genius like Russell confuse the advances of modern science with the imaginative constructions in the history of art and literature does the profundity of the rift between art, science and religion fully take hold. Unless I am misreading him, Russell clearly sees the poetry of Dante as a kind of drag on the advance of scientific knowledge at the very dawn of the modern age—a drag not unlike that of religion itself.
As Russell’s cold, backhanded indictments of Dante began to pile up I thought of two books which have dealt with the problem of the disjunction between science and the humanities: C.P Snow’s The Two Cultures, first published in 1959 and E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, first published in 1998. Both books discuss the fact that the knowledge base and value system for modern scientists and that for artists, poets and theologians are alien to each other and both feel that education is the key to communication.
I will return to the problem of the two cultures (three if you count them as art, science and religion) at the end of this essay. But first I want to continue to explore the question of whether or not Dante if allowed chronological inclusion could be classified as a Renaissance man.
Writing in the same Encyclopedia Britannica mentioned above, the 19th Century Renaissance scholar, John Addington Symonds takes a much more subtle approach than Russell to Dante’s achievement:
Dante showed both in his epic poem and in his lyrics that he had not abandoned the sphere of contemporary thought. Allegory and theology, the vision and the symbol, still determine the form of masterpieces which for perfection of workmanship and for emancipated force of intellect rank among the highest products of the human mind. Yet they are not medieval in the same sense as the song of Roland or the Arthurian cycle. They proved that, though Italy came late into the realm of literature, her action was destined to be decisive and alterative by the introduction of a new spirit, a firmer and more positive grasp on life and art. These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states. So much had to be premised in order to make it clear in what relation humanism stood to the Renaissance since the Italian work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio is sufficient to indicate the re-birth of the spirit after ages of apparent deadness. Had the Revival of Learning not intervened, it is probable that the vigorous efforts of these writers alone would have inaugurated a new age of European culture.
Symond’s position is buttressed by Philip Wheelwright, late professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside who says in his essay on Religion and Poetry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (also part of the Rabbit Rock collection):
The Divine Comedy, although it draws freely upon the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas, is by no means merely a restatement of that teaching in more highly colored language. The peculiar perspective and quality of Dante’s poem comes not from either the doctrinal content or the poetic embellishments taken separately, but mainly from the fresh insights produced by the poet’s fusion of particular images and incidents with the theological ideas which they represent and which they suggest to an informed reader’s mind.
Something like Wheelwright’s statement is what I have had rolling around in the back of my own mind over the years as I have struggled with the meaning and importance of religion in my life and with the literary importance for me of Dante’s work. The richness of Dante’s imagination is evident from the very first pages of the Inferno. His influence on modern poetry is rivaled only by Shakespeare. Milton, Blake, and Shelly were all enthralled by Dante. T.S. Eliot pays enormous tribute to him in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Wasteland, and the Hollow Men. This last poem, echoing Canto III of the Inferno in which Dante, barely inside the gates of Hell, is introduced to the “wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise,” is enough in itself to stand as a tribute to Dante's complex moral vision and what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno calls, the “tragic sense of life.” “The Divine Comedy,” Unamuno says, writing around the time of the Spanish Civil War “is the most tragical tragedy that has ever been written.” And Eliot himself has said, “More can be learned about how to write poetry from Dante than from any English poet…Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth.”
The key elements of the renaissance were economic, political, scientific and technical as much as artistic. Da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Botticelli made technical innovations in their fields that were natural progressions of existing techniques. Much
of their subject matter was classically Greco-Roman but much remained religious. While Da Vinci, the quintessential renaissance man, was undertaking scientific study on the same plane as Copernicus and Gallileo, Dante had made the same kind of technical advances in poetics that Da Vinci and the other painters and sculptors who came after him made in the visual arts. Dante’s invention of terza rima, for example, was as important to poetry as the invention of visual perspective was in art as a device for propelling the comedeia forward as a physical and emotional journey. His use of vernacular Italian was as revolutionary as Machiavelli’s political theories and in choosing Italian over Latin for the Comedia he was demonstrating his belief in the secular Italian state separated from Papal authority and in the modern idea of producing high art for the common man.. Dorthy Sayer’s in her introduction to her 1949 English translation of The Inferno has this to say about Dante’s political treatise, De Monarchia, which Russell had dismissed as out of date.
It is at this point that we find Dante clearly distinguishing between the proper functions of Reason and Revelation. The secular order is founded on Reason, and its task is to lead to happiness in this world; the spiritual order is founded upon Revelation, and its task is to lead men to eternal beatitude. While making this distinction, Dante adds the warning that this truth “is not to be received in such narrow sense as that the Roman prince is subordinate in nothing to the Roman pontiff; in as much as mortal felicity is in a certain sense ordained with reference to immortal felicity”. This point is one he will, later on, develop in the grand scheme of the Comedy, where Revelation (Beatrice) is seen at all points directing, guiding, and finally superseding Reason (Virgil), as Man proceeds through self-knowledge to the Earthly and thence to the Heavenly Paradise. But so far as the affairs of this world are concerned, Dante never ceased to protest against that drive towards theocracy which a great modern Catholic philosopher [Jacques Martain] has called “the temptation, the evil spirit of Mediaeval Christendom.”
The main high points of the traditional Renaissance indeed came between 1450 and 1600 with the Reformation complete, the invention of the printing press, the Copernican revolution, the discovery of America, the reification of all the great nation states of Europe, and Bacon’s refinement of the modern scientific method.
But listen finally to Percy Bysshe Shelly’s assessment of Dante in his Defence of Poetry published in 1820 (an essay found in the Rabbit Rock Library).
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the thirteenth century shown forth from Republican Italy, as from a heaven into the darkness of the benighted world.
Conclusion
For a long time now I have had the idea to write an essay on the transformation of modern art, particularly poetry, from the religious mythology of the ancient and mediaeval worlds into what I call “secular sacredness.” In other words I think it is erroneous to believe that what has happened in human consciousness over the last thousand years is that it has been transformed from irrational religious mysticism to secular reason. On the level of scientific discovery and within the disciplines of the hard sciences of physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology, the belief is reasonable. But the more I study the fields of art, philosophy and religion, the more convinced I become that they continue to act like a medussa’s head of primitivism writhing and intertwining with the human mind like some unrelenting nightmare. The “soft” sciences of economics, political science, anthropology, sociology and psychology seem at times to be as much in the thrall of the demagogues of fashion in the fields of art, philosophy and religion as they are in the service of pure science.
If Bertrand Russell’s assessment of Dante seems coldly scientific, it may be because as a mathematician and logician he is offended by those very imaginative impulses that have caused me to want to reassess the so-called “progress” of modern poetry and consign it to the dustbin of history that both Russell and I agree should be the fate of religion and traditional philosophy. But in defense of literature, in defense of poetry, in defense of Dante, the great Canadian literary critic, Northrup Frye writing in the Educated Imagination, published in 1969 has the following to say:
Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience: that is it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can. You can see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as emotional: one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have. Up to a point it is true that science gives an intellectual view of reality, and that the arts try to make the emotions as precise and disciplined as sciences do the intellect.
All of which leads to the matter of consilience, explored so eloquently in the book of the same name by E. O. Wilson in which he argues forcefully that there can be only one truth and that all the human disciplines are either on the bus or off the bus of human enlightenment. But Wilson is more conciliatory than Russell in his assessments of art and religion, hence the name Consilience (interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines.) Of religion Wilson writes,
The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and empiricist world views? No, unfortunately, there is not. Furthermore, a choice between them is unlikely to be arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying the two world views are being tested with increasing severity by cumulative verifiable knowledge about how the universe works, from atom to brain to galaxy. In addition, the harsh lessons of history have made it clear that one code of ethics is not as good—at least not as durable—as another. The same is true of religions. Some cosmologies are factually less correct than others, and some ethical precepts are less workable.
There is a biologically based human nature, and it is relevant to ethics and religion. The evidence shows that because of its influence, people can be readily educated to only a narrow range of ethical precepts. They flourish within certain belief systems and wither under others. We need to know exactly why.
And of the Arts, Wilson’s stance can be summed up in this passage:
The Arts, while creating order and meaning from the seeming chaos of daily existence, also nourish our craving for the mystical. We are drawn to the shadowy forms that drift in and out of the subconscious. We dream of the insoluble, of unattainably distant places and times. Why should we so love the unknown? The reason may be the Paleolithic environment in which the brain evolved. In our emotions, I believe we are still there. As a naturalist, I use an explicit geographic imagery in reveries of the formative world.
At the center of our world is home ground. In the center of the center are shelters backed against a rock wall. From the shelters radiate well-traveled paths where every tree and rock is familiar. Beyond lies opportunity for expansion and riches. Down a river, through a wooded corridor lining the opposite shore, are campsites in grassy places where game and food plants are seasonally abundant. Such opportunities are balanced by risk. We might lose our way on a too-distant foray. A storm can catch us. Neighboring people—poisoners, cannibals, not fully—will either trade or attack; we can only guess their intentions. In any case they are an impassable barrier. On the other side is the rim of the world, perhaps glimpsed as a mountain front, or a drop toward the sea. Anything could be out there: dragons, demons, gods, paradise, eternal life. Our ancestors came from there. Spirits we know live closer by, and at fall of night are on the move. So much is intangible and strange! We know a little, enough to survive, but all the rest of the world is a mystery.
What is this mystery we find so attractive? It is not a mere puzzle waiting to be solved. It is far more than that, something still too amorphous, too poorly understood to be broken down into puzzles. Our minds travel easily—eagerly! From the familiar and tangible to the mystic realm. Today the entire planet has become home ground. Global information networks are its radiating trails. But the mystic realm has not vanished; it has just retreated, first from the foreground and then from the distant mountains. Now we look for it in the stars, in the unknowable future, in the still teasing possibility of the supernatural. Both the known and the unknown, the two worlds of our ancestors, nourish the human spirit. Their muses, science and the arts, whisper: Follow us, explore, find out.
The Renaissance then may be as much a product of the mediaeval mind as it is a reaction to it and Dante may be as much a symbol of it as Da Vinci and Shakespeare. Harold Bloom’s assertion that Shakespeare invented the Human is hard to swallow after reading Dante. As Wilson (the biologist) and Frye (the literary critic) have both concluded, the human imagination is what makes us human and artistic expressions of the imagination may go back to the Paleolithic era. In that spirit, Unamuno says in a 20th century essay on Don Quixote,
I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country [Spain] is medieval, that has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Revolution—learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages.
If Unamuno can argue that the medieval mind passed through the Renaissance, learning from it but not losing its soul, it could be argued as well that Dante passed through the Renaissance (with Virgil and Beatrice at his side) teaching of the journey of the soul as he went. Botticelli was a student. He created a whole series of illustrations of the Divine Comedy. It is rumored still that Michaelangelo's sketches of Dante's work may have perished in a storm in the Mediterranean. He gave Milton the courage to write Paradise Lost. And William Blake was still arguing with Dante in the 19th century even as he worked on his own illustrations of the Comedia from his death bed.
The Divine Comedy consists of 100 cantos divided equally between the three books, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Here now in conclusion in its entirety from my Rabbit Rock Library is John D. Sinclair’s English prose translation of Canto XXXI of Purgatorio where Dante has, with the guidance of the Roman poet, Virgil, passed through Hell, and reached the Earthly Paradise at the peak of Mount Purgatory where his late beloved Beatrice has just arrived from Paradise to guide him on the rest of his journey. Beatrice was a real person in Dante’s life whom he loved and worshipped from childhood but was never able in real life to marry or even take as a lover. She became for him the central figure in the Divine Comedy, synonymous with perfect beauty, perfect truth and the essence of Heaven itself. She does not let him slide on the confession of his sins after her death. But in the end she smiles.
PURGATORIO
Canto XXXIII
‘O thou that art on that side of the sacred river’, she began again, turning against me the point of her speech which even with the edge had seemed sharp to me and continuing without pause, ‘say, say if this is true; to such an accusation thy confession must needs be joined.’
My faculties were so confounded that my voice began and was spent before it was released from its organs.
She forbore a little, then said: ‘What thinkest thou? Answer me, for the sad memories are not yet destroyed in thee by the water.’
Confusion and fear mingled together drove forth from my mouth a Yes such that to hear it there was need of sight. As a cross-bow shot with too great strain breaks the cord and bow and the shaft touches the mark with less force, so I broke down under that heavy charge, pouring forth tears and sighs, and my voice failed in its passage. At which she said to me: ‘In the desires for me which were leading thee in love of the good beyond which there is nothing to be longed for, what cross-ditches or chains didst thou meet with for which thou must give up the hope of going forward, and what attractions and advantages showed in the aspect of other things for which thou must be at their service?’
After heaving a bitter sigh I had hardly the voice to answer and the lips shaped it with difficulty; weeping, I said: ‘Present things with their false pleasure turned my steps as soon as your face was hid.’
And she: ‘Hadst thou kept silence or denied what thou confessest, thy fault would be not less plain, by such a judge is it known, but when from a man’s own cheek breaks forth condemnation of his sin, in our court the wheel turns back against the edge. Nevertheless, in order that thou mayst now bear the shame of thy wandering and another time, hearing the Sirens, be stronger, lay aside the sowing of tears and hearken; so shalt thou hear how my buried flesh should have directed thee the other way. Never did nature or art set before thee beauty so great as the fair members in which I was enclosed, and they are crumbled in the dust; and if the highest beauty thus failed thee by my death, what mortal thing should then have drawn thee into desire for it? Truly thou oughtest, at the first shaft of deceptive things, to have risen up after me who was such no longer. No young girl or other vanity of such brief worth should have bent thy wings downward to await more shots. A young chick waits for two or three, but in vain is the net spread or arrow shot in the sight of the full-fledged bird.’
As children ashamed stand dumb with eyes on the ground, listening and acknowledging their fault and repentant, so I stood there, and she said:’Since by hearing thou art grieved, lift up thy beard and thou shalt have grief by looking.’
With less resistance is uprooted the sturdy oak, whether in the wind from our parts or from the country of Iarbas, than I raised at her command my chin, and when by the beard she demanded my face I noted well the venom of the argument. And when my face was lifted up my sight marked those primal creatures pause in their scattering of flowers, and my eyes, still lacking confidence, saw Beatrice turned toward the beast which is one sole person in two natures. Beneath her veil and beyond the stream, she seemed to me to surpass her former self more than she surpassed the others here when she was with us. The nettle of remorse so stung me that of all other things that which had most bent me to the love of it became for me the most hateful; such self-conviction bit me at the heart that I fell overcome and what I became then she knows who was the cause of it. Then, when my heart restored my outward sense, the lady I had found alone I saw above me, and she was saying: ‘Hold me, hold me!’ She had brought me into the river up to the throat and, drawing me after her, was passing over the water light as a shuttle. When I was close to the blessed shore I heard ‘Asperges me’[purge me] so sweetly sung that I cannot recall, far less write it. The fair lady opened her arms, clasped my head, and plunged me under, where I must swallow the water; then she took me out and led me bathed into the dance of the four fair ones, and each covered me with her arm.
‘Here we are nymphs and in heaven are stars. Before Beatrice descended to the world we were ordained to be her handmaids. We will bring thee to her eyes; but for the happy light that is within them the three on the other side, who look deeper, shall quicken thine.’ Thus they began to sing and then brought me with them to the breast of the Griffin, where Beatrice stood turned to us, and they said: ‘See thou do not withhold thy gaze; we have set thee before the emeralds from which love once shot his darts at thee.’
A thousand desires hotter than flame held my eyes on the shining eyes, which remained still fixed on the Griffin, and even like the sun in a mirror the two-fold beast shown within them, now with the one, now with the other nature. Think, reader, if I marveled when I saw the thing still in itself and in its image changing. While my soul, full of amazement and gladness, tasted of that food which, satisfying with itself, for itself makes appetite, the other three, showing themselves by their bearing to be of a higher order, moved forward, dancing to their angelic roundelay.
‘Turn, Beatrice, turn thy holy eyes on thy faithful one,’ was their song ‘who, for sight of thee, has made so great a journey; of thy grace do us the grace to unveil thy mouth to him, that he may decern the second beauty [her smile], which though concealest.’
O splendour of living light eternal, who has ever grown so pale under Parnassas’ shade or drunk so deep of its well that he would not seem to have a mind disabled, trying to render thee as thou appearest there, heaven with its harmonies overhanging thee, when in the free air thou didst disclose thyself?
,
( * indicates books found in the Library at Rabbit Rock)
Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, 1971.*
Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago, 1964.*
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, translated by Charles Eliot Norton, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, Chicago, 1952.
Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, Cantica I, Hell <L’Inferno>.
Translated by Dorothy Sayers, Penguin Books, London, 1949.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1998.*
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, Penguine, New York, 1998.*
Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1945.*
Dante, The Divine Comedy, Italian text with translation by John D. Sinclair, three volumes, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Oxford University Press, New York, 1939.*
Robert Pinsky, The Inferno of Dante, verse translation, bilingual edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1994.
Miguel De Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 1954, Dover reprint of the Macmillan translation, New York, 1921*
Percy Bysshe Shelly, Poetry and Prose, Norton, New York, 1977.*
C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1959.*
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1930.*
Northrup Frye, The Educated Imagination, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1964.
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton, 1965.*
T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1943.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, Translated by Henry F. Cary, Volumn 20 of The Harvard Classics, the five-foot shelf of books, ed. By Charles W. Eliot, P.F. Collier & Son, New York, 1909.*
Blake’s Dante, The Complete Illustrations of the Divine Comedy, commentary by Milton Klonsky, Harmony Books, New York, 1980.*
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