More Classics Revisited

Kenneth Rexroth

Jan 1989 · New Directions Paperbook Book 668 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

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 from With Eye and Ear (1970) and The Elastic Retort (1973), both long out of print, as well as various previously uncollected or unpublished essays. Taken together, these hundred and one critiques stand, writes editor Bradford Morrow, "as a primer, or Baedeker, to a whole terrain of thought, to one man's study of imagination and its field of conjuries." The New Directions edition of Classics Revisited was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, attesting to the wide appeal of Rexroth's learning and humanity.

About the author

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, and worked at a wide variety of jobs, being largely self-educated. In the late 1950s, he won a number of awards, including an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He translated widely, mainly from the Japanese, and wrote a lively account of his life, An Autobiographical Novel. His work influenced many younger poets, such as Snyder, and continued in part the traditions of imagism and objectivism. A critic as well as a poet, his collections of essays include American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971) and Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1975). Bradford Morrow is a professor of literature at Bard College and is founder and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions. He lives in New York.