This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

Chapter 5 offers a probing survey of late reflections on nationhood in the context of the German Empire, focusing on Engelbert of Admont, Dante Alighieri, and Marsiglio of Padua. By 1300, radical changes to the political landscape – especially the curtailing of imperial power and the rise of independent territorial kingdoms – prompted medieval thinkers to rethink and refine the principles of political order, resulting in two broad currents of thought: renewed imperialism and defenses of territorial monarchy. Medieval proponents of empire, despite their different argumentative approaches and strategies, treat a number of similar problems: the source of imperial authority, the end and purpose of world government, and the legitimacy of the empire’s claim to universal rule, that is, over all nations of the world. While Engelbert and Dante aim to reconcile national pluralism and political unity through some variant of legal pluralism, Marsiglio suggests that the various national communities that are part of the empire have to consent to imperial rule, offering explicit normative criteria for multinational politics.

In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

This chapter situates the sixteenth-century drive to define ’Englishness’ through literature within a broader European context, charting the widespread efforts to reify ’national character’ through the production of standardised grammars for vernaculars and assertions of their peculiar grace. After surveying early modern thought on the relationship between language, nation and empire, the chapter discusses the particular strategy adopted by English writers (centrally Puttenham and Sidney) to establish the very peripheral barbarousness of the English tongue as a proof of its distinction, before pointing at the close towards the emerging role of empire in underpinning notions of Englishness.

This concluding chapter turns from inquisitional procedure to the inquisition as an institution. The first part of the chapter examines the tale of the good man and the inquisitor (1.6). The second part argues that when Boccaccio responds to his nameless critics, he puts himself in the role of the good man and treats his critics as inquisitors. In mounting his defense, Boccaccio compares his situation to that of Dante’s; both must contend with the talk of the crowd. Yet instead of transcending common talk, Boccaccio answers it: he parries his critics’ talk, their novelle, with another novella (recounting a tale about a hermit’s son’s sexual awakening). Dante responds to an inquisition against him by ensnaring his judges within a more encompassing inquisitorial trial. Boccaccio turns their monologue into a dialogue, their whispered criticisms into an open rhetorical contest, their secret denunciation into an accusatorial trial.

Surrealism is thought to have taken a very firm stance against the genre of the novel, a view based in much of the work of André Breton, who championed surrealist poetry and inveighed against the bourgeois commercialism of the realist novel. Yet the story is more complicated, and needs to be seen more broadly. This essay begins by contextualizing what André Breton meant in the 1920s by ’the novel’, in a kinship with a larger tradition of writers not formally associated with surrealism, especially Marcel Proust. Starting from Breton’s Nadja and L’amour fou, this essay tells the secret story of the production and circulation of the intellectual ideas that went into Breton’s fictions, but also of their ramifications through other world writers and filmmakers: from Dante, Nerval, and Proust to filmmakers like the Chilean Raúl Ruiz in Time Regained and the Italian Paolo Sorrentino in La grande bellezza. Through the complex network opened by Breton’s theoretical and literary texts, the novel changes significantly across this history, overlapping with poetry, the essay, autobiography, and with art film today.

Liminal spaces of waiting and expectation are at the centre of this chapter that focuses on Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The chapter draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s study Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and on Daniela Caselli’s Beckett’s Dantes (2005), but it also takes the idea of purgatory to describe a dynamic, permeable space for intertextual dialogue. I argue that the texts of Beckett, Dante and Shakespeare do not appear as stable entities but rather are in flux and resonate with one another. Beckett’s recourse to purgatory is therefore not only the adaptation of a space for the imagination of medieval readers, but also a means of reflecting on the processes in which literary space is constructed. A main part of the chapter is devoted to the reading of ‘Dante and the Lobster‘ in dialogue with Hamlet and King Lear and also with the poetry of Thomas MacGreevy, from which many of its themes derive. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and Hamlet converge on the notion of pause, and the chapter examines the ways in which both works become mutually interanimating in their reflections on dualisms, between human being and animal, Christ and the lobster, beginning and end, hesitation and rashness, fear and the embrace of death.

This Afterword acknowledges the powerful role played by philology, and especially Germanic philology, in determining the shape of nations, especially after World War I. The search for absolute beginning, nationally inflected, can serve foundationalist aims, but the pluralized beginnings of this volume work quite differently. Many poets and writers, especially women of colour, find beginning qualities in medieval texts that help free up their own creativity. The volume’s productive distinction between openings and beginnings is here tested on the early Middle English Orrmulum. The influential model of a unified, integrative model vision of Rome-centred Latinity, proposed by E. R. Curtius, is here counterposed to a multi-centred understanding of European space, with due reference to Arabic, Hebrew, Byzantine Greek, Church Slavonic, Slavic, Armenian, and other traditions. The relationship of language and text to territory is problematized, with the space of Europe constituted not by firm boundaries but by complex vectoring and overlapping; Greek, Czech, and East Slavonic, often isolated, here join a pan-European conversation in which vernaculars engage fruitfully with learned and prestigious languages. The volume unshowily affirms the continuing need for philology, for the institutions that sustain it, and for the consequent necessity of collaboration, sharing what we know.

This chapter entertains four questions: first, what are hope’s conceptual relations to the other theological virtues, faith and love? Second, is there eternal hope for some people only, or for everyone – for the rich as well as the poor, for non-Christians as well as Christians? (I argue that Dante, in the Divine Comedy, offers some salvation hope for his pagan guide, Virgil.) Third, is hope inherently self-regarding or not? Fourth, does hope come to an end, as no longer necessary, when eternal life is fully inhabited – or does it continue eternally? In some accounts, hope will no longer be necessary once the kingdom comes, and God is all in all. Yet my chapter title refers to hope as a component of eternal life, hope that motivates eternally. The theological belief that souls eternally strive for perfection is developed in the Greek writings of the early Church Father St. Gregory of Nyssa.

This chapter addresses the advent of Nothing within the history of religions as an advent necessarily within literature, and within the ritual enactments of literature as sacred. If the Commedia of Dante is our most profoundly heterodox work while at the same time our most purely orthodox, then Joyce is the late modern counterpart of Dante, and Finnegans Wake is not only the final epic of late modernity, but also at once deeply primordial and apocalyptic, so that its pure heterodoxy is nonetheless a profoundly liturgical work. Only the advent of a uniquely modern Nothing makes possible this universal liturgical celebration. This Nothing is more primal in the Wake than the liturgical movement of anamnesis, but this is an anamnesis of the fall, condemnation, and crucifixion of H.C.E. or Here Comes Everybody, repeated again and again, even as the host is ever broken in the mass. Thus the epic becomes our only purely liturgical epic, embodying a pure action that is a purely ritual action, one truly irresistible to all who actually encounter it as a liturgical mode of being, which is our most sacred mode.

This chapter analyses Simmel’s worldview during his early period (until ca. 1900). It argues that Simmel held an unusually optimistic view regarding the contradictions of modernity at that time, subscribing to the idea that modern differentiation leads to a comprehensive unity which naturally emerges from variety. This claim is supported by an analysis of Simmel’s writings of the period, starting from his early monograph on Dante and ending with his early sociology and his interpretation of Kant’s philosophy. In respect of sociology, it is argued that the young Simmel subscribed to a kind of reductionist sociologism in the spirit of the founders of Völkerpsychologie, Lazarus and Steinthal. In respect of Kant, it is argued that the young Simmel conceived of his thought as the ultimate philosophical solution to the problems of modernity, and that he distanced himself from Kant once he began to doubt the possibility of reconciling the contradictions of modernity.

A cliché of Heaney criticism is that his poetry can be divided into two phases: an earlier one of bog and body, a later one of air and spirit. It is less frequently observed that a third phase emerged in the late Heaney. His poems no longer treat body or spirit as a binary but explore the catalytic relationship between them, and the constant movement, between time and eternity, between the past and the present, between the represented and the representation, between history and memory, between filiation and affliliation. His poetry never erupted into a fulminating rage against the killings of the Troubles as an inevitable consequence of a rancid politics. A therapeutic function is fundamental to Heaney’s poetry. Violence enters his poetry as painful and wounding divisions, to which his poetry is applied as a healing ointment.

Heaney’s translation work not only registered his engagement with literary history, and an evolving awareness of his position in the poetic world, but it was an intrinsic aspect of his poetics more generally. Specifically, Heaney spoke of how Frost’s notion of the ‘sound of sense’ lay at the root of both his poetry and his mode of ‘impure translation’. As a result, translational fidelity, for Heaney, privileged the uncovering of echoes that might capture and recreate the sound of the original text. This chapter charts how this conception of translation found expression in his renderings, in particular, of Sophocles, Dante, Virgil, Sweeney Astray and Beowulf. Focusing on the diverse dramas of fidelity these translations embody, this chapter explores how these texts assert his native soundscape’s ability to convey classics of world literature while, at the same time, they also defamiliarize and profitably disrupt Heaney’s domestic linguistic and cultural world.

In lectures and interviews, Seamus Heaney spoke candidly and revealingly about the influence of T.S. Eliot on his poetry and poetics. There was never an immediate or instinctive allegiance; rather, it was an acquired taste, a matter of having to ‘grow up’ to Eliot. Eliot’s essays shaped Heaney’s own prose writings in the early 1970s and Eliot’s idea of the ‘auditory imagination’ had a profound effect on his critical methods. Increasingly, Eliot’s example in Four Quartets gave sustenance to Heaney’s poetry. ‘Little Gidding’ came to be seen by Heaney as an exemplary instance of how the imagination might endure the destruction of war, while the mystical qualities of Four Quartets helped to shape the visionary poetics of Seeing Things. In the later work, Eliot’s presence is pervasive and subtly assimilated, often manifesting itself in Heaney’s adaptations of Virgil and Dante.