Knowledge & Delight

‘T HE true province of poetry,” Thomas Jefferson once intoned, is “knowledge of the human heart,” and he believed that bookish knowledge of this kind was worth having at almost any price. It civilized us. Such was the faith, at once wildly optimistic and muscularly ambitious, behind the high and humane learning of the Founders. That mere ideology, not to mention policy-wonking, failed to add up to anything resembling a citizen’s education went without saying. Now Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at what Jefferson called his “academical village” at the University of Virginia, casts his lot with the great man. Why should we read? We should read, Edmundson tells us in his tight little treatise, to change our lives, to become better than what we’d be without reading. Mr. Jefferson would surely agree.

About the Author

Tracy Lee Simmons

Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin.

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Knowledge & Delight

‘T HE true province of poetry,” Thomas Jefferson once intoned, is “knowledge of the human heart,” and he believed that bookish knowledge of this kind was worth having at almost any price. It civilized us. Such was the faith, at once wildly optimistic and muscularly ambitious, behind the high and humane learning of the Founders. That mere ideology, not to mention policy-wonking, failed to add up to anything resembling a citizen’s education went without saying. Now Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at what Jefferson called his “academical village” at the University of Virginia, casts his lot with the great man. Why should we read? We should read, Edmundson tells us in his tight little treatise, to change our lives, to become better than what we’d be without reading. Mr. Jefferson would surely agree.