Virgil Has Departed, Do Not Weep Yet

(I put together a little academic-ish essay in order to be systematic with my McCarthy habit. I tried to keep it under 2000 words, which means it’s not as thorough as it could be, but it should hold water.) An Analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree As It Regards Dante’s Use of Allegory by Seth Wieck […]

Like most good poets, great or minor, Dante wrote better than he had meant to do. Allen Tate. “The Symbolic Imagination.” Essays of Four Decades. p. 440. Third Edition, ISI Books.

Sunrise, Moonset//Sunset, Moonrise

They did not know that they were set forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert…The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across […]

…meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortal existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that […]