Poetry History Music Art

In 23 essays published over the last quarter-century, Laurance Wieder considers Homer, Lao-tzu, Valmiki, and Lady Murasaki, medieval Hebrew poems for Yom Kippur and 20th-century American poetry, Orhan Pamuk and Evliya elebi, Miguel de Cervantes and Roberto Bolao, William Blake and John Milton, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Wagner. This caravan of exiles and messiahs, poets and scholars, novelists and travelers, composers and artists transports the written word-that human thing which lasts.