What is the temperature in Hell? Is it hot or cold?

Brad Leithauser writes about hot Hells and cold Hells, from Dante to Robert Frost: http://nyr.kr/15woO2r

The heat I’m talking about has little to do with traditional hellfire. It’s the hell of overheated emotions. Wind is a prevailing weather condition: gusts of storming rage. Molten waves of unrequited lust break and sprawl on its rocky shores. It’s a place where rationality collapses. Nothing is predictable. You can’t count on your adversary for anything—even to act in his own self-interest. His fury may be such that he’d embrace mutual destruction before seeing you escape his wrath…

The evil genius of Cold Hell typically takes the form of a designing schemer. It’s a spider—or a wizened, dark, spidery wizard. It’s Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Moriarty. It’s Fu Manchu. It’s the flattering, unctuous creature that proffers a tainted apple, whether the Bible’s serpent or Snow White’s witch…

“It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness—pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited…”

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frost’s death. Here, Joshua Rothman looks at the poet’s two sides: http://nyr.kr/VSHmr5

Photograph: Library of Congress.

Ian Crouch looks at a brief history of Inaugural poems, from Robert Frost to Elizabeth Alexander, and tells us what we should listen for when Richard Blanco reads his poem on Monday: http://nyr.kr/13MvxHv

Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart/National Geographic/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)