Classics Revisited

Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious reader–Kenneth Rexroth was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant essays ofClassics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, basic documents in the history of the imagination. Ranging fromThe Epic of GilgameshtoHuckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in theSaturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth’s plain, wide-awake style,Classics Revisitedpresents 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.