Literature
Our literature program is coordinated to give students works that they can read well, but which are of the highest accessible quality. These books and poems are intended to be consistently one small step above where the student is comfortable, leading them up a staircase towards the best literature without ever giving them anything too difficult to digest. Pulling from our Western Literary tradition, and especially guided by the work of John Senior, the students will spend the first three years on “the good books,” starting with fairy tales and ending with Dickens, before culminating in senior year with some of the most foundational and influential stories of the Western tradition: Homer’s Epics, Dante’s Commedia, and Shakespeare’s Plays.
In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.