The best works of literature, like the most beautiful places we know, bear revisiting. The works and places remain the same, perhaps, but we do not. We grow, change, decline, reinvent ourselves, so that though we are revisiting the same place or the same poem, our understandings of the truths and beauties there change. Some grow in depth and nuance. Some grow more complex, more paradoxical; others are distilled to simplicity. The garden in spring offers a different yield than the garden in autumn. Reading Shakespeare at eighteen is a different experience than reading him at sixty, or at thirty, or at ninety. This is an expression of a great work’s “universality,” of its capacity to yield new aspects of its meaning to each person and upon each return to it.

Spring Resprung proposes to revisit a number of works which, as we used to say, “every student knows.” Our purpose is to see what we can find there which we may not have been in a position to see when when we first visited, when we were younger. Participant input as to which works we might revisit is welcome. Initial possibilities include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Mann, Emerson, Nabokov, Hawthorne, William James, Swinburne, Emerson, Pope, Wallace Stevens, Whitman, Cummings, Eliot.