A Quote by Edward Hirsch

A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld. — © Edward Hirsch
A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.
In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.
In a sense, I never got over Robert Lowell's History. A flawed, infinitely brilliant project I never tire of going back to. It's a modern Inferno, where Lowell plays both Dante and Virgil, guiding us through dozens of illuminating, bitter episodes from human history, all the while managing to hold a mirror to our confused hominid face as it squints at eternity and fails to grasp any of it.
Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world.
Dante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.
If Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in 2013, he might very well have set part of it in the suburbs.
Dante would not have forgotten: they say that when Dante was a boy, he was asked: Dante what is the best food? to test his memory. Eggs, replied Dante. Years later, when Dante was a grown man, he was asked only: how? and Dante replied: fried.
The ninth, the worst circle of the Inferno - Dante intended it for traitors.
I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.
Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.
Help me reach a friend in darkness; Help me guide him through the night. Help me show thy path to glory By the Spirit's holy light. . . .
As Dante says in the beginning of the Inferno, 'In the midst of life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost.' I think we're all doing that, in our various ways Looking for our Selves in the dark wood. I hope you find yourself on your journey.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
I disconnected as a sleepy Seth stepped out of the bedroom. “Who’s Dante? Was that a collect call to the Inferno?” “They won’t accept the charges,” I murmured.
Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage: "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.
Some souls think that the Holy Spirit is very far away, far, far, up above. Actually he is, we might say, the divine Person who is most closely present to the creature. He accompanies him everywhere. He penetrates him with himself. He calls him, he protects him. He makes of him his living temple. He defends him. He helps him. He guards him from all his enemies. He is closer to him than his own soul. All the good a soul accomplishes, it carries out under his inspiration, in his light, by his grace and his help.
My hell is going to be the stairmaster wing of Dante's inferno, where they're gonna tape my feet to the pedals and the only music I get is Michael Bolton karaoke style.
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