To return to McGann's essay, hit the Back links,
which will take you to the beginning of the numbered
citation.
1. The Romantic Agony (Meridian Books: New York, 1960), pp. 26-27. Back
2. John of Antioch, for example (Frag. Hist. Graec., iv. 539, fr. 1, 8), says that "The Gorgon was a beautiful courtesan whose loveliness so astonished everyone who saw her that they seemed to be turned to stone." Back
3. See Ovid, Metamorphoses , Books iv and v. Back
4. Italienische Reise , Pt. II, April 1788. Quoted in Praz, p. 46. Back
[Note five has been replaced with a link to the Romantic Circles electronic edition of Shelley's poem.]
6. Neville Rogers, "Shelley and the Visual Arts," KSMB , 12 (1961), 10. Back
7. Of course, Shelley's phrase refers directly to the Medusa's character. But he believed that all transcendent human qualities had their analogues, or natural metaphors, in the world of seasonal flux. Back
8. Shelley was probably inspired to this image by the painting, which shows a large and gruesome moth hovering in the mist above Medusa. Back
9. Neville Rogers, op. cit., p. 16, discusses the Virgilian echo in the phrase. Back
10. "The Theatre of Cruelty (First Manifesto)," in chapter 7 of The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, Evergreen Books, 1958). Back
11. The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. 106. All Pater citations are to this volume and appear in the text, unless otherwise indicated. Back
12. Pater expressed this favorite opposition of his, in Hellenic terms, in the following way: "Scarcely a wild or melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by Greek polytheism! What should we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek religion? . . . The Dorian worship of Apollo. . . , always opposed to the sad Christian divinities, is the aspiring element, by force and spring of which Greek religion sublimes itself. . . . It was the privilege of Greek religion to be able to transform itself into an artistic ideal" (203-04). Back
13. Essays and Studies (London: Chano and Windus, 1911), pp. 319-20. Back
14. Praz, op. cit., p. 387. The neglect of d'Annunzio's achievement as a poet--a very great one--is largely attributable to Praz's famous judgements upon him in The Romantic Agony, a set of partisan negative attitudes only excusable because the poet was the critic's countryman. The real basis for Praz's animus is not a pleasant one to contemplate, but is clearly set out a pp. 385-86.Back
15. The crucial texts are d'Annunzio's great poem "Gorgon" and Jung's Aion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 126-37.Back
16. The Earthly Paradise (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871 ), 111, 393. Back
17. Ibid., 1, 142. Back
18. "The Philosophy of Composition," in The Works of Edgar Allen Poe, ed. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry (New York: Scribner's, 1927), VI, 39. Back
19. The Earthly Paradise, ed. cit., I, 168-69. Back
20. "Aspecta Medusa," in The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti , ed. W. M. Rossetti, (London, 1890), I, 357. Back
21. Complete Poetical Works, ed. cit., p. 761. Back
22. Daryl Hine, Minutes (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 45. Back