| Author Quoted | Dante Alighieri |
| Title Quoted | Paradiso. English & Italian. The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1939/10/09 |
| Imprint | London : Dent [etc.]. 1936 |
| Quotation | Began reading Dante's Paradiso today, out of Douglaston, after Mass. More splendid than anything else before it. He starts by praying to achieve a much higher kind of writing than in the Hell and Purgatory, to fit his much higher subject: and he does. Everything is now made plain: movements are swift and easy (arrows) and the "keel" of the poetry cuts the water in a swift, straight furrow now. Perhaps it is easier to write well of difficulty - the hard climb of the mountain of Purgatory - than of the swift and breathtaking and yet unnoticed movement through nine spheres of heaven... But because heaven is, of itself, a better subject than hell and a higher one, so, with the writing being good enough and hig enough to reach the height of this subject, the Paradiso is the greatest of the three books. |
| Quotation Source | Run to the mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 1, 1939-1941.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1995, p. 45 |
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| Link to Merton's Copy |
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