Strangely, I woke up June 17 and found myself agreeing with something Cal Thomas had written ("Brit curriculum heralds demise"), but only to a degree. As a professor of English literature at ECU, I share his concern over what appears to be a gradual disappearance of literary classics from our schools, authors such as "John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Byron, Shelley and Keats." Should students choose ECU for their education, rest assured that the English Department requires both standard survey courses (pre-ca. 1700 and post-ca. 1700) and Shakespeare for its major. The American classics are also well represented.

We should celebrate these authors as a rich and essential part of our culture, most of all for their sophisticated artistic accomplishment. What Thomas may not be so happy to hear is that, rather than blindly encouraging "fidelity and virtue" and "the national will to resist an invading enemy," as he states, these authors strongly question moralistic jingoism and military and religious conformity. Shakespeare, for example, wrote damning anti-militaristic plays (including Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida) and the majority of his sonnets, considered among the best love poetry ever written, are addressed from one man to another (including No. 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"). Milton supported divorce based on incompatibility centuries before it was popular to do so and was extremely unorthodox in his religious views. Spenser, the "poet's poet," was unusual in his celebration of loving marital fidelity but also advocated near-genocidal measures against the Catholic Irish, whose land he and his wife eagerly occupied as Protestant newcomers. Shelley was a radical socialist, and the less said about Byron's personal life the better.

All of these authors wrote superbly and, at times, to our discomfort and radical joy. I don't think Mr. Thomas would have approved.

THOMAS HERRON

Greenville