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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DANTE AND BEATRICE THOSE critics who allegorize the Divine Comedy, who exaggerate, or, rather, who mistake the supersensual element in Dante's work, who reduce to nothing the sensible and human element, are hardly worth refuting. They know nothing of the necessary laws under which poetic genius works, of the inevitable conditions under which the creations of poetry are produced. But, in their turn, those other critics err hardly less widely, who exaggerate, or, rather, who mistake the human and real element in Dante's poem; who see, in such a passion as that of Dante for Beatrice, an affection belonging to the sphere of actual domestic life, fitted to sustain the wear and tear of our ordinary daily existence. Into the error of those second critics an accomplished recent translator of Dante, Mr. Theodore Martin, seems to me to have fallen. He has ever present to his mind, when he speaks of the Beatrice whom Dante adored, Wordsworth's picture of? The perfect woman, nobly planned To warm, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light. He is ever quoting these lines in connexion with Dante's Beatrice; ever assimilating to this picture Beatrice as Dante conceived her; ever attributing to Dante's passion a character identical with that of the affection which Wordsworth, in the poem from which these lines are taken, meant to portray. The affection here portrayed by Wordsworth is, I grant, a substantial human affection, inhabiting the domain of real life, at the same time that it is poeticaland beautiful. But in order to give this flesh-and-blood character to Dante's passion for Beatrice, what a task has Mr. Martin to perform how much he is obliged to imagine how much to shut his eyes to, or to disbelieve Not perceiving that the ...
| ISBN-13 | 9781459047129 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1459047125 |
| Weight | 0.31 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.21 In |
| List Price | $14.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 86 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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