The ruins lesson : meaning and material in Western culture In The Ruins Lesson the National Book Critics Circle Award winning poet critic Susan Stewart explores the Wests fascination with ruins in literature visual art and architecture covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins artists and writers she surveys Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination particularly Roman ruins in the work and thought of Goethe Piranesi Blake and Wordsworth whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory eighteenth century melancholy and nineteenth century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster