IBPC: Poetry and Poets in Rags

11/30/2004

"I had the feeling I was going to be released when they told me I was being moved to Havana," Mr [Raul] Rivero told reporters from his home in the Cuban capital. "But I was told nothing until today."

He said he was a free man "without rage, with a position that is constructive rather than belligerent."

from BBC News: Cuba releases leading dissident

But--instead of investigating a chest infection when told of these symptoms--his personal physician, Dr Milton Feltenstein, a celebrity doctor, diagnosed [Dylan] Thomas as suffering from delirium tremens, a drinker's condition.

Dr Feltenstein injected the poet with three doses of morphine, which the biographers say would have had the effect of further depressing his breathing. After the third dose, Thomas's face turned blue and he went into coma.

from Guardian Unlimited: History has Dylan Thomas dying from drink. But now, a new theory

It's long been obvious that [Ted] Hughes's Ariel paints a grimmer picture of [Sylvia] Plath than her version; in manuscript, the collection opens with the word Love and ends on spring, following a trajectory toward hope and renewal. (Hughes's sequence closes with the implacably bleak pieces Plath wrote in her last days--sample image: "A white skull,/Eaten by weedy greens.") What's newly apparent, thanks to The Restored Edition, are the significant changes Hughes (and probably others involved in the publishing process) made within the text.

from The Village Voice: Tragedy Restoration

For one thing, Keats's less famous poems often shed a bright light on the intentions and effects of his masterpieces. For another, they refresh our sense of the whole poet by showing him in a variety of moods, and in doing so alert us to undercurrents elsewhere. When we consider the mingled affability and ambition of the sonnets he dashed off with and for Leigh Hunt we learn something about the humanity which fills the odes.

from Guardian Unlimited: Journey of discovery

These two debates are really the same debate--the cooked versus the raw, the aesthete versus the shaggy bard: Each new poetic generation finds a way to keep these controversies in place, and the emblematic Wilbur continues to be of service. Meanwhile, a half-dozen of the finest poems of the 20th century are dimly remembered and scarcely read.

Wilbur himself is not entirely innocent of responsibility for this injustice.

from Slate: The Overlooked Master

Well, Shiki [Masaoka] pulled that red wheelbarrow into the light of day decades before the American [William Carlos Williams]. If Shiki had been writing in a European language at the turn of the 20th century, he might have been ranked with Baudelaire and Whitman as one of the world's great literary innovators.

Shiki used the word shasei, meaning "reality sketches," to characterize his approach to what he saw and did with his writing.

from The Japan Times: Revealing 'The Japanese Sensibility': Modernity

The poet always has the ball. The poet designed the ball, and invented the game, and can change the rules. You always lose when you're the subject matter of poetry. Attempts to make the subject a worthy competitor feel condescending, like when your tennis coach serves leftie to build up your self-esteem.

What's wonderful about Anne Winters is that she's a poet of complexly staged compassion but, at the same time, she's full of artistic ego.

from Slate: The Anne Winters Challenge

Celebrated poet Sheila Cussons died at the age of 82 on Thursday night.

"She died at 19:20 in the Catholic institution, Nazareth House, in Vredehoek," her friend, journalist Amanda Botha, said.

from News24: Sheila Cussons dies

Korea's senior poet, Kim Chun-su, died on the morning of Nov. 29 after being in a coma for several months. Kim was born in 1922 in Chungmu, on the southern coast of Korea. His poetry abounds in sea-imagery and memories of his childhood persist in his poems, which were often inspired by his early life in that seaside town.

from The Korea Times: The Poetry of No Meaning

In other words, it's like ham cubes. [Ted] Kooser, grinning, explains that grocery stores used to sell ham cubes with the plastic stretched over a gob of cubes piled on a flat piece of Styrofoam. Now they leave the Styrofoam out, and somehow shrink-wrap the plastic very closely over the cubes.

Poetry, he says, should be like that new package: "If you write a sonnet and you've got too much grocery-store air in there and not enough ham, it isn't going to work."

from The Kansas City Star: A poet for the people

"Poetry and creative writing are booming now because there is a market for it among students," says Ms. [Jane] Draycott, whose tenure at Oxford Brookes University is being sponsored by the Royal Literary Fund. "And because there is a democratization of the arts. In the sense that over the last 15 years, people have been encouraged to appreciate expressive arts in articulating the idea of the whole section of the society."

from The Christian Science Monitor: Britain's poets gain new status on campus

A weekend of hard work was enough to emblazon Gwyneth Lewis's words on the horizons of Cardiff and Wales. The poet is the author of the inscription which fronts the high copper dome of the Wales Millennium Centre.

At night, with the centre's powerful lights illuminating them, the words in English and Welsh blaze across the skyline of Cardiff Bay.

from Western Mail: Immortal words

It will be in operation every day until around 10pm, when the water will be turned off to be replaced by a misting effect.

At night, the fountain will be a blaze of changing colours.

The poem is inlaid in stainless steel into the granite paving surrounding the fountain, and has been written to be read from any point.

from Liverpool Daily Post: A poet and a fountain give square a little magic

11/23/2004

To [Pauline] Michel, poetry is not just a matter of words on a page. "Poetry is a way to live, a way to feel," she said "It's in everything, everywhere, and in each person."

She is not not keen on publishing her work, she said: "Because I feel lonesome when the book goes and I'm not there to see the result of my work. To see if it touches (people) or doesn't touch them."

from Montreal Gazette: Canada's gregarious rose

Like most ventriloquists, he [Richard Howard] ends up with more dummies than voices; his own cadence keeps creeping in. Of course this was true of [Henry] James himself: even his teenage servant girls wound up sounding like that aging male genius who never found a nuance he couldn't tease into a pair of nuances.

What does Howard sound like, himself? Here, too, he has a peculiar perch. The poems in this collection are written almost exclusively in syllabics--poems whose versification depends on the number of syllables per line, irrespective of where accents fall.

from The New York Times: 'Inner Voices': Art Is Everything

[Philip] Levine just wants to tell us why he writes poems, why anyone would bother to write poems: for the feeling, on those rare days, that you can take the world in and then push it out transformed, and that the process will seem ''automatic, this entering and exiting,/my body's essential occupation without which/I am a thing.''

from The New York Times: 'Breath': Can't Forget the Motor City

Clearly, wherever he lived, whether in Clarendon, Montego Bay or Spanish Town, [Claude] McKay felt comfortably close to nature in all its tropical excess. The repetition of the phrase, "the poinsettias red, blood-red in warm December", clearly indicates that the poem was written during the winter months of 1922 in the northern hemisphere when every tropical person unconsciously and inevitably thinks of their native land.

from The Jamaica Observer: The nostalgia of Claude McKay

Half a century on, welcoming [LeRoy] Breunig to New York, Annie Playden Postings had no idea that Kostro [Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky] had become [Guillaume] Apollinaire, that he was widely regarded as the greatest French poet of the 20th century, and that he had written poems about their love affair, which included one of his most remarkable achievements, "Song of the Poorly Loved". Breunig noted Annie's striking blue eyes, which were nevertheless, he said, "cold". The poem begins:

One foggy night in London town
A hoodlum who resembled so
My love came marching up to me -
The look he threw me caused my eyes
To drop and made me blush with shame

from Guardian Unlimited: To London, for love

About three-quarters of the way through ''A Different Person,'' the splendid 1993 memoir included in its entirety in James Merrill's ''Collected Prose,'' the poet himself runs into this wall: ''The very format of verse . . . suffices to obscure forever even the lyrics I've worked longest to make clear, whereas a page of my most devious and artificial prose will be greeted with relief: 'Now you've written something I can read!'''

from The New York Times: 'Collected Prose': James Merrill, Unversed

In ''Orpheus and Eurydice,'' a brilliant reimagining of the myth, written after the unexpected death of his much younger wife in 2003, [Czeslaw] Milosz conjures up Orpheus' return to the world:

Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

from The New York Times: 'Second Space': The Captive Body

The Prosecution Office has officially suggested the repeal of the death sentence of great Bulgarian poet Nikola Vaptsarov, sentenced and killed by firing squad by then ruling fascist regime on July 23, 1942 in Sofia.

from Sofia News Agency: Bulgaria Repealing Death Sentence of Great Poet

Fast-forward to the year 2004. The entire advisory board of the Miller project, including [Edwin Haviland] Miller himself, is now deceased, and there does not seem to be an end in sight. So [Walt] Whitman watchers can be forgiven a spell of confusion at this fall's news that the University of Iowa Press has brought out Volume VII of Whitman's writings, under a new publisher and a new editor.

This latest volume includes a very grim forward from an academic by the name of Ed Folson who is certainly aware of the curse Whitman's papers have over those who try to organize them.

from City Pages: Leaves of Ass

Considering that the Best American series is about as mainstream as poetry gets, it's tempting to view [Lyn] Hejinian's editorship as a signal that the guerrilla fighters are now riding into town to become sheriffs.

There are several problems with this picture, though, and the first is one that has long troubled American poets: for the average, engaged reader (the Best American's target audience), even fairly accessible poems can be maddeningly arcane. The second problem, which is related to the first, is that in the poetry world, even the insiders are outsiders.

from The New York Times: 'The Best American Poetry 2004': You, Too, Could Write a Poem

For the real need is not to sell books, but to create the conditions where a diverse range of poets, have time and money to devote significant time to their work for significant periods in their lives. And giving it away free might just be a first step towards this. Cast your bread on waters, goes the old saying, and it will come back buttered.

Of course this doesn't mean I'm going to give all my writing away for free. But why hang on to something that doesn't sell well anyway?

from The Age: Value-adding saves poetry for the masses

11/16/2004

Wilfred Owen is perhaps the most famous English poet of the First World War, but this is not one of his best-known poems.

Yet it is highly accomplished and profoundly moving, both as a tenderly respectful treatment of a dead soldier and as an emotionally intense meditation on the meaning and purpose of human life.

from Western News: 'All a poet can do to-day is warn'

[Siegfried Sassoon's] unpublished poem is a significant work because it demonstrates not only the dangers of generalisation but also how timing played a crucial role in writers' attitudes towards the war. It is quite clear from both its style and content that Sassoon's poem, for example, was written before he witnessed the reality of trench-life for himself at the end of 1915, while he was still able to believe that "the agony of wounds" would "make us clean".

from The Guardian: Truths written in blood

On the little island the wailing of cold, wild geese can be faintly heard.
The hero who has lost his way can talk meaninglessly of the sword.
The poet at the end of the road can only ascend a tower.
One should know that when the country is weak, the people's spirit dies.
Why else do we come to this place to be imprisoned?

- Poem on wall at Angel Island

from The Sacramento Bee: Walls that talk

After the outbreak of civil war in Nigeria in 1967, [Wole] Soyinka tried to negotiate a cease-fire with the Ibo secessionists. The government accused him of conspiring with the rebels and detained him, without trial, at the notorious Kaduna prison in northern Nigeria where he spent two years in solitary confinement.

He wrote extensively--mostly with homemade ink on toilet paper--during his incarceration.

from The Harvard Crimson: Nobel Winner On Survival

In "Queen Marie-Thérése & Nabo," he tells the story of a black dwarf from Dahomey given to the queen to show off her pale skin. After Nabo's death, she gives birth to a black baby who is spirited away:

The horse hooves
struck sparks from stone
as the royal carriage
rounded a hairpin curve
in the road, hurrying
a secret to the convent

from Philadelphia Inquirer: Pulitzer winner again addresses race in poetry collection

E.E. Cummings once said, "Poets and artists, especially in America, make me sick. What right has such a beggar to take on airs? I have no more interest or respect for a man because he can write a poem or paint a picture that can hang in the Louvre than I have for a man because he can fix the plumbing or design a beautiful motor car.

"I make poems because it is the thing I know how to do best. In fact, it's about the only thing I know how to do. America doesn't want poems badly enough to make it a profitable business to be engaged in."

from The Christian Science Monitor: i have found what you are like

It's not obvious why some of these books were chosen instead of others. The sentimental favorite is Donald Justice, long considered a major poet, unequaled as a craftsman. His "Collected Poems" was published just weeks after his death in August. The winner will be announced at a $1,000-a-plate black-tie ceremony in New York hosted by Garrison Keillor.

from The Christian Science Monitor: A look at the National Book Award Finalists/Poetry

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

How refreshing and joyful this poem is even though it is an apology with a hint of guilt. We know we are hearing poetry at it best.

from The Washington Times: 2 American Poets

And Plath, she reminds us, twice destroyed her husband's work--once by ripping it up and once by burning it.

Ariel itself, Plath's most celebrated book, is described as an "act of revenge". Of her mother's poetic process Frieda Hughes writes vividly but chillingly: "She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress."

from Daily Telegraph: My father was not a monster, says daughter of Ted Hughes

Dissatisfied with the Bengali plays being put on in Calcutta, [Michael Madhusudan] Dutt remarked to his friend Gour that he could do better. To prove his point he wrote "Sermista", which was an instant success and won him generous patrons.

The Michael Dutt every Bengali knows--the author of "Meghnadbadh", the fashioner of Bengali blank verse, the first Bengali sonneteer, the witty farceur--was launched. Only his letters to friends were still in English, in a crisp epistolary style modelled on Byron's.

from The Daily Star: Introducing South Asian Poetry In English: Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73)

Huang [Xiang] and his wife first visited Pittsburgh in July. When they saw the bluffs on Mount Washington, Huang proclaimed that he would carve the rock into a Rushmore-like poem as a gift to the city. Zhang convinced him to leave his mark on the house instead, so he painted his poetry -- in sweeping Chinese characters -- onto the exterior.

But that's not the end of it. On Sunday, Huang will read his poetry at The Mattress Factory. Mayor [Tom] Murphy has proclaimed it Huang Xiang Day in the City of Pittsburgh, and the poet sees that as the start of his civic involvement.

from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: The right to write: City gives safe harbor to exiled Chinese poet and his work

11/9/2004

"My heart sank, because I thought, 'There goes my work time,'" she [Rita Dove] says laughing. "But I had to accept, because I had to put my money where my mouth is. I've always felt poetry is something that every person can enjoy, but we've become afraid of it. Here was my chance to prove even the most challenging poetry can speak to someone."

During her tenure as poet laureate from 1993 to 1995, Dove decided that she would be "absolutely truthful" about what poetry is and what it means to her, to never be embarrassed or apologize for the special challenges posed by poetry to a nation weaned on journalism, raised on trashy novels, and addicted to television and video games.

from South Florida Sun-Sentinel: When Dove flies

And in "Fox Trot Fridays," [Rita] Dove displays the stylistic acumen that has brought her such acclaim:

Thank the stars there's a day each week to tuck in
the grief, lift your pearls, and stride brush stride
quick-quick with a heel-ball-toe. Smooth
as Nat King Cole's slow satin smile ...

Ah, yes, Nat King Cole's slow satin smile. What could be more American smooth than that?

from The Kansas City Star: In Rita Dove's hands, poetry kicks up its feet

Today, it is often a feature at memorial services for disasters where there has been a large loss of life, for example the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, or the 9/11 terror attack in New York in 2001. In Britain, a reading on the BBC television programme Bookworm in 1995 attracted more than 30,000 requests for copies. A year later, a Bookworm poll named it ?the Nation?s Favourite Poem?.

Born Mary Elizabeth Clark in Dayton, Ohio, Frye was orphaned at the age of 3 and moved to Baltimore when she was 12.

from The Times: Mary E. Frye

For [Kimberly Cloutier] Green of Kittery, and [Cappy] Whalen, of Portsmouth, it meant trying to understand one another?s process, and aesthetics through weekly work-sessions. They started by setting up outline and finding common ground.

"We agreed right away that we didn?t want the art to illustrate the poem, nor did we want the poem to narrate the art. We wanted to instead find some third form in which the written and visual images might co-exist in an organic and fully integrated way," she says. "We thought we could only achieve that if we discovered a third creative mind, if you will, some combination of the two of us."

from Portsmouth Herald: Voice finds its vision - Poet, painter collaborate on making visual images, written word co-exist

"It is not a revenge poem even though I am not a jogger, but I couldn't resist the ironic drama of killing off Richard in the flower of his vigorous life. He deserved better; he deserved immortality. May this poem help to keep his story alive. Onward, Richard!" [--Nancy Sullivan]

from The Providence Journal: Tom Chandler: The Laureates Choice--Nancy Sullivan

We might see our lives as separate from the downtrodden family in the car, but at the same time we realize that's not the case ("It's not hard to find them . . .") because by witnessing them at the moment they're dreaming of us ("dreaming of how we stand here watching them"), we're implicated in their struggle -- no, our struggle -- to live with dignity.

from The Oregonian: Di Piero poem engages subject's life, integrity

Why have the mullahs in Tehran tolerated such verse when other forms of literature have been banned or censored for mentioning alcohol, or what would be considered blasphemous content?

Talking to students and young people in Shiraz and other cities, the answer was a striking one.

Aside from the poets' popularity ensuring their continued availability, the official line appears to be that Khayyam and Hafez did not actually drink alcoholic wine.

from The Daily Star: Symbolic interpretations slip through Iranian ban

The Persian epic poet Firdausi - another name that is actually a descriptive term meaning "the heavenly one" - lived from circa 940-1020 and spent his lifetime writing the "Shah-Nameh" ("Book Of Kings"), a poetic history of Persian rulers from from about 3600 B.C. to A.D. 651. The poem, which totals some 60,000 couplets, had no Persian predecessor or successor of equal worth. Nearly all Iranian academics regard the "Shah-Nameh" as the highest expression of Persian genius in the epic poem form. Firdausi was praised in Iran for centuries as responsible for the revival of the Persian language and Iranian nationalism after hundreds of years of Arabic and Islamic influence.

from The Daily Star: The history of epicurean delights in Persian poetry

["Poem of Leave-taking from a Great Love" by Yitzhak Laor] ends with the words: "Do not speak of love of country, / Not out of pain of longing, / But because no one should love a graveyard, / And the smell of blossoms is / The smell of a slaughterhouse." And the reader, who rubs his eyes at the end of the reading, goes back again to the beginning of the poem and he does not understand at which moment all this began and how we got from beautiful Michal, from "the thick black mud / In the neighboring fields," to the smell of the slaughterhouse.

from Haaretz: A personal and political moment

[Allama] Iqbal was shaken by the tragic events of World War-I and the disaster the Muslims had to face. The genius had passed through the formative period. He had attained maturity as a poet, thinker, seer and crusader who could read the signs of tomorrow in the happenings of today, make predictions, present hard facts and unravel abstruse truths through the medium of poetry and ignite the flame of faith, Selfhood and courage by his own intensity of feeling and force of expression.

from Pakistan Times: Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal - an Ideologist, a Poet-Philosopher and a Spiritualist

Already in this vainglorious business
Delusions are possessing you,
Already, ferocity and brute force
Are labeling strength and valour,
The heresy "Long live Death!"" is already
Current among you, when life should always
Be cherished, as Christ in times gone by
Who gave us death yet was afraid to die.

But I found the greatest rebuke to the claim that Europe only changed Asia through force, not in [Luis Vaz de] Camoes' poetry, but in the physical space of the Camoes Garden. Within it is also a statute of Kim Tae-gon (Saint Andrew), who was educated in Macao and later martyred in the middle of the 19th century.

from The Korea Times: Camoes Garden in Macao

Louis Zukofsky is one of the most influential poets you have never heard of. A poet?s poet, or maybe even a poet?s poet?s poet, Zukofsky produced work that is mostly unknown, but that does not mean it is without consequence.

Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Zukofsky (1904-1978) is now acknowledged as one of the most important American poets of his generation.

from The University of Chicago Chronicle: Literary scholars to reassess writings of poet of obscurity

11/2/2004

"Poetry, before anything else, is sounds. A lot of nonsense has been written about 'the music of poetry,' but unless there is a music, a compelling rhythm of some kind, you really don't have a poem before you but something else. There are hundreds of different ways to make such rhythms, but the pleasure of making them sustains the mind and emotions with a strange kind of paradoxical joy even in the midst of engaging difficult and painful material." [--John Matthias]

from South Bend Tribune: An American poet: 'New Selected Poems' gathers something old, new by Matthias

When [Gary] Snyder climbed its 9,677-foot summit for the first time on Aug. 13, 1945, he was 15 years old, and the mountain's dynamism lay deep underground. Because of its gentle slopes and perfect dome, hikers referred to it as the Mt. Fuji of the West, and the explosion in 1980 altered that image forever. "Nature is not a book," Snyder says. "It's a performance." And he brings that performance to life through an interplay of prose and poetry, reflection and association.

from Los Angeles Times: Mountain as muse

"In my generation, we walked under a very dark sky. And that was the main reason that affects the poet. Some people didn't write about it because they were scared or because they were not real poets. But I am a poet. I have to write exactly what I feel. The other poetry people wrote about a little teapot or a flower, but how do you describe your emotions on paper and (communicate to the reader) the feeling (you have) - pride, pity, an emotion? That's poetry. Not 'I'm going to fight the Americans' or 'I hate those people,' that's not poetry." [--Dos Nguyen]

from The Sacramento Bee: Poet universal: Dos Nguyen puts Vietnamese poetry - including his own - into English and gives voice to a culture

With the onset of the Vietnam war [Denise] Levertov asked hard questions of herself. What form, she wanted to know, should the poem take when the thing pressing itself on the consciousness is not thrown water but burning flesh? How can one carry on, in good faith, revealing the beautiful in the full knowledge of the world's horror? How, in other words, do you sit down to write a poem when there are pictures of men being tortured on the front page of your morning paper? Levertov's response to these questions was, as she saw it, to set the unimportant things aside.

from Guardian Unlimited: Lay down that history

I believe that the religions are crucial in explaining existence. I mean that I am most interested in the stories that give theology its source. I think Imam Ali's image, which turned out to be a mythological figure is challenging, especially the story of Kerbela or I become emotional when I remember the cries of "Hussein Hussein!!" when I am in Iran. However, I am distant from such a state-centered Alevi concept - that is which competes with Sunnis and imitates their institutions. Let me say something funny. I think it's a crime against humanity to take an old Alevi "dede", [spiritual leader], from his village in Maras and fly him by plane to make a speech in a German association. [--Bejan Matur]

from Zaman Daily Newspaper: Bejan Matur: Leyla Zana should Throw her Scarf on the Ground!

Derek Walcott had an actual twin brother, the playwright Roderick Walcott, an expatriate to Canada who, in a further doubleness, distinguished himself by fostering a homegrown theater in their native St. Lucia. His death in 2000 is a sorrow that recurs in ''The Prodigal'':

March 11. 8:35 a.m. Guadalajara, Saturday.
Roddy. Toronto. Cremated today.
The streets and trees of Mexico covered with ash.
Your soul, my twin, keeps fluttering in my head. . . .

from The New York Times: 'The Prodigal': The Wanderer

He calls for total eradication of amateur poets and of "postmoderns".

[Don] Paterson accuses the former of "infantilising" the art of poetry. "Many people feel that, armed with a beermat, a pencil, and a recent mildly traumatic experience, they are entitled to send 100 pages of handwritten drivel into Faber or Cape."

from Guardian Unlimited: Pinter's poetry? Anyone can do it

[Billy] Collins said one of the reasons high school students are turned off from poetry is because there is a tendency for students to feel interrogated about poems they read, especially about theme.

"There are only so many themes," he said. "There are only a couple things to write about."

Collins said a poet becomes original when he or she has developed mannerisms or language that makes an old idea seem fresh again.

from Lincoln Journal: Poetry at work: Collins speaks to students

A judge yesterday said it was "bizarre" for a former Holliston High teacher to give sexually explicit poems to a 16-year-old female student, but said the actions were not illegal.

Richard Melpignano, 58, of Bellingham was cleared after Framingham District Court Judge Robert Greco ruled that the poems' contents did not measure up to the legal standard to convict him of disseminating harmful material to a minor.

from MetroWest Daily News: Former teacher found innocent: Poems, although 'bizarre,' do not violate state law

Further, let's be reminded something basic about humanity as we know it: When we punish people for their feelings and leanings alone, we are punishing ourselves and our community. When we do it to our children, we are building the bombs of the future who will explode in our faces.

from Star Tribune: H. Edgar Hix: Punished for expressing his feelings in poetry

Like the medieval cathedrals that found a place for gargoyles alongside saints, Dante gives us what we seem to want in our popular celebrations of Halloween: masks, disguises, and the momentary thrill of being scared. But, through Virgil, he warns us against inordinate fascination with vice and the grotesque. Dante also gives us a sense of the significance of the liturgical celebrations of All Saints and All Souls, celebrations now ignored in the onslaught of Halloween activities.

from National Review: Dante at Halloween: There?s nothing scarier than Hell

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