-The duty of the present is neither to copy nor to deny the past but to resurrect it-, wrote W.H. Auden in 1948. The European voices that William B. Yeats and Sir Geoffrey Hill choose to resurrect reflect their shared hope in the future of humanity, as the essays in this book demonstrate. From Greek and Roman voices, through the Italian Renaissance and into our troubled present, these poets use myth, as Auden suggested, -to make private experiences public- and -public events personal-. They write about the past to maintain continuity and provide the transmission of cultural values or to avoid...