"Rarely was a poet so conscious of his craft, of how his thoughts were faithfully incarnated in his words, both as sense and as sound. I can’t think of any other poet who with such hubris dares us, his readers, to follow him on the sea of invention and discovery that he is himself fording for the first time, while proudly telling us to ‘wheel about’ because our puny crafts (except for a few happy ones) cannot cross the ocean he is about to cross: ‘Do not set out,’ he warns us at the beginning of Paradiso, ‘on depths where, losing me, you’ll lose yourselves.’" Alberto Manguel PN Review

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