John Crow, a witty and wise Shakespearian authority, has said that the difficulty with writing on Shakespeare today is that by now all the intelligent things have been said, so that anyone hoping to come up with a new observation is reduced to saying something unintelligent.

Before reading this book, one might have said the same of the sixty classics on which Kenneth Rexroth, best known as a poet, has written sixty brief, revealing essays which first appeared in the Saturday Review. After all, hasn't all the intelligence about such works as The Iliad, The Republic, Don Quixote, and War and Peace already been disseminated? Can readers unfamiliar with them be lured to read the poems of Tu Fu, The Epic of Gilgamesh, or Njal's Saga? The answers to these questions are no and yes, respectively.

While Rexroth has obviously read much of the scholarship surrounding each of the works, his special talent lies in being uncorrupted by it, so that he approaches each classic as though it were a brand new book, just arrived for review. He goes immediately to the heart of each, indicating its theme(s), style, and pertinence in a few pithy paragraphs. Although he is sometimes adversely critical, he is plainly excited by each book and, what is more to the point, he can excite others into wanting to read it also. (After reading the original Saturday Review articles, I rushed out and bought The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Tale of Genji; after rereading these reviews, I see I will have to buy several more.)

By making the contents of these classics interesting to and relevant for man today, Rexroth demonstrates plainly why "classic" rightfully means a literary work alive with transcendent insight, not a tiresome tome one must struggle through for a book report in English 10-A. For instance, he comments that The Odyssey resembles the ever-recurring dream of the traveling man who wonders what his wife is doing at home. Livy's history, Early Rome, is a myth of how the aristocrats of the day supposed themselves to be; it provided models for generations of heroes to come, in many different countries and cultures. Marco Polo had "what we have lost—an ecumenical mind, an international sensibility;" he did not find distant persons and customs strange, no matter how outlandish. Casanova's History of My Life possesses a "peculiar naked profundity" by revealing that Casanova, "a man without interiority except for a profound awareness of the vanity of human wishes," knew that the passage of time has no meaning.

Rexroth is at times highly controversial, as when he says that The Brothers Karamazov contains "general ideas reduced to foolishness and hysteria," and that tragedy is neither impressive, nor even believable, when it is so garrulously articulate. Still, the opposition probably stirred up by such comments will force the reader back to the book to formulate his rebuttal, which is precisely what Rexroth intends.

Not the least of the virtues of this book is that the reader is told, for the works that must be read in translation, which are the best and most inexpensive editions. If this book were handed to students in Comparative Literature courses, it would do more to arouse interest than any number of dull, learned lectures by dull, learned pedagogues who equate solemnity with profundity.