[New-Poetry] Dante on drugs

[JforJames at aol.com]

_http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25341-2409872,00.html_ 
(http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25341-2409872,00.html) 
Dante on drugs
Peter Hainsworth

Barbara Reynolds
DANTE
The poet, the political thinker, the  man
488pp. I. B. Tauris. £20.
1 845 11161 3
 
In many ways, we think we know where we are with Dante. As a writer who is  
eager to give his readers a moral education, he spells out intelligibly and  
forcefully what he thinks about a whole range of issues – human responsibility,  
the proper relations between Church and State, what is wrong with 
contemporary  society, and so on. Nor has he any hesitations about telling us about 
himself –  his love for Beatrice, his feelings at being exiled from Florence, his 
friends  and enemies, his aims as a writer. The works and the personality may 
be rich and  complex, and there is an obvious chasm between the early 
fourteenth century and  the early twenty-first, but on the whole we feel that we are 
reading him right,  or at least that with appropriate efforts on our part we 
should be able to do  so.
 
Then we reach a limit and the picture begins to  crumble

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