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From the beginning of the Divine Comedy — ‘where the sun is silent’ — to the final vision of light, the poem is a carefully ordered hierarchy of light and shadows. We are not only asked to see clearly but we are asked to see qualitatively, to distinguish degrees of light and kinds of vision. It is in the last canto of the Paradiso that the degree of light is most intense and that our attention is called to a unique kind of seeing. With extraordinary insistence, Dante repeats some form of the verb vedere (to see) or a derivative there-of every few lines. The transition from time to eternity and from the finite to the infinite makes all the more sophisticated resources of language inadequate, and one must revert to a childlike form of emphasis, mere repetitions. This simplest of rhetorical devices is, by some miracle of art, adequate for the expression of the most unimaginable of possible experiences. In every line we feel something of Dante's joy in the possession of a ‘novella vista’ and his rapture in the divine vision, an effect conveyed by the very struggle to express the inexpressible. The struggles of course are those of Dante the pilgrim; Dante the poet is in perfect control of his artistic resources, and it is through the masterly rendering of inadequacy that the whole presentation becomes — paradoxically — adequate.

Both Dante and Plato inherited from the past a complex of attitudes, legends and literature about love, and in both cases it was a special kind of love, love as an ennobling passion. Plato confronted the problem of so-called Dorian love, imported into cultured Attica from the Dorian regions of Greece where it had formed part of the ethos of a warrior class. It soon became a widespread practice, and in its most refined form it was conceived of as a passion which made the warrior brave and engendered civic as well as military virtues. The stories of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Cratinus and Aristodemus, the later versions of the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, all testify to the military and civic heroism which was believed to emerge from this form of masculine affection.

BABIES NEED FATHERS, TOO, by Rhoda Kellogg. New York: Comet Press, 1953. 256 pp. $3.50DIAGNOSTIC MANUAL IN SPEECH CORRECTION, A Professional Training Workbook, by Wendell Johnson, Frederic L. Darley, and Duane C. Spriestersbach. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952. viii + 221 pp.SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE PRODUCTION: THEN AND NOW, by Cecile de Banke. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1953. xviii + 342 pp. $6.00THE AGE OF DANGER: MAJOR SPEECHES ON AMERICAN PROBLEMS, edited by Harold F. Harding. New York: Random House, 1952. xiv + 561 pp. $2.45RADIO ENGLISH, by Florence Felten French, William B. Levenson, and Vera Cober Rockwell. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Cober Rockwell. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1952. xiii + 368 pp.BROADCASTING PROJECTS: RADIO AND TELEVISION, a Manual for students, by Henry L. Ewbank and Sherman P. Lawton. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953. v + 152 pp.