“Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or overpraised their greatest mediaeval poet, it is certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach qualities, which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm.”

— Wolfram von Eschenbach

George Saintsbury The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897) p. 251.
Criticism

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Wolfram von Eschenbach 23

German knight and poet 1170–1220

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“By common consent, Wolfram is the greatest medieval poet before Dante.”

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Victor Duruy (trans. E. H. & M. D. Whitney) The History of the Middle Ages (New York: H. Holt, 1891) p. 338.
Criticism

“Dante would not have forgotten: they say that when Dante was a boy, he was asked: Dante what is the best food? to test his memory. Eggs, replied Dante. Years later, when Dante was a grown man, he was asked only: how? and Dante replied: fried. p30”

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“"The bread of the stranger is bitter," says Dante, "and his staircase hard to climb." But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor companion of an old lady of quality?”

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“That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo.”

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“Dante's corpus as a whole is in certain respects like a testament to the closing medieval age; it shows what the Western world would have been had it not broken from its tradition.”

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“To paraphrase the great poet Dante, the heavens swirl above us and our eyes are still cast to the ground.”

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“The Satan of the Italian and English poets may be poetic; but the German Satan is satanic; and thus one could say that Satan is a German invention.”

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Der Satan der italienischen und englischen Dichter mag poetischer sein; aber der deutsche Satan ist satanischer; und insofern könnte man sagen, der Satan sei eine deutsche Erfindung.
Athenäumsfragmente 379; the Italian and English poets referred to are Dante, and John Milton.
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)

“Henry Kissinger is possessed of a truly superior intelligence, in addition to which he has two qualities which, unfortunately, many great men lack: he is able to listen and he has a very subtle sense of humour.”

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Page 144
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“Insulting the Prophet is something that has been going on in Europe for a very long time. In Dante's Inferno, if you're interested in the 28th Canto, where Dante is being taken on his conducted tour of hell and guided by Virgil, he comes across the Prophet Mohammed in the course of his eternal damnation. He is punished I quote Dante's words, as a seminator di scandalo e di scisma, a sower of scandal and of schism. Now, this is very insulting. In the great Cathedral of Bologna there is a wonderful set of pictures painted, if I remember rightly, in the 15th century depicting scenes from Dante's Inferno, including some very graphic pictures of Mohammed being tortured in hell by the devil very graphic.
Nobody did anything about this. A couple of years ago, the leaders of the Italian-Muslim community sent a polite request to the cathedral saying these are insulting to Muslims; would they mind covering those pictures. The cathedral administration said they would consider it. Nothing happened. The pictures are still in view.”

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Wolfram von Eschenbach 23

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