In art, gusto is the excitement of the imagination that gives full expression to the dynamic character of an object.
According to William Hazlitt (1778-1830) in his essay “On Gusto,” gusto is “power or passion defining any object.”
Gusto unites the senses as “the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another.” Michelangelo’s sculptures, says Hazlitt, “are full of gusto.”
In the 1964 play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window by Lorraine Hans-berry, it was located in Greenwich Village, New York City.
Maud Gonne did not marry William Butler Yeats, the poet who made the actress famous through his poems of unrequited love. In 1903, after knowing Yeats for fourteen years, Gonne married Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary characterized by Yeats as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” MacBride was executed for his role in the Easter Rebellion…
Chaucer’s pilgrims are going to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket, former archbishop of Canterbury. Becket had been assassinated in the cathedral in 1170, following a political disagreement with King Henry II. Pilgrimage to the shrine was a popular journey at the time the Tales were written (c. 1387-1400).
Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
As set forth by scholastic theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), the seven deadly sins are: anger, covetousness, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth.
The full name of Antonia in Willa Cather’s novel My Antoniais is Antonia Shimerda, eldest daughter of a Bohemian family in Black Hawk, Nebraska.