I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them.  My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience.   In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum:      I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes:   “. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”   Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector.   Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova:   “You pilgrims walking by oblivious, Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand, Can you have come from such a distant land— The way you look suggests as much to us— That you’re not weeping, even as you pass Right through the suffering city, like that band Of people who, it seems, don’t understand A thing about the measure of its loss?   “If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear About it all—so says my sighing heart— Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave. For she who blessed the city is nowhere In sight: what words about her we impart Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.”   Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’” [Photos by David Kurp.]

Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a reader asks. His assumption, never directly articulated, is that reading is compensation for the absence of something far more important. I suppose people have been facing such suspicions at least since Freud’s arrival on the scene. Busybodies flatter themselves by uncovering previously unsuspected motives in others. Think of it as amateur psychology practiced as a self-congratulating hobby. One of my favorites among Clive James’ books is Late Readings, published in 2015, four years before his death from cancer. “Late” is redolent of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” James writes about the books he knows will be among the last he ever reads, including those by Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning – all superb choices. A line in his introduction comes to mind: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” That almost sounds like a pep talk. If something has worked for more than six decades, reliably supplying pleasure and learning, why stop now? James continues: “Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.”

“Sometimes the what takes over so much that the how disappears. I think poetry works best when these are indistinguishable, when they keep such good balance that you don't feel you're being preached to or grasping at the abstract.”  Back in the early 1990s I had a chance to meet Robert Creeley. A friend was a graduate student in English, and he and his doctoral adviser were meeting the poet for coffee. I was invited but I couldn’t come up with a good reason to meet Creeley. “Celebrities” had lost their attraction years before. As a reporter I occasionally had to interview a writer whose work didn’t interest me. I knew how to enter that professional mode, but why waste my time and his? Creeley’s poems had always seemed anorexic, pale and underfed, barely holding on to life – scrawnier versions of William Carlos Williams’ poems. In a word, boring.   The passage quoted at the top is spoken by the Dominican-born American poet Rhina P. Espaillat in a 2015 interview. She identifies precisely the reason so much contemporary poetry is unreadably dull. The what dominates, as in strident adolescent diary entries – or poems. The how gets ignored into non-existence. Creeley’s lines are instantly forgettable. They don’t register as they grasp at the abstract.  Contrast his work with “Workshop,” a poem by Espaillat:   “‘Where have you been,’ says my old friend the poet, ‘and what have you been doing?’ The question weighs and measures me like an unpaid bill, hangs in the air, waiting for some remittance.   “Well, I’ve been coring apples, layering them in raisins and brown sugar; I’ve been finding what's always lost, mending and brushing, pruning houseplants, remembering birthdays.   “The wisdom of others thunders past me like sonic booming; what I know of the world fits easily in the palm of one hand and lies quietly there, like a child’s cheek.   “Spoon-fed to me each evening, history puts on my children’s faces, because they are the one alphabet all of me reads. I’ve been setting the table for the dead,   “rehearsing the absence of the living, seasoning age with names for the unborn. I’ve been putting a life together, like supper, like a poem, with what I have.”   Plenty of content there -- “history / puts on my children’s faces” – accompanied by plenty of how. Is it a “domestic” poem, an account of caring for family? The most important of jobs. “I’ve been setting the table for the dead.” Espaillat continues in her interview:   “Many poets today have been confused into believing that adherence to forms is for minor works. William Carlos Williams ‘blessed’ us with that idea: that if you’re really a grown-up poet you throw out the sonnets. I think he did us a great disservice.”

I owe a significant chunk of my education to the existence of paperback books. By “education” I don’t mean what I pretended to do while in the company of professors, though many of them assigned books published in soft covers. I mean self-assigned literature, beginning as a kid with all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ various pulpy series (Tarzan, Pellucidar, Amtor, John Carter), followed by a brief but intense enthusiasm for science fiction. I recall an oddly fetishistic fondness for books published by Ace Books. I collected the paperback reprints of Mad magazine, and I remember working weekends at Kwik Kar Wash at age twelve and packing a paperback with my lunch. I worked beside an old man, Elijah Waters, who told me he never read books in paperback because they were “low-class.”  Paperbacks had precursors in the nineteenth century but they burgeoned in the 1930s in England with Allen Lane and his Penguin Books. By the nineteen-sixties, they were still inexpensive. The base-price for mass-market editions was thirty-five to fifty cents. Larger or more prestigious books – the Oscar Williams poetry anthologies, for instance, published by Washington Square Press -- might go for $1.25 or even higher, which seemed extravagant. I remember reluctantly shelling out extra money in Avallone’s Pharmacy for a paperback edition of Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (1966). Today, paperbacks are shelved indiscriminately among my hard covers: In Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades (1960), Phyllis McGinley includes “Dirge for an Era,” a poem from the fifties, in a section called “Laments and Praises.” It begins:   “O! do you remember Paper Books When paper books were thinner? It was all so gay In that far-off day When you fetched them home At a quarter a tome . . .”   McGinley writes of a time before I was around, when paperback were cheaper still and most were popular books, mysteries and romances. They contained “never a taint of Culture.” In contrast:   Cluttering bookstore counters,     In stationer’s windows preening, The Paperbacks Now offer us facts On Tillich and Sartre And abstract artre    And Life’s Essential Meaning . . .”   McGinley has an eye for shifts in the culture and the pretensions of the middle class.   “You pack your trunk and you’re at the station But what do you find for a journey’s ration? Books by Aeschylus, books by Chaucer, Books about atom or flying saucer, Books of poetry, deep books, choice books, Pre-Renaissance and neo-Joyce books, In covers chaste and a prose unlurid. Books that explore my id and your id, Never hammock or summer-porch books But Compass, Evergreen, Anchor, Torch Books, Books by a thousand stylish names And everywhere, everywhere, Henry James.”   The rhymes “Chaucer”/“flying saucer” and “unlurid”/”your id” are good. So are, in the next stanza, “thrilling”/“Trilling” and “to read”/”seldom Gide.”