More Classics Revisited

by Kenneth Rexroth

Book Overview

More Classics Revisited is the second volume of the late poet and polymath Kenneth Rexroth's brilliant, succinct analyses of some of the key documents in literary history. It presents East and West: from the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu to the works of Karl Marx, Charles Baudelaire, and William Carlos Williams. Supplementing the sixty short essays originally published as Classics Revisited in 1969 are forty-one pieces...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811210839
• ISBN13: 9780811210836
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant companion to the first volume

Rexroth scores again in this second "Classics Revisited" volume. The books he loved -- the classics of the non-Western and the Western world -- he saw as emanations of living feeling, lines of communication miraculously kept open.Rexroth wrote in the first volume: "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."(By the way: These essays are such that one can read volume two before volume one.)