The Spirit Of Understanding English Literature In An Age Of Confusion [Hardcover]

The winning contestants on University Challenge could not identify lines from one of the best-known English poems, Keats' Ode to Autumn , and seemed unconcerned about their ignorance. This book provides an engaging retrospect for readers who have forgotten, or who have never had much chance to study, their own literature and history. In presenting a kind of cross-section of this abundant inheritance, it supplies ample selective quotes, and suggests an antidote to the strange sickness of modernity, which seems to have forgotten that memory is the mother of the muses.