Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...occasionally repeats an effect needlessly. His talent lies in choosing witty, nimble metaphors to give life to the clash of values between his two protagonists. When Tognazzi starts rolling his own cigarettes, expropriating for the purpose a page from the professor's miniature volume of poems by Leopardi, the professor watches a classic poem burn, then resignedly selects for his own smoke "a minor work." Both men understate their roles in virtuoso style, whether locked in ideological combat or coping with a nubile vagrant (Stefania Sandrelli) who tramps the countryside like a one-girl emporium-stealing clothes, swapping souvenirs...
...poem opens with a noted tercet...
...genius for which the bird of the sun is no intemperate metaphor. For seven centuries La Commedia, which in 14,233 lines of lordly language describes the poet's descent into hell and ascent into heaven through the refining fires of purgatory, has been widely considered the greatest poem ever composed; and its author has been virtually deified by the critics. T. S. Eliot pronounced him "the most universal of poets in the modern languages," and added: "Shakespeare gives the greatest width of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth. They divide the modern world between them...
...artful and meticulous composition unequaled in the whole of literature." The last canto of I'Inferno, for instance, descends to the depths of despair through a brilliant cacophony of rhymes that snarl, snigger, squeak, squitter, screech like a sackful of demented imps. And the structure of the entire poem is a miracle of symmetry; all its canticles are consciously articulated in a great Golden Section, an ancient system of proportion in which the nature of God and the structure of the human soul are reconciled...
...poem, Dante suffers the "full experience" of this immortal metamorphosis. Faith is not enough; he demands experience. And with that demand, Dante becomes the first modern...