Classics Revisited

This book by Kenneth Rexroth called Classics Revisited is unusually good. I have recently been looking through my old copy, and I can see how much I picked up from it. Rexroth has a good, basic understanding of these influences. The book is basically a list of classics (history, imaginative literature of all kinds, philosophy, etc.). His choice is is what I would call on-the-mark foundational. I.e. not a trace of modern, politically-correct nonsense or any kind of ax-grinding. Each work gets a few pages of Rexroth's general explication. He is probably the best I've read in doing this. You can tell he is speaking from real understanding of each of these works. After the fact when you go back as well you can see he had real understanding. It's worth looking at.