Classics Revisited

this book has made me stop wasting my time with secondary new things and try to focus onthe top books. i thank rexroth for getting me to read f m ford's "some do not..." , a really great novel. his remarks on homer are great,and his comments make wonderful reading.

Rexroth was "the father of the beatniks" and steeped in a humane understanding of the classics. Rexroth's book discusses sixty volumes, such as the Illiad & Odyssey, Beowolf, Njal's Saga, Job, Mahabarata, Kalevala, Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, Livy, and so on, through Mark Twain and Chekhov. A second volume contains similar sweep across different authors/works. As Rexroth says, these classic texts from around the world are "basic document in the history of the imagination".A review of Rexroth's book in the Villlage Voice, written three decades ago, says that "The talk is expansive, linking the archaic and the immediate, finding in Euripides 'the first psychedlic system of values, a middle-class substitute for mystical vision,' or noting how in Caesar's _Gallic War_ 'the simple nouns and verbs carom off each other like billiard balls... The rapid and complex movement of simple elements deploys on the page exactly like the battle it describes.'...The books he loved he saw as emanations of living feeling, line of communication miraculously kept open."Or, to quote from Rexroth himself: "Life may not be optimistic, but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature present 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."Without denigrating the non-Western tradition -- in fact, by including many essays about non-Western classics -- and without paying homage via knee jerks, Rexroth succeeds brilliantly.