A reissue of Rexroth's 1969 "Classics Revisited" series, which
originally appeared in Saturday Review. Rexroth, the late poet,
translator, and essayist, had presented the series as "basic
documents in the history of the imagination." They are that,
ranging from Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, down
through Tacitus, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius, across the
centuries to Malory, Cervantes, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, to the
moderns, such as Flaubert, Rimbaud, Mark Twain, and Chekhov - 60
selections in all. His purpose, which emerges clearly throughout,
is to show how all great literature, demonstrates, as he says, "a
human face - yours and mine." The great irony that he discovers as
the common distinguisher of all great literature is that "it is all
so ordinary. "This ordinariness stems from the fact that we are all
so ordinary and all great writing is, simply, a chronicle of Man.
The bond of mankind spans millenia, so that, as Rexroth writes in
his Livy essay, "both Corneille and Henry Adams look to Livy for
their patterns of contemporary noble conduct. "Rexroth did not hold
to a naive vision of mankind as never-changing, however. In his
essay on Chekhov, for instance, he compares Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides to Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov: ". . .If we go
directly from a performance of [Antigone] to Chekhov's Three
Sisters, it is difficult not to believe that the men of Classic
times were different from us, a different kind of men." The
omissions are as intriguing as the included works. Virgil's Aeneid,
for example, is not cited; neither are Aristotle, Pascal, Samuel
Johnson, or Charles Dickens. Of those he chose, Rexroth wrote so
intelligently that reading through this volume should propel anyone
straight to the Classics section of their bookshop. (It might be
added that his literary executors have discovered notes for a
second volume which, hopefully, they will put together soon.)
(Kirkus Reviews)
Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious reader--Kenneth Rexroth
was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant
essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for
Rexroth, "basic documents in the history of the imagination."
Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these
pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the
Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth's plain, wide-awake
style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple
language, energized by the author's air of talking eye-to-eye with
his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not
bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The
Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we
pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for
Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical
Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces
of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. "Life may not be
optimistic," Rexroth maintains in his introduction, "but it
certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man
wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping
faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind
the mask? Just a human face--yours or mine. That is the irony of it
all--the irony that distinguishes great literature--it is all so
ordinary."
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