Kenneth Rexroth's Classics Revisited - Page 2

In the 1960s, poet, translator, and polymath Kenneth Rexroth selected sixty works that he considered "basic documents in the history of the imagination"."Life may not be optimistic, but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks: the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theater prosceniums. What is the face behind the double 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."