Presenting new possibilities for negotiating the thorny realms of literary influence, canonicity, and the processes of Classical reception, the works of James Joyce, Derek Walcott, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf serve as models for the ways in which the present can negotiate the past. These authors and their readers participate in an ongoing negotiation with the Classical canon, persistently acknowledging its failures, challenging its assumptions, and adapting its lessons. By investigating the ways Joyce, Walcott, Carson, and Woolf are inspired by the past without succumbing to impulses of adulation or erasure, a reader’s faculties of attending to text and to time—to past, present, and future—are refined, strengthened, and made fully self-aware.