“We think of Dante as a poet who concentrated and defended the medieval order. The medieval order evidently did not want to be concentrated and defended by a poet, for the works of Dante were publicly burnt by Pope John XXII.”
Source: “The Translation of Poetry”, a lecture delivered by Allen Tate in 1970 at an International Poetry Festival hosted by the Library of Congress. This talk has been reproduced in BU’s journal of translation, Pusteblume, edited by Core professor Sassan Tabatabai. Find the lecture online here.
