"Reading Dante’s Purgatory While the World Hangs in the Balance"
"For many students of Dante, Purgatory is the Divine Comedy’s central canticle poetically, philosophically, and psychologically. It is, as one of its best translators, the poet W. S. Merwin, noted, the only one that 'happens on the earth, as our lives do. . . . Here the times of day recur with all the sensations and associations that the hours bring with them, the hours of the world we are living as we read.'"
via THE NEW YORKER |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Aaron McCollough on Denise Levertov's The Poet In The World
"We are, as she says, 'living our whole lives in a state of emergency' and therefore have no choice but to resist the petty politics of disenfranchisement peddled by nationalist revanchism and instead to embrace a truly radical form of conservatism—the effort to 'save that earthly life, that miracle of being, which poetry conserves and celebrates.'" |
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