Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia wrote a seminal book, called “Why Read?” on the importance of a liberal education. His thesis is that “Reading literature nurtures our intelligence, our imagination, and our very soul.” He places literature at the very heart of a liberal-arts education, which he fears is becoming an endangered tradition. "The purpose of a liberal arts education,” he avers “is to give people an enhanced opportunity to decide how they should live their lives" and literature is "the major cultural source of vital options.” Edmundson begins this notable book with these lines from physician-poet William Carlos William's poem Asphodel:
Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.For more of introductory remarks:
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"Too much machinery, too much administration and not enough brains and intuition. Research harbours a lot of second and third rate fellows. Medicine needs more humanism and less science. But humanism is hard work and so much science is just Tinkertoy." Robertson Davies: "The Cunning Man"
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