General Introduction
– Disappointing David Grubbs
– Listener feedback
– Stroking and broking the ego
– (Yeah, my math is off)
– A correction
– Theologico et Ratio
Translations
– Old Lady Sayers
– End notes, not footnotes
– Reproducing rhyme and meter
– Ciardi’s middle ground
– Musa, king of Dante
– Wikipedia as savior
– The advantages of reading in translation
Footnotes
– C.S. Lewis gets snobby
– Thundercats and Plutarch
– Spreading our ignorance
Poet and Persona
– It gets better
– Guelphs and Gibilines
– Who is Beatrice?
– How much biography is necessary?
– The pleasures of rereading
Poet as Synthesizer
– Dante’s debt to the Nicomachean Ethics
– How approachable is Aristotle?
– The Philosopher says these things
– Looking up the footnotes
– Nathan’s favorite Thomist
– Social virtue
Medieval Cosmology
– David lectures
– What Lewis says
– Hierarchies and boundaries
Virgil
– The Guide
– Soul-sorting in The Aeneid
– Violating the social contract
– Dante’s poetic furniture
– How good is The Aeneid?
– David defends Orlando Furioso
Mythological Sources
– The absence of Homer
– The venerable Edith Hamilton
Later Dantes
– Hart Crane goes underground
– Cheever’s suburban inferno
– The Burial of the Dead
– O’Connor’s Purgatory
– Who hears Prufrock’s story?
Our Advice
– Read the other two!
– Don’t try to understand every reference
– Train yourself
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. New York: Hackett, 1999.
Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Vintage, 2000.
Crane, Hart. The Bridge. New York: Liveright, 1992.
Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: NAL, 2003.
—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandlebaum. New York: Bantam, 1982. 3 volumes.
—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. 3 volumes.
—. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1955. 3 volumes.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. New York: Norton, 2000.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Back Bay, 1998.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.
—. The Great Divorce. New York: HarperOne, 2009.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. South Bend, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1998.
O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2010.