Classics Revisited (Paperback)

Kenneth Rexroth

ISBN 10: 0811209881 / ISBN 13: 9780811209885

Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, 1986

About this Item

Paperback. Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious readerKenneth 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 faceyours or mine. That is the irony of it allthe irony that distinguishes great literatureit is all so ordinary." Rexoth, Classics Revisited. Humourous and insightful essays on Classic literature. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780811209885

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Classics Revisited (Paperback)
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York
• Publication Date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811209881
• ISBN 13: 9780811209885
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

Rexoth, Classics Revisited. Humourous and insightful essays on Classic literature.

About the Author

Poet-essayist Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was a high-school dropout, disillusioned ex-Communist, pacifist, anarchist, rock-climber, critic and translator, mentor, Catholic-Buddhist spiritualist and a prominent figure of San Francisco's Beat scene. He is regarded as a central figure of the San Francisco Renaissance and is among the first American poets to explore traditional Japanese forms such as the haiku.