Loving Herodias

My essay on Heine and Dante (in fact, on idealized love for Beatrice vs Herodias) appears on the main First Things website this morning. Heinrich Heine remains my moral compass, not because he got everything right (he got many things hideously wrong until the very end of his life) but because he always was all in. He went after his friends with the same gusto as he went after his enemies when they did stupid things, and he took no prisoners. More to the point, he understood how personal the political was. I can’t recommend too highly his utterly weird epic poem  Atta Troll. Several translations are available via Google books. Better yet, learn German, and then read Atta Troll. Unlike Dante, to whom Virgil says, “Non ti curar’ di lor, ma guarda e passa” (Don’t worry about them, but look and move on), Heine gets involved with the damned. It is over the top. Whenever too many people seem to like my work, I worry that I have become complacent, and go back to Heine for inspiration.