Paul Krause Follows in Dante's Footsteps

The world’s great poets not only wrote poetry still read and studied today, but they also helped shape the culture of their countries and indeed what we call Western civilization. Consider the greats of Greece and Rome – Homer, Virgil, Ovid and others. The great poets of English include Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Germany has its Goethe. Russia has Pushkin. And Italy has Dante. 

Many others belong to the category of “great poets,” of course, but as poet and author Paul Krause points out in his Dante’s Footsteps: Poems and Reflections of Poetry, it was poets and their works of poetry who led the way in language, culture, and ways of thinking and expression. 

 

One brief example cited by Krause: The word agape is well known in historic Christianity. It is the highest form of love. It is love that is selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. The word come from the Greek, and it was Homer who first used it and perhaps invented it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

This Craft of Verse – Alexander Fayne.

 

Putting the Poetry Back into Homer – James Sale at The Epoch Times.

 

“Autumn,” poem by David Baird – Malcolm Guite.

 

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” (excerpt), poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Every Day Poems.

 

Horses Moving on the Snow – poem by David Whyte.

 

“Nativity,” poem by John Donne – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

A Biography of Dante's "Divine Comedy"

I first read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) in 1977. I read the translation by American poet and translator John Ciardi (I still have the book), who had undertaken the work from 1954 to 1970. He used Dante’s terza rimaform, an arrangement of tercets or three-line stanzas that use an interlocking rhyming scheme. Ciardi’s translation is considered defective today (who knew?), but it’s still widely read.  

The Divine Comedy has been translated into English alone scores of times since 1782. Some translators attempt the tera rima form; others choose blank verse, prose, quatrains, six-line stanzas, irregular rhyme, and just about every other imaginable form. The first complete American translation, one still read today, was by none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1867, who is credited with a kind of American renaissance of Dante that continues today. (Longfellow employed blank tercets, if you want to know.) In fact, more translations of The Divine Comedy exist in English than in any other language.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Behind Each Number, One Beloved Face – poem by Malcom Guite.

 

“Of Elizabeth Bishop” and “Tribute to Roethke” – poems by Julian Woodruff at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“One Art,” poem by Elizabeth Bishop – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

“The Man with the Hoe,” poem by Edwin Markham – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell and "Dear Dante"

If I were asked to name the greatest poets in human history, I would likely name five: Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Milton. There they are: a Greek, a Roman, a Florentine, and two Englishmen. Yes, the list reflects my Eurocentric perspective, but there it is. 

Dante (1265-1321) serves as a pivot point between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the more recognizable modern world of Milton. Chaucer (ca. 1340s-1400) is chronologically close to Dante and is believed to have memorized at least parts of Dante’s The Divine Comedy by heart. While many of the people mentioned in The Divine Comedy are not well known today outside their own historical era, that doesn’t detract from the greatness of the poetical work.

 

In the summer of 2021, to mark the 700^th anniversary of Dante’s death, poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell decided to reread The Divine Comedy by one canto a day (100 cantos, she wrote, and about 100 days of summer, seemed an almost perfect match).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The calm after the storm,” poem by Giacomo Leopardi – Beverley Bie Brahic at The New Criterion.

 

Pax – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

A Conversation with Maurice Manning – Ben Palpant at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

No wait – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

Poets and Poems: James Sale and "StairWell"

I’ve never said that I’m eagerly awaiting the publication of a new poetry volume or collection. I have said it about a novel by a favorite author, or a new mystery in an enthralling series. Perhaps it’s because poetry has always been something more cerebral or quietly emotional, perhaps.  

Then came poet James Sale and his contemporary epic structured like (and written in open homage to) Dante and his Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, the three parts of The Divine Comedy. Sale began writing what he called The English Cantos in 2017, and the first volume, HellWard, was published in 2019. Then came the COVID pandemic and Sale’s own health issues. 

 

Four years after HellWard, we now have StairWell, Vol. II of the English Cantos, corresponding to Dante’s Purgatorio. And, yes, I’d heard it was coming. I can now say I eagerly anticipated a work of poetry. I can also say it bully justified my eagerness. StairWell is a marvel of imagination, insight into the human condition, and social commentary. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

James Sale and “HellWard” – Writing an Epic Poem in English

British poet James Sale has a mission. A lifelong poet, he is now turning himself to what is perhaps the most ambitious project of his career. He’s writing an epic poem of heaven and hell that “stands four-square against the meaninglessness of post-modernism.” 

Sale began writing The English Cantos in 2017. The first volume, HellWard, was published in 2019, and his working on the next volume. If “HellWard” sounds something like “The Inferno,” it should. Dante’s The Divine Comedy is the model. In fact, Dante (like Virgil) serves as the guide to the poet embarking on the journey of Hellward. Sales considers Dante’s epic as one of the greatest ever written because of “the profound belief system behind the overt belief system.” The overt belief system is Roman Catholic; the belief system behind it is something broader. It’s no surprise than poet John Milton is an inspiration here.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"These Nameless Things" by Shawn Smucker

At some point while reading These Nameless Things, the new novel by Shawn Smucker, I realized I was reading three different but closely related stories.

The first story is the dystopic, almost post-apocalyptic one. A group of people live in a small village at the base of a mountain. At some point in the past they’ve come down from the mountain, but their memories of the mountain and what happened there are vague and ill-formed at best, except for the fact they were horrible. Each person knows that he or she made a deliberate choice to leave the mountain, because that’s how you have to leave. The village seems a safe place. Stretching to the east is a great plain, punctuated by trees. And one by one, people have been leaving the village for the rumored city beyond the plain. Some eight people are left.

Life in the village is safe, and yet there’s this pull to the east. Profound change comes from the outside and from two directions – a woman suddenly arrives from the mountain, and Dan, one of the remaining residents, takes her in, and then a young girl arrives from the east, saying nothing about why she’s journeyed to the village. 

The second story concerns two brothers, Dan and his twin Adam. Dan lives in the village, having survived the journey from the mountain, but he lives in the house closest to the mountain. Adam still lives on the mountain, and Dan will never leave the village until his brother comes down. Only gradually does Dan unfold the story of what happened to him and his brother, and that story involves all of the people left in the village. One senses it is not a good story.

Shawn Smucker

The third story is the underlying, framing story. It is the story of the underworld in Greek mythology, with its ferryman Charon and its separation from the living world by two rivers – Styx and Acheron. Dante wrote his epic Inferno based on this Greek myth, with himself as the narrator making the journey and the Roman poet Virgil as his guide. According to the myth, heroes like Aeneas, Heracles, Odysseus, and others make the journey and return alive. 

These Nameless Things works on all three story levels because Smucker maintains a simplicity and a sparseness to the narrative. It could have easily veered off into a jumbled chaos, but that sparseness, reminiscent of Raymond Carver, keeps the story flowing toward a conclusion of successive revelations. 

In addition to the novels The Day the Angels Fell and The Edge of Over There, Smucker has published four non-fiction works – Once We Were Strangers, My Amish Roots, Building a Life Out of Words, and Refuse to Drown. He and his family live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Smucker tells a haunting tale in These Nameless Things, a story of guilt and regret, a story about longing, and, ultimately, a story about forgiveness.

Related:

My review of Light from Distant Stars by Shawn Smucker.

My review of The Day the Angels Fell by Shawn Smucker.

My review of The Edge of Over There by Shawn Smucker.

My review of Once We Were Strangers by Shawn Smucker.

My review of My Amish Roots by Shawn Smucker.

Rod Dreher’s “How Dante Can Save Your Life”

You’re standing in the poetry section of a Barnes & Noble bookstore. You don’t usually read poetry, or fiction either, for that matter. But a book caught your eye; you pull it from the shelf, open it and begin to read.

Without realizing it, a random act of browsing in a bookstore leads to you changing your life.

The “you’ in question here was writer Rod Dreher, author of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming and Crunchy Cons and a writer for The American Conservative. The Barnes & Noble was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And the book was Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Dreher describes what happened in How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem.

And what a story it is.

What a fascinating story it is. If you love poetry, and even if you don’t, this is a remarkable book.

It’s a story about how Dreher worked through serious physical illness brought on by his family, himself, his and his family’s history, and the sense of place. He tells it so well that the reader beings to see in Dante what Dreher found, and more – the reader begins to recognize himself in the journey.

Of all the things I expected from this book, that turned out to be the most surprising, although in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been. That’s what good writing does. And it says something about both Dante and Dreher, and Dreher’s candor, openness and vulnerability in telling a story that is often painful.

With Dreher and reader for the journey is Dante, himself guided by the Roman poet Virgil.

Dreher takes the scenes and lines that connected most with himself and the situation he was trying, and largely failing, to deal with. Along with his Orthodox priest and his therapist, he works his way through his own personal Inferno and Purgatorio. He doesn’t necessarily reach Paradiso (Dante does, however), but he does find healing.

How Dante Can Save Your Life is a much larger story than one man’s journey. Dante is one of those writers not studied much any more – a dead, white, European male. While he often criticizes the church and the popes, he is very much in the Roman Catholic tradition. The Divine Comedy is a profoundly religious book – and that alone might be sufficient eliminate it from the curriculum.

Rod Dreher

That is criminal. It’s one of the great works of Western literature. It will still be read and treasured long after the more contemporary and trendy stuff is forgotten. What Dreher does in his book is to explain how meaningful and important Dante is for many of the same things that bedeviled us in late medieval and early Renaissance times that still bedevil us today. For that is the genius of Dante and The Divine Comedy – the poet and his great work still speak to the human condition.

The Divine Comedy has been translated by numerous authors and writers over the years, including Dorothy Sayers, Clive James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many others (and that’s just a few of the English translations; there are many others in other languages). Dreher prefers the translations by Robert and Jean Hollander and Mark Musa; the only translation I’ve read myself is by John Ciardi.

Read How Dante Can Save Your Life, and you will read of how a great work literature helped guide one man on what was at times a harrowing, life-threatening journey.

Painting: Dante Illuminating Florence with His Poem, fresco by Domenico de Michelino; circa 1465.