Sayers writes in her Introduction to Hell about the use of allegory in The Divine Comedy. After saying that the best way to read the poem would be straight through, surrendering to the poem's own internal drive, she then spends pages explaining why this can't be done. One of her principal reasons for this is [...]
Author: catholicfictioncatholicscience
Reading Dante
"The ideal way of reading The Divine Comedy would be to start at the first line and go straight through to the end, surrendering to the vigour of the story-telling and the swift movement of the verse, and not bothering about any historical allusions or theological explanations which do not occur in the text itself." [...]
Longfellow Poems 5 & 6
Here are the last two of Longfellow's six sonnets about Dante. Remember, Longfellow wasn't Catholic, he was a Unitarian. Then read Sonnet V right to its lovely end. Sonnet VI might be pointing to Italian history of the 1800's but I don't know for sure. I do know that there is lots of commentary about [...]
Earth’s evil twin?
I read an article the other day about Venus where it was called Earth's evil twin. In the same article runaway global warming was mentioned as the reason for the incredibly horrible, windy, acidic, hot surface of the planet. Now look at Venus. It has no magnetic field. It has no oceans. It has no [...]
Longfellow: Dante sonnets 3 & 4
Longfellow was not Catholic. I don't know how he felt about Catholicism but his translation of Dante, and these sonnets, amazing meditations on confession, are evidence of a sympathy at least. He was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne whose daughter Rose became a Catholic nun. She is currently listed as a Servant of God. He also [...]
