The World's Great Classics
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217288781
Paperback|9780217288781
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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: INTRODUCTION IT is not to be wondered at that while Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso found English translators and imitators during the Elizabethan period, the Divine Comedy was comparatively neglected and remained untranslated. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance which, spreading westward, had quickened the intellectual life of France and England, was of a different order from that with which Dante had been inspired. Dante's poem was largely the product and expression of the mediaeval conceptions of the universe embodied in the dogma of the Roman Church. In form and substance it was strange to the new era. Hence, though Chaucer had translated delightfully some brief passages of it, though it was read and admired by a few scholars and poets of succeeding generations, though Milton recognized Dante's greatness well enough to speak of his giving leave to Fame, the Divine Comedy remained practically unknown to English readers down to the end of the eighteenth century. Thomas Warton, a scholar of genial appreciations and wide reading, could say of it as late as 1780 in his History of English Poetry: We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, purgatory, and paradise. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art, and method. And this of a poem unsurpassed in the whole field of literature precisely in these very qualities of art and method. Warton cites a witty and vivacious paraphrase and perversion by Voltaire of a passage from the poem, praises Voltaire's inimitable lines, and adds, with seemingly unconscious humor, Dante thus translated would have had many more readers than at present. Speaking of the Italian poets of the thirteenth century, among whom Dante was included, he says with true Anglican provincialism: Their...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217288781 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217288782 |
| Weight | 1.93 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 1.34 In |
| List Price | $26.71 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 604 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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