This book presents a sequence of six related studies of poets from classical antiquity to the present (Pindar and Sophocles at one end, Pound at the other, with Dante somewhere in the middle). This group of literary essays is framed by two more general papers showing how the texts can reach out into our society and into the lives we lead there--and can question the lives we lead. the opening paper argues for a way of reading (as rigorous as those...