Europe is the poetic journal of Louis Dudek’s cultural pilgrimage to the famous buildings and fabled sites of Europe. Although the sections of the poem are arranged chronologically in the order of his journeyings, the poem is less the story of Dudek’s travels than a series of moral and aesthetic meditations prompted by his experiences. Expecting to find in Europe culture in its most evolved forms, the poet is confronted instead by materialism and superficiality, by exhausted peoples who are the unworthy inheritors of past greatness.
Eventually the poet comes to realize that it is the sea, ‘constant always in beauty,’ that is the real object of his quest.