Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 honored in the academy but directed to different ends) that would restore to literature its old didactic function, and the final paper searches for a place where such a reading might be possible--a way of reading that would also be a way of living. Literature matters, more than it ever has before, because it is the strongest remaining witness to much that mankind has always known but is now in danger of losing. It can tell us things about human being and about nature and about the gods that we have forgotten. But it can do so only if we read v
