SOURCE: "Seeing the Classics as New," in Christian Science Monitor, January 9, 1969, p. 5.

In the following review, Overmyer offers a favorable assessment of Classics Revisited.

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...