Wednesday, December 16, 2009
from "Will in the World"
With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comforting rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper. The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.
"Will in the World", Stephen Greenblatt, 2004
"Will in the World", Stephen Greenblatt, 2004
Friday, December 11, 2009
Paper Draft
Richard Wilbur’s “ A Barred Owl” and Billy Collins’ “The History Teacher” both present a simplification of reality so that children will be saved from fear and undue anxiety. The two poets take different approaches in their exploration of this theme. Wilbur gives us a sense of protecting children from knowledge that is unsettling, and really unnecessary. His poetic form—a rhyme that evokes childhood bedtime stories—is both ironic and calming. Collins, on the other hand, shows the reader a deeply flawed teacher who absurdly distorts the ugly truths of history to save the innocence of his students, when in fact those same students are far from innocent. Collins uses free-verse, and absurd humor to drive home his darker points about human nature and history.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
"The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe"-Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe
WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed 5
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element; 10
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise, 15
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast, 20
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet 25
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through, 30
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round 35
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense 40
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air. 45
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart, 50
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh: 55
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us, 60
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth, 65
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one 70
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand 75
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not 80
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows. 85
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft, 90
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake 95
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal, 100
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are 105
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him 110
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere; 115
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky; 120
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled, 125
Fold home, fast fold thy child.
WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed 5
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element; 10
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise, 15
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast, 20
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet 25
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through, 30
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.
I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round 35
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense 40
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air. 45
If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart, 50
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh: 55
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us, 60
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth, 65
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one 70
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.
Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand 75
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not 80
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows. 85
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft, 90
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake 95
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal, 100
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.
So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are 105
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him 110
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.
Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere; 115
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky; 120
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled, 125
Fold home, fast fold thy child.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Shakespeare’s Millennium
First Things
Edward T. Oakes
When debate about an artist’s merit no longer seems to have any point, one is left either with an icon of culture, too sacred to enjoy, or with a target of satire, brought down to our more humdrum level by a vaudeville lampooning of the unapproachable totem, as when graffiti artists paint a moustache on reproductions of the Mona Lisa. Thus we are left, in the case of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), with that oddest of cultural phenomena, Bardolatry, which then almost automatically begets its malign twin: the iconoclastic desire to tear down Shakespeare’s undoubted achievement, whether by denying the man was even literate and insisting that his plays had to be written by someone else, anyone else (preferably a peer of the realm)—or by making him the ideological tool of Dead White English Man’s oppressive, imperial regime, the thin cultural veneer disguising naked British hegemony.
But even among those who have no desire to address the Bard using Juliet’s term for her Romeo ("thy gracious self, the god of my idolatry") and who also feel no desire to enroll in what Harold Bloom calls the School of Resentment, Shakespeare’s achievement is extraordinarily difficult to specify. Not only are we faced with the immense edifice of Shakespeare scholarship, a massif that simply cannot be scaled by any one mortal. But even more daunting, his own productivity and protean creativity so defy the imagination that one might almost sympathize with the Shakespeare–deniers if the candidates put forward in his stead were not themselves such pathetic blue–blood epicenes—not to mention the fact that the achievement would still remain inexplicable coming from any human being, whatever the color of his blood.
But since slack–jawed stupefaction can scarcely be said to constitute the beginning moment, let alone the terminating goal, of literary criticism, one must say something, or so one supposes, when confronted with Shakespeare’s collected works: thirty–eight plays, two lengthy narrative poems, 154 sonnets of unusual intricacy and narrative fascination, and one metaphysical allegory ("The Phoenix and the Turtle"). Computer studies only add to the stupefaction: nearly half of Shakespeare’s words were what scholars call hapax legomena, that is, words that Shakespeare used only once, having found the one right location for their perfect use and never needing them again. Moreover, one–twelfth of his words make their appearance, at least in print, for the first time in the history of English, most of which must have been of his coinage. Then there is his pace of production: according to commonly accepted dating techniques—using the known dates of Shakespeare’s forced retreats from London during the plague years, the year of his final retirement to Stratford, allusions to current events in the plays, and so forth—it seems that during his working life in London he wrote on average two plays each year until the death of Elizabeth in 1603, when the pace slackened to about one play per year during the Jacobean reign.
Because Shakespeare never went to university, much is made—too much, in fact—of the termination of his formal schooling with grammar school. The idea that the greatest playwright of the human race could have poured forth such a cornucopia of genius with only the benefit of a grammar school education does seem to stretch stupefaction past the point of credulity. But the objection ignores both the intensely classical curriculum of Stratford’s "grammar" school (which, unlike our modern counterpart, stretched well into a boy’s fifteenth or sixteenth year) and Shakespeare’s years of young adulthood working as a schoolmaster for a wealthy Catholic family in Lancashire, when he had ample opportunity to expand his reading and activate, as a teacher, his passively absorbed pupil’s learning.
One also hears from time to time how sparse are the confirmed and reliable details available to the Shakespeare biographer, but this too is more myth than fact, as two recent works, E. A. J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The "Lost Years" (Manchester University Press) and Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press), amply testify. As the famous Elizabethan historian A. L. Rowse rightly points out, "We know more about him than about any other dramatist of the time, with the exception of Ben Jonson, who lived rather later and had a longer life."
Indeed his schooling, far from making it unlikely that a product of its system would emerge as a poet of astonishing rhetorical intricacy, was such that it could hardly have produced anything else. As Honan points out, "With its arid emphasis on verbal artifice, school evidently came too early for him, in some ways narrowing his mind and delaying his success; there are signs, for example, in his mature writing, that he had been too attracted by ringing changes on words, by varying, amplifying, and patterning. . . . This fault is attributable to schools that were hotbeds of literary talent, but not always of self–sustaining life."
Recent research has also uncovered a plethora of evidence pointing to the Catholic and Jesuit sympathies of most of Shakespeare’s schoolmasters. Simon Hunt, Shakespeare’s first teacher, for example, left his position in 1575 to become a Jesuit priest. One of Shakespeare’s fellow pupils, Robert Debdale by name, was executed as a priest in 1586; while studying for the priesthood Debdale shared classes with Thomas Cottom (executed in 1582), whose brother John Cottom was a schoolmaster at Stratford and taught Shakespeare until, under mounting anti–Catholic pressure from the Crown, he fled home to Lancashire, a Catholic stronghold.
Shortly after that, at least according to Honigmann, Shakespeare took up a position, presumably at Cottom’s recommendation, as a tutor and player in the Houghton household, a recusant Lancashire family whose property neighbored Cottom’s. From the will of one of this family, Alexander Houghton, we know that the family maintained a company of players, for Alexander bequeathed his stock of costumes and musical instruments to a neighbor, one Sir Thomas Hesketh. As it happens, the Heskeths are mentioned as frequent guests in the hospitality book of the Earl of Derby, the most powerful peer of that region; perhaps it is sheer coincidence, but the son of the fourth Earl of Derby was Ferdinando Stanley, later Lord Strange, whose company of players performed four of Shakespeare’s early plays and five of whose members formed the nucleus of the Chamberlain’s Men (later called the King’s Men when King James I assumed patronage of the company), which Shakespeare joined at its inception and for whom he wrote all the rest of his plays.
Although the evidence connecting Shakespeare to the Catholic nobility of Lancashire is only circumstantial, the evidence of his own family’s attachment to Catholicism is direct and overwhelming. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, came from one of the most prominent and tenacious Catholic families in Warwickshire. The head of the clan, Edward Arden, for instance, kept his own Catholic priest, disguised as a gardener but known throughout the Avon valley as Father Hugh Hall. One of Arden’s sons–in–law, a hot–headed Catholic fanatic named John Somerville, traveled to London on a personal mission to assassinate the Queen; apparently quite deranged, he betrayed his intentions to anyone who would listen to his rantings during his frequent tavern–hopping. Inevitably, he was arrested and, under torture, implicated Arden and Hall. The priest died in prison while his case was being adjudicated; but in 1583 the hapless Arden was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head stuck on a spike on London bridge.
William Shakespeare was nineteen years old at the time of his cousin’s execution. Well before that traumatic date, from as far back as William’s thirteenth year, his father John had apparently begun to run into financial difficulties, at which time he tried to avoid town meetings and church attendance, allegedly to elude summons by subpoena (one could be served for debt in church). Presumably the debts were real (he defaulted on a mortgage in 1580), but the father’s financial woes seem to have been exacerbated by Crown revenge against the Ardens. In any event, John’s name was later entered on the recusant rolls of Stratford for failing to come to Anglican church services on Sunday, as the law required. One often reads that John Shakespeare’s absence was due strictly to his fear of subpoena. But Catholic convictions must have played at least some role in the father’s recusancy. On April 27, 1757 a bricklayer working on the son’s birthplace in Stratford came across a six–page manuscript, hidden under the roof tiles, of John Shakespeare’s last will and spiritual testament. To the rather queasy surprise of eighteenth–century England, the document unhesitatingly affirmed John’s Catholic faith (for example, it referred to the "glorious and ever Virgin Mary, refuge and advocate of sinners" and asked for intercessory "prayers and Masses" to speed the testator through purgatory).
The authenticity of the document was challenged for a while, but then an English Jesuit, Herbert Thurston, discovered in 1911 that John Shakespeare had taken the testament, almost word for word, from a translation by Jesuits Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion of a testament first composed by Charles Cardinal Borromeo for Catholics in his diocese during the plague years in Milan in the late 1570s. Before leaving for England, Parsons and Campion had visited Borromeo and were given copies of the testament to bring with them; and we know that Campion got to within twelve miles of Stratford before his arrest in June 1581. Somerville’s plot was exposed in the fall of 1583, so it must have been around then that John Shakespeare hid—but tellingly did not destroy—his treasonous profession of faith. (There is also a possibility that John’s financial difficulties were caused by his recusancy, for many Catholic gentlemen of that age often avoided fines by "conveying" their property to friends and relatives.)
None of this can prove anything about William Shakespeare’s own private convictions, but we do know that his daughter was fined for recusancy and that William and his fiancée Anne Hathaway married not in his Stratford church but in Temple Grafton, five miles from his birthplace. Neither the Shakespeares nor the Hathaways had connections there, but the vicar of the village, John Frith, was cited in contemporary records as "unsound in religion," a code–term for Catholic priests. And finally, a seventeenth–century Anglican archdeacon from nearby Coventry reported that, according to Stratford oral tradition, Shakespeare "died a papist."
Admittedly, the report as phrased implies that Shakespeare only returned to his family’s religion—or perhaps that he had even lost his Christian convictions altogether until his last hours. Indeed a common opinion among critics holds that Shakespeare grew increasingly pagan in outlook as his tragic view deepened. Philip Edwards, until recently the King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, is perhaps the most balanced representative of this view. "The idea of salvation and damnation," he says, "is central to an understanding of the tragedies, but the nature of the world beyond this world, the demands that it makes on one, and the means to reach it are presented not as something revealed but as a haunting and troubling mystery. There is a great deal of anxious religious questing and very little Christian conviction." Peter Levi, the classicist and poet (and former Jesuit), echoes this view when he observes that Shakespeare’s "personal religion, so far as his plays reveal it—which is not very far—seems to have been something like Montaigne’s with a touch of neo–Platonism. . . . But his mind had many sides, and he was not, thank God, a theologian, except in the more serious sense in which a poet must be."
These are both plausible views, and for a while I held them too. But then—under the influence of a perhaps surprising source, the writings of British feminist Germaine Greer—I began to reconsider. Taking the play that seems most to evidence Shakespeare’s distance from the reconciling vision of the Christian gospel, Greer shows that King Lear is actually Shakespeare’s most Christian play, and precisely because it is so redolent of Montaigne’s worldview (one must not forget that Montaigne was a Christian and wrote as such): "It would be a mistake to interpret the futility of Lear’s appeals to his gods as evidence of atheism on Shakespeare’s part," she writes. "Rather, like Montaigne, he denies man’s right to scan the ways of God or to assume that God’s will coincides at any point with his own. This Christian skepticism is neither pessimistic nor cynical, for it is based in acceptance of the benighted human condition."
In other words, Shakespeare’s views as a playwright exactly correspond to what he has the character of Isabella (a postulant seeking entrance in a Catholic nunnery, interestingly enough) say in Measure for Measure:
. . . but man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
The key to Greer’s interpretation—one that makes her short book on Shakespeare for Oxford’s "Past Masters" series one of the finest essays on Shakespeare this century—is her insight that the persona of the Fool in Lear and other plays largely coincides with the self–portrait of the poet in the Sonnets: both persons, Sonneteer and Fool, are self–deprecatory, marginalized, and contemned, yet for that reason are lethally insightful about the flaws of the nobility. George Orwell once notoriously criticized Shakespeare for his bourgeois–Tory predilection for hierarchy and aristocracy, holding that the views of the playwright came through only in the voice of kings or nobles. But Greer firmly refutes this view, and shows how the Fool’s comments in Lear indicate how deeply Christian Shakespeare remained throughout his writing career:
Orwell thinks that from Shakespeare’s writings it would be difficult to know that he had any religion—whereas in fact the placing of truth in the mouths of babes is one aspect of the Christian respect for all human life; that same profound feeling is what inspires us to protest loudly when health authorities take a mental defective off dialysis machine because they consider his "quality of life" too low, in defiance of Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount.
I must admit I rather hesitate to raise the issue of Shakespeare’s religion, because at a fundamental level a concentration on his personal beliefs obscures the essence of his achievement. No doubt he participated in the religious life of his country. In public worship (there was, after all, no other legal option) he prayed with a congregation that used Cranmer’s superbly crafted Book of Common Prayer and heard at these same services the Bishop’s Bible (the immediate predecessor to the King James Authorized Version), echoes of both of which can be detected in the plays, and of course he was buried in Stratford’s Trinity Church; while privately he probably held to the Old Religion throughout his life, as recent research is making increasingly evident.
But as an artist he was essentially unselfconscious. Even in the history plays, patriotic and devoted to the monarchy as they clearly were, he sounds relatively unpropagandistic; and he must certainly be the most nonideological writer in English, Chaucer alone excepted. (Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Macaulay, Newman, Tennyson all have their personal hobbyhorses to ride, to say nothing of contemporary writers.) Again, Greer is the critic who gives clearest expression to this insight:
Given the undeniable fact that Shakespeare seldom if ever spoke in his own person, a scrupulous discussion of his thought must take his invisibility into account as an aspect of his intellect. This is not to do what Shakespeare eulogists have so often done in praising him for having "in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling." . . . Rather, he was profoundly aware of and interested in intellectual issues, which he did not choose to simplify, codify, reconcile, or resolve but rather to dramatize. . . . The resolution which is reached is not the negation of the conflict, but the stasis produced by art. Even as we applaud it, we recognize its fragility.
While his authorial modesty might elicit our admiration, we should not attribute it entirely to Shakespeare’s personality, even if we accept the sonnets as autobiographical, where the persona of the poet can at times seem to grovel, even to the point of self–contempt. Rather, Shakespeare’s work as a playwright, without proprietary concerns for his own work or voice, is entirely a product of his life in a company of players: to survive in that appalling, disease–ridden world of fragile egos, he had to be affable, unassuming, and totally subordinate to the company, whose success defined his own. If they failed, so did he.
Above all, he had to be hardworking. In stretches of good weather (and of course when the plague did not loom), a company acted every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent. Moreover, troupes usually put on a different play each afternoon. Each actor, says Honan, usually had to keep at least thirty parts in his head during the span of one month, and a leading actor had to memorize around 800 lines for an afternoon and keep 4,800 lines in mind per week. Mornings were spent in rehearsal for an entirely different play, all without help of a director. Then there was the constant demand for text from the company’s playwright. (The idea of that epicene fop, the Earl of Oxford, taking a break from his falconry and hawking or from his documented European travels to supply two plays a year to this rather disreputable band of low–life artisans is risible.)
Most testimonials to Shakespeare, both during his life and in the memorial to him in the First Folio, speak warmly of his pleasant manners and courteous disposition, a feature of his personality that must have stood him in good stead within his touchy, flamboyant, and excitable troupe. But Shakespeare thrived in this demanding environment, and precisely because he tended by nature, if the sonnets are any indication, toward self–effacement, even self–abasement. "Stage demands suited his rapid intellect," Honan notes. "The more self–abnegating he became, the more his imagination really flourished. His daily self–effacing duties would have given him a sense of routine as he sat at his table, and he found he could supply his troupe best by complicating his work and giving it multiple layers of appeal. In the same play, he can affirm and repudiate popular attitudes, and in a sense, by writing plays with subversive, troubling aspects, he remained inside and outside his vocation, and abetted his own development."
Nor would it be too much to say that Shakespeare could only have been the playwright and poet he was in precisely the period of history ending with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and in the early years of James I. A. L. Rowse is not exaggerating in the least when he avers that if Shakespeare "had been born twenty years earlier or later, his achievement would not have been what it was. The time would not have been ripe, or it would have been overripe, for him and his work as we have it." His career and his work, in other words, "provide a signal example of this fruitful marriage of the right moment with the man." Harold Bloom makes much the same (almost Christological) point in The Western Canon when he says with his usual lapidary precision that "the miracle of Shakespeare’s universalism is that it is not purchased by any transcending of contingencies."
Theaters, after all, were the only places where all the inhabitants of London—from pickpocket and whore to magistrate and noble—could directly experience their membership in a community, and it was the glory of Elizabethan theater to provide precisely that venue for Shakespeare’s art. "In an age when religious zeal turned brother against brother," says Greer, "the drama sought to reunite the people and raise public morale. Shakespeare was remarkably successful in managing potentially inflammable material so as to send audiences home excited and gratified rather than anxious about the deteriorating political situation and increasing instability of the Elizabethan order, but the plays are neither insipid or jingoistic."
Unfortunately, even by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the dynamics of London theatrical economics and increasing Puritan hostility were undermining theater’s unique public role, unprecedented since the days of Periclean Athens. In a passage telling the sad tale, not of the death of kings, but of the end of Shakespeare’s career as a writer of English history plays, Greer points to this new dynamic as the cause:
By the time he wrote Henry V (1598–99) Shakespeare must have been aware that the illusion of unity in English society could no longer be sustained. It was no longer in the power of the dramatist to hold the imagination of all, literate and illiterate, powerful and powerless. The development of the indoor theatres with their greater scenic resources and their prurient interest in matters sensational and intimate rather than public–spirited and universal had divided the Globe’s audience while other entertainments vied for the groundlings’ half–pence. The most talented newcomers to write for the theatre had a different viewpoint at once loftier and more limited.
Still, for a brief window of opportunity, Shakespeare could put his fluency to work to create exactly the art that has made him the greatest dramatist of the human race. Shakespeare, though, was not a mere product of his time. Rather, he is an example of what the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar calls a "relative singularity." Here is his discussion:
Great works of art appear like inexplicable miracles and spontaneous eruptions on the stage of history. Sociologists are as unable to calculate the precise day of their origin as they are to explain in retrospect why they appeared when they did. Of course, works of art are subject to certain preconditions without which they cannot come into being: such conditions may be effective stimuli but do not provide a full explanation of the work itself. Shakespeare had his predecessors, contemporaries, and models; he was surrounded by the atmosphere of the theater of his time. He could only have emerged within that context. Yet who would dare offer to prove that his emergence was inevitable?
It is one thing to examine all the necessary presuppositions and prior requirements that make possible the emergence of a work of art; but it is another thing entirely to claim that one has thereby accounted for that work of art. This is to mistake the sudden manifestation of the phenomenon for its presuppositions (a common mental habit called "the genetic fallacy"). And this fallacy is a perennial danger for scholars whose job it is to concentrate on narrating the history of origins until the story ends up at the termination point: the text itself. This movement of going from beginning to end in the narratives of historical critics can make it seem as if the beginning accounts for the end, rather than the end representing an astonishing fulfillment and supersession of what went before. But we can only fall into that trap because we are already in possession of the work and so we know how our etiological narrative will conclude. But this is to fail to come to terms with the work itself, which must itself determine how its own past is to be interpreted.
As Balthasar also points out, the singularity of the great work of art makes it greater than its time, and likely to be misunderstood by those who are so caught up within their time that they are unable to appreciate it.
A great work of art has a certain universal comprehensibility but discloses itself more profoundly and more truly to an individual the more attuned and practiced his powers of perception are. Not everyone picks up the unique inflection of the Greek in a chorus of Sophocles, or of the German of Goethe’s Faust, or of the French in a poem of Valéry. Subjective adaptation can add something of its own, but that objective adequacy which is able to distinguish the noble from the commonplace is more important.
Although he does not share the theological freedom so radiantly on display in Balthasar’s work, and indeed is rather phobic toward Christianity, Harold Bloom echoes Balthasar’s insistence on the primacy of the aesthetic and even comes close to seeing how resentment against aesthetic primacy is rooted in, and arises from, an ideologization of culture that will fear all true singularities, relative or otherwise. In other words, aesthetic contemplation, by its very nature as disinterested appreciation of the singular, refutes any and all ideologies, which is why Bloom hails Shakespeare as the single greatest refutation of all later ideal schemas, programs, reeducation camps, and brainwashing propaganda. "We are all feminist critics," he quotes one professor as proclaiming, and then replies: "That is the rhetoric suitable for an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation." No wonder, then, that in so many English departments in this nation "the teaching of poems, plays, stories, and novels is now supplanted by cheerleading for various social and political causes."
Even on the face of it, this project should strike everyone as absurd and self–defeating. ("The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted in our schools.") But more crucially it begs the question by feeding off Shakespeare’s preeminence precisely by attacking him and not, say, Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe, who presumably are equally the products of class myopia and imperial designs:
Shakespeare’s eminence is, I am certain, the rock upon which the School of Resentment must at last founder. How can they have it both ways? If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, then they need to show why the dominant social class selected him rather than, say, Ben Jonson, for that arbitrary role. Or if history and not the ruling circles exalted Shakespeare, what was it in Shakespeare that so captivated the mighty Demiurge, economic and social history? Clearly this line of inquiry begins to border on the fantastic; how much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer, even Chaucer, even Tolstoy, or whoever. Originality is the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate, and Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know.
By calling Shakespeare "nonideological," and by joining Bloom in hailing him as a refutation of all those ideologies that offer us no hope of "liberation from liberation," I am not claiming that he passed his life in a hermetically sealed realm of pure aesthetics, blissfully unaware of the passions and ideas that were tearing apart the English nation. Quite the contrary: where Elizabethans were unanimous in their worldview (hierarchy, Great Chain of Being, immortality of the soul, etc.), Shakespeare was one with his contemporaries.
But where his countrymen differed and hurled themselves into the conflict over ideas, Shakespeare participated by dramatizing the conflict, not by contributing to it. And that is the source of his greatness; for the aesthetic, properly understood, subsumes all ideologies by understanding them from within and by giving us true liberation through that understanding. Balthasar and Bloom converge at this point, one from a theological and the other from a literary perspective; but perhaps Bloom can illustrate the point better because of the way Shakespeare has managed to liberate Bloom himself from his own previous excessive attachment to Freud:
Here they [that is, the professional Resenters] confront insurmountable difficulty in Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic strength: he is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not by prefiguration but by postfiguration, as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare’s; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare, or would if we could bear a reduction that crosses the line into absurdities of loss. Coriolanus is a far more powerful reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon than any Marxist reading of Coriolanus could hope to be.
No doubt Shakespeare shared in the stereotypes of his day. In fact, one will occasionally come across the complaint that Shakespeare’s thought is too homespun, too reliant on proverbs and folk wisdom, too "bromidic," as it were, to be of service to a philosopher or theologian—or ideologue. George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell frequently opined in this manner. But this observation (which contains a grain of truth) misses a central point: the ideas that do appear in the plays—monarchism, hierarchy, ambition, fidelity to one’s marriage vows or to one’s king, the ideal of chastity in some, the celebration of concupiscence in others, etc.—all function, so to speak, as actors in the plot. That is, Shakespeare presents no overarching idea meant to serve as a soapbox from which the playwright can browbeat the audience with his convictions. The folk wisdom that gets expressed from time to time by various actors thus serves as a kind of implicit Greek chorus commenting on the action. And precisely because the proverbs and folk wisdom being expressed are true, and recognized as true by the audience, they create a bond between the meaning of the play and the experience of the spectators.
Both Orwell and Shaw thus have a point when they accuse Shakespeare of having a philosophy that rarely transcends the hackneyed, time–tested saws of folk wisdom. But the truth of this wisdom is what counts. Moreover, one of the rarely noticed gifts that make his plays so engaging is his ability to turn bromides, clichés, and proverbs into music. Somewhat like Mozart transforming the rather silly libretto for The Magic Flute into the most extraordinary melodies, Shakespeare can take the rather pedestrian awkwardness of English, with its clumsy consonant clusters, random stress accents, and unmusical cadences, and turn it into an arresting melody.
I can cite only two examples here. Just before the Friar marries Romeo and Juliet in a secret ceremony, Romeo shows up in church too excited and in love to prepare himself properly for the sacred rite. The Friar upbraids him for his adolescent hot blood and sternly admonishes him, using words whose message scarcely means much more than "haste makes waste" but whose musical phrasing immediately awakens the audience to the real meaning of the couple’s tragedy:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore, love moderately; long love doth so:
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
Similarly with evil. Everyone knows that evil is a real force in the world and cuts a hole in the fabric of Being; but that gash in Being is also what makes evil, in the metaphysical sense, a non–entity, a gap, a privation. Everyone also knows that good can come out of evil, as when a plague of insects devastates the fields of a one–crop economy, forcing the region to diversify. (There is a statue of the cotton–destroying boll weevil in front of the statehouse in Birmingham, Alabama, for just this reason.) But every hospital chaplain also knows that patients are not in the least comforted by being told that "God draws good out of evil," or that "evil is only a privation in relation to being."
Now, any playwright who can compose King Lear and Othello needs no instruction from metaphysicians or theologians on the nature of evil as a real and active force in human history and in the human personality. But Shakespeare also had an abiding sense of evil’s strange, shadowy evanescence, especially in the later plays, where a reconciling mood seems to lift evil off its hinges. But this reconciliation never seems forced or cheaply won, because the truth of the bromides "evil is a privation" and "God draws good out of evil" are enacted, not pronounced. Wittgenstein gets this point exactly right when he says that "Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. Hence he has to be objective; otherwise he would not so much display the dance of human passions—as talk about it."
The enactment, however, must still at some point include a "speech act" pointing out the meaning of the action, and here once more Shakespeare is able to exploit the resources of folk wisdom, to turn it into music, and to place it in the mouth of one of his characters, who at that moment becomes the chorus commenting on the meaning of the play. But because Shakespeare rarely uses an actor whose sole role is to play the chorus, he avoids the danger of didacticism, and lets the wisdom embed itself in the action of the play (which is why so many of Shakespeare’s characters, including even Iago, both seem and do not seem to express the playwright’s viewpoint). Somewhat at random I shall cite this example from Henry V:
Gloucester, ’tis true that we are in great danger;
The greater therefore should our courage be.
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distill it out.
For our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful and good husbandry.
Besides, they are our outward consciences,
And preachers to us all, admonishing
That we dress us fairly for our end:
Thus may we gather honey from the weed,
And make a moral of the devil himself.
No wonder, then, that Dr. Johnson could say of Shakespeare that "he seems to produce, without labor, what no labor can improve." How he manages to have characters speak lines in such arresting melodies enunciating such obvious truths and yet in a voice that seems to correspond exactly both to the personality of the character and to the situation of the moment is, of all Shakespeare’s achievements, the most mysterious to explain and the hardest to specify.
The editors of First Things did not choose Shakespeare for their millennium series, preferring Calvin for the sixteenth century and Pascal for the seventeenth. I concur. For the singular, universal genius of Shakespeare makes him a poor representative of those ideologically riven centuries, while at the same time his sublime freedom makes him the obvious choice for man of the millennium, the one man of the past one thousand years who can promise us liberation from liberation. Who else is there?
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Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is the author of Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum).
Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 98 (December 1999): 17-24.
Edward T. Oakes
When debate about an artist’s merit no longer seems to have any point, one is left either with an icon of culture, too sacred to enjoy, or with a target of satire, brought down to our more humdrum level by a vaudeville lampooning of the unapproachable totem, as when graffiti artists paint a moustache on reproductions of the Mona Lisa. Thus we are left, in the case of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), with that oddest of cultural phenomena, Bardolatry, which then almost automatically begets its malign twin: the iconoclastic desire to tear down Shakespeare’s undoubted achievement, whether by denying the man was even literate and insisting that his plays had to be written by someone else, anyone else (preferably a peer of the realm)—or by making him the ideological tool of Dead White English Man’s oppressive, imperial regime, the thin cultural veneer disguising naked British hegemony.
But even among those who have no desire to address the Bard using Juliet’s term for her Romeo ("thy gracious self, the god of my idolatry") and who also feel no desire to enroll in what Harold Bloom calls the School of Resentment, Shakespeare’s achievement is extraordinarily difficult to specify. Not only are we faced with the immense edifice of Shakespeare scholarship, a massif that simply cannot be scaled by any one mortal. But even more daunting, his own productivity and protean creativity so defy the imagination that one might almost sympathize with the Shakespeare–deniers if the candidates put forward in his stead were not themselves such pathetic blue–blood epicenes—not to mention the fact that the achievement would still remain inexplicable coming from any human being, whatever the color of his blood.
But since slack–jawed stupefaction can scarcely be said to constitute the beginning moment, let alone the terminating goal, of literary criticism, one must say something, or so one supposes, when confronted with Shakespeare’s collected works: thirty–eight plays, two lengthy narrative poems, 154 sonnets of unusual intricacy and narrative fascination, and one metaphysical allegory ("The Phoenix and the Turtle"). Computer studies only add to the stupefaction: nearly half of Shakespeare’s words were what scholars call hapax legomena, that is, words that Shakespeare used only once, having found the one right location for their perfect use and never needing them again. Moreover, one–twelfth of his words make their appearance, at least in print, for the first time in the history of English, most of which must have been of his coinage. Then there is his pace of production: according to commonly accepted dating techniques—using the known dates of Shakespeare’s forced retreats from London during the plague years, the year of his final retirement to Stratford, allusions to current events in the plays, and so forth—it seems that during his working life in London he wrote on average two plays each year until the death of Elizabeth in 1603, when the pace slackened to about one play per year during the Jacobean reign.
Because Shakespeare never went to university, much is made—too much, in fact—of the termination of his formal schooling with grammar school. The idea that the greatest playwright of the human race could have poured forth such a cornucopia of genius with only the benefit of a grammar school education does seem to stretch stupefaction past the point of credulity. But the objection ignores both the intensely classical curriculum of Stratford’s "grammar" school (which, unlike our modern counterpart, stretched well into a boy’s fifteenth or sixteenth year) and Shakespeare’s years of young adulthood working as a schoolmaster for a wealthy Catholic family in Lancashire, when he had ample opportunity to expand his reading and activate, as a teacher, his passively absorbed pupil’s learning.
One also hears from time to time how sparse are the confirmed and reliable details available to the Shakespeare biographer, but this too is more myth than fact, as two recent works, E. A. J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The "Lost Years" (Manchester University Press) and Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford University Press), amply testify. As the famous Elizabethan historian A. L. Rowse rightly points out, "We know more about him than about any other dramatist of the time, with the exception of Ben Jonson, who lived rather later and had a longer life."
Indeed his schooling, far from making it unlikely that a product of its system would emerge as a poet of astonishing rhetorical intricacy, was such that it could hardly have produced anything else. As Honan points out, "With its arid emphasis on verbal artifice, school evidently came too early for him, in some ways narrowing his mind and delaying his success; there are signs, for example, in his mature writing, that he had been too attracted by ringing changes on words, by varying, amplifying, and patterning. . . . This fault is attributable to schools that were hotbeds of literary talent, but not always of self–sustaining life."
Recent research has also uncovered a plethora of evidence pointing to the Catholic and Jesuit sympathies of most of Shakespeare’s schoolmasters. Simon Hunt, Shakespeare’s first teacher, for example, left his position in 1575 to become a Jesuit priest. One of Shakespeare’s fellow pupils, Robert Debdale by name, was executed as a priest in 1586; while studying for the priesthood Debdale shared classes with Thomas Cottom (executed in 1582), whose brother John Cottom was a schoolmaster at Stratford and taught Shakespeare until, under mounting anti–Catholic pressure from the Crown, he fled home to Lancashire, a Catholic stronghold.
Shortly after that, at least according to Honigmann, Shakespeare took up a position, presumably at Cottom’s recommendation, as a tutor and player in the Houghton household, a recusant Lancashire family whose property neighbored Cottom’s. From the will of one of this family, Alexander Houghton, we know that the family maintained a company of players, for Alexander bequeathed his stock of costumes and musical instruments to a neighbor, one Sir Thomas Hesketh. As it happens, the Heskeths are mentioned as frequent guests in the hospitality book of the Earl of Derby, the most powerful peer of that region; perhaps it is sheer coincidence, but the son of the fourth Earl of Derby was Ferdinando Stanley, later Lord Strange, whose company of players performed four of Shakespeare’s early plays and five of whose members formed the nucleus of the Chamberlain’s Men (later called the King’s Men when King James I assumed patronage of the company), which Shakespeare joined at its inception and for whom he wrote all the rest of his plays.
Although the evidence connecting Shakespeare to the Catholic nobility of Lancashire is only circumstantial, the evidence of his own family’s attachment to Catholicism is direct and overwhelming. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, came from one of the most prominent and tenacious Catholic families in Warwickshire. The head of the clan, Edward Arden, for instance, kept his own Catholic priest, disguised as a gardener but known throughout the Avon valley as Father Hugh Hall. One of Arden’s sons–in–law, a hot–headed Catholic fanatic named John Somerville, traveled to London on a personal mission to assassinate the Queen; apparently quite deranged, he betrayed his intentions to anyone who would listen to his rantings during his frequent tavern–hopping. Inevitably, he was arrested and, under torture, implicated Arden and Hall. The priest died in prison while his case was being adjudicated; but in 1583 the hapless Arden was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head stuck on a spike on London bridge.
William Shakespeare was nineteen years old at the time of his cousin’s execution. Well before that traumatic date, from as far back as William’s thirteenth year, his father John had apparently begun to run into financial difficulties, at which time he tried to avoid town meetings and church attendance, allegedly to elude summons by subpoena (one could be served for debt in church). Presumably the debts were real (he defaulted on a mortgage in 1580), but the father’s financial woes seem to have been exacerbated by Crown revenge against the Ardens. In any event, John’s name was later entered on the recusant rolls of Stratford for failing to come to Anglican church services on Sunday, as the law required. One often reads that John Shakespeare’s absence was due strictly to his fear of subpoena. But Catholic convictions must have played at least some role in the father’s recusancy. On April 27, 1757 a bricklayer working on the son’s birthplace in Stratford came across a six–page manuscript, hidden under the roof tiles, of John Shakespeare’s last will and spiritual testament. To the rather queasy surprise of eighteenth–century England, the document unhesitatingly affirmed John’s Catholic faith (for example, it referred to the "glorious and ever Virgin Mary, refuge and advocate of sinners" and asked for intercessory "prayers and Masses" to speed the testator through purgatory).
The authenticity of the document was challenged for a while, but then an English Jesuit, Herbert Thurston, discovered in 1911 that John Shakespeare had taken the testament, almost word for word, from a translation by Jesuits Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion of a testament first composed by Charles Cardinal Borromeo for Catholics in his diocese during the plague years in Milan in the late 1570s. Before leaving for England, Parsons and Campion had visited Borromeo and were given copies of the testament to bring with them; and we know that Campion got to within twelve miles of Stratford before his arrest in June 1581. Somerville’s plot was exposed in the fall of 1583, so it must have been around then that John Shakespeare hid—but tellingly did not destroy—his treasonous profession of faith. (There is also a possibility that John’s financial difficulties were caused by his recusancy, for many Catholic gentlemen of that age often avoided fines by "conveying" their property to friends and relatives.)
None of this can prove anything about William Shakespeare’s own private convictions, but we do know that his daughter was fined for recusancy and that William and his fiancée Anne Hathaway married not in his Stratford church but in Temple Grafton, five miles from his birthplace. Neither the Shakespeares nor the Hathaways had connections there, but the vicar of the village, John Frith, was cited in contemporary records as "unsound in religion," a code–term for Catholic priests. And finally, a seventeenth–century Anglican archdeacon from nearby Coventry reported that, according to Stratford oral tradition, Shakespeare "died a papist."
Admittedly, the report as phrased implies that Shakespeare only returned to his family’s religion—or perhaps that he had even lost his Christian convictions altogether until his last hours. Indeed a common opinion among critics holds that Shakespeare grew increasingly pagan in outlook as his tragic view deepened. Philip Edwards, until recently the King Alfred Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, is perhaps the most balanced representative of this view. "The idea of salvation and damnation," he says, "is central to an understanding of the tragedies, but the nature of the world beyond this world, the demands that it makes on one, and the means to reach it are presented not as something revealed but as a haunting and troubling mystery. There is a great deal of anxious religious questing and very little Christian conviction." Peter Levi, the classicist and poet (and former Jesuit), echoes this view when he observes that Shakespeare’s "personal religion, so far as his plays reveal it—which is not very far—seems to have been something like Montaigne’s with a touch of neo–Platonism. . . . But his mind had many sides, and he was not, thank God, a theologian, except in the more serious sense in which a poet must be."
These are both plausible views, and for a while I held them too. But then—under the influence of a perhaps surprising source, the writings of British feminist Germaine Greer—I began to reconsider. Taking the play that seems most to evidence Shakespeare’s distance from the reconciling vision of the Christian gospel, Greer shows that King Lear is actually Shakespeare’s most Christian play, and precisely because it is so redolent of Montaigne’s worldview (one must not forget that Montaigne was a Christian and wrote as such): "It would be a mistake to interpret the futility of Lear’s appeals to his gods as evidence of atheism on Shakespeare’s part," she writes. "Rather, like Montaigne, he denies man’s right to scan the ways of God or to assume that God’s will coincides at any point with his own. This Christian skepticism is neither pessimistic nor cynical, for it is based in acceptance of the benighted human condition."
In other words, Shakespeare’s views as a playwright exactly correspond to what he has the character of Isabella (a postulant seeking entrance in a Catholic nunnery, interestingly enough) say in Measure for Measure:
. . . but man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
The key to Greer’s interpretation—one that makes her short book on Shakespeare for Oxford’s "Past Masters" series one of the finest essays on Shakespeare this century—is her insight that the persona of the Fool in Lear and other plays largely coincides with the self–portrait of the poet in the Sonnets: both persons, Sonneteer and Fool, are self–deprecatory, marginalized, and contemned, yet for that reason are lethally insightful about the flaws of the nobility. George Orwell once notoriously criticized Shakespeare for his bourgeois–Tory predilection for hierarchy and aristocracy, holding that the views of the playwright came through only in the voice of kings or nobles. But Greer firmly refutes this view, and shows how the Fool’s comments in Lear indicate how deeply Christian Shakespeare remained throughout his writing career:
Orwell thinks that from Shakespeare’s writings it would be difficult to know that he had any religion—whereas in fact the placing of truth in the mouths of babes is one aspect of the Christian respect for all human life; that same profound feeling is what inspires us to protest loudly when health authorities take a mental defective off dialysis machine because they consider his "quality of life" too low, in defiance of Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount.
I must admit I rather hesitate to raise the issue of Shakespeare’s religion, because at a fundamental level a concentration on his personal beliefs obscures the essence of his achievement. No doubt he participated in the religious life of his country. In public worship (there was, after all, no other legal option) he prayed with a congregation that used Cranmer’s superbly crafted Book of Common Prayer and heard at these same services the Bishop’s Bible (the immediate predecessor to the King James Authorized Version), echoes of both of which can be detected in the plays, and of course he was buried in Stratford’s Trinity Church; while privately he probably held to the Old Religion throughout his life, as recent research is making increasingly evident.
But as an artist he was essentially unselfconscious. Even in the history plays, patriotic and devoted to the monarchy as they clearly were, he sounds relatively unpropagandistic; and he must certainly be the most nonideological writer in English, Chaucer alone excepted. (Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Macaulay, Newman, Tennyson all have their personal hobbyhorses to ride, to say nothing of contemporary writers.) Again, Greer is the critic who gives clearest expression to this insight:
Given the undeniable fact that Shakespeare seldom if ever spoke in his own person, a scrupulous discussion of his thought must take his invisibility into account as an aspect of his intellect. This is not to do what Shakespeare eulogists have so often done in praising him for having "in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling." . . . Rather, he was profoundly aware of and interested in intellectual issues, which he did not choose to simplify, codify, reconcile, or resolve but rather to dramatize. . . . The resolution which is reached is not the negation of the conflict, but the stasis produced by art. Even as we applaud it, we recognize its fragility.
While his authorial modesty might elicit our admiration, we should not attribute it entirely to Shakespeare’s personality, even if we accept the sonnets as autobiographical, where the persona of the poet can at times seem to grovel, even to the point of self–contempt. Rather, Shakespeare’s work as a playwright, without proprietary concerns for his own work or voice, is entirely a product of his life in a company of players: to survive in that appalling, disease–ridden world of fragile egos, he had to be affable, unassuming, and totally subordinate to the company, whose success defined his own. If they failed, so did he.
Above all, he had to be hardworking. In stretches of good weather (and of course when the plague did not loom), a company acted every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent. Moreover, troupes usually put on a different play each afternoon. Each actor, says Honan, usually had to keep at least thirty parts in his head during the span of one month, and a leading actor had to memorize around 800 lines for an afternoon and keep 4,800 lines in mind per week. Mornings were spent in rehearsal for an entirely different play, all without help of a director. Then there was the constant demand for text from the company’s playwright. (The idea of that epicene fop, the Earl of Oxford, taking a break from his falconry and hawking or from his documented European travels to supply two plays a year to this rather disreputable band of low–life artisans is risible.)
Most testimonials to Shakespeare, both during his life and in the memorial to him in the First Folio, speak warmly of his pleasant manners and courteous disposition, a feature of his personality that must have stood him in good stead within his touchy, flamboyant, and excitable troupe. But Shakespeare thrived in this demanding environment, and precisely because he tended by nature, if the sonnets are any indication, toward self–effacement, even self–abasement. "Stage demands suited his rapid intellect," Honan notes. "The more self–abnegating he became, the more his imagination really flourished. His daily self–effacing duties would have given him a sense of routine as he sat at his table, and he found he could supply his troupe best by complicating his work and giving it multiple layers of appeal. In the same play, he can affirm and repudiate popular attitudes, and in a sense, by writing plays with subversive, troubling aspects, he remained inside and outside his vocation, and abetted his own development."
Nor would it be too much to say that Shakespeare could only have been the playwright and poet he was in precisely the period of history ending with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and in the early years of James I. A. L. Rowse is not exaggerating in the least when he avers that if Shakespeare "had been born twenty years earlier or later, his achievement would not have been what it was. The time would not have been ripe, or it would have been overripe, for him and his work as we have it." His career and his work, in other words, "provide a signal example of this fruitful marriage of the right moment with the man." Harold Bloom makes much the same (almost Christological) point in The Western Canon when he says with his usual lapidary precision that "the miracle of Shakespeare’s universalism is that it is not purchased by any transcending of contingencies."
Theaters, after all, were the only places where all the inhabitants of London—from pickpocket and whore to magistrate and noble—could directly experience their membership in a community, and it was the glory of Elizabethan theater to provide precisely that venue for Shakespeare’s art. "In an age when religious zeal turned brother against brother," says Greer, "the drama sought to reunite the people and raise public morale. Shakespeare was remarkably successful in managing potentially inflammable material so as to send audiences home excited and gratified rather than anxious about the deteriorating political situation and increasing instability of the Elizabethan order, but the plays are neither insipid or jingoistic."
Unfortunately, even by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the dynamics of London theatrical economics and increasing Puritan hostility were undermining theater’s unique public role, unprecedented since the days of Periclean Athens. In a passage telling the sad tale, not of the death of kings, but of the end of Shakespeare’s career as a writer of English history plays, Greer points to this new dynamic as the cause:
By the time he wrote Henry V (1598–99) Shakespeare must have been aware that the illusion of unity in English society could no longer be sustained. It was no longer in the power of the dramatist to hold the imagination of all, literate and illiterate, powerful and powerless. The development of the indoor theatres with their greater scenic resources and their prurient interest in matters sensational and intimate rather than public–spirited and universal had divided the Globe’s audience while other entertainments vied for the groundlings’ half–pence. The most talented newcomers to write for the theatre had a different viewpoint at once loftier and more limited.
Still, for a brief window of opportunity, Shakespeare could put his fluency to work to create exactly the art that has made him the greatest dramatist of the human race. Shakespeare, though, was not a mere product of his time. Rather, he is an example of what the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar calls a "relative singularity." Here is his discussion:
Great works of art appear like inexplicable miracles and spontaneous eruptions on the stage of history. Sociologists are as unable to calculate the precise day of their origin as they are to explain in retrospect why they appeared when they did. Of course, works of art are subject to certain preconditions without which they cannot come into being: such conditions may be effective stimuli but do not provide a full explanation of the work itself. Shakespeare had his predecessors, contemporaries, and models; he was surrounded by the atmosphere of the theater of his time. He could only have emerged within that context. Yet who would dare offer to prove that his emergence was inevitable?
It is one thing to examine all the necessary presuppositions and prior requirements that make possible the emergence of a work of art; but it is another thing entirely to claim that one has thereby accounted for that work of art. This is to mistake the sudden manifestation of the phenomenon for its presuppositions (a common mental habit called "the genetic fallacy"). And this fallacy is a perennial danger for scholars whose job it is to concentrate on narrating the history of origins until the story ends up at the termination point: the text itself. This movement of going from beginning to end in the narratives of historical critics can make it seem as if the beginning accounts for the end, rather than the end representing an astonishing fulfillment and supersession of what went before. But we can only fall into that trap because we are already in possession of the work and so we know how our etiological narrative will conclude. But this is to fail to come to terms with the work itself, which must itself determine how its own past is to be interpreted.
As Balthasar also points out, the singularity of the great work of art makes it greater than its time, and likely to be misunderstood by those who are so caught up within their time that they are unable to appreciate it.
A great work of art has a certain universal comprehensibility but discloses itself more profoundly and more truly to an individual the more attuned and practiced his powers of perception are. Not everyone picks up the unique inflection of the Greek in a chorus of Sophocles, or of the German of Goethe’s Faust, or of the French in a poem of Valéry. Subjective adaptation can add something of its own, but that objective adequacy which is able to distinguish the noble from the commonplace is more important.
Although he does not share the theological freedom so radiantly on display in Balthasar’s work, and indeed is rather phobic toward Christianity, Harold Bloom echoes Balthasar’s insistence on the primacy of the aesthetic and even comes close to seeing how resentment against aesthetic primacy is rooted in, and arises from, an ideologization of culture that will fear all true singularities, relative or otherwise. In other words, aesthetic contemplation, by its very nature as disinterested appreciation of the singular, refutes any and all ideologies, which is why Bloom hails Shakespeare as the single greatest refutation of all later ideal schemas, programs, reeducation camps, and brainwashing propaganda. "We are all feminist critics," he quotes one professor as proclaiming, and then replies: "That is the rhetoric suitable for an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation." No wonder, then, that in so many English departments in this nation "the teaching of poems, plays, stories, and novels is now supplanted by cheerleading for various social and political causes."
Even on the face of it, this project should strike everyone as absurd and self–defeating. ("The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted in our schools.") But more crucially it begs the question by feeding off Shakespeare’s preeminence precisely by attacking him and not, say, Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe, who presumably are equally the products of class myopia and imperial designs:
Shakespeare’s eminence is, I am certain, the rock upon which the School of Resentment must at last founder. How can they have it both ways? If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, then they need to show why the dominant social class selected him rather than, say, Ben Jonson, for that arbitrary role. Or if history and not the ruling circles exalted Shakespeare, what was it in Shakespeare that so captivated the mighty Demiurge, economic and social history? Clearly this line of inquiry begins to border on the fantastic; how much simpler to admit that there is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between Shakespeare and every other writer, even Chaucer, even Tolstoy, or whoever. Originality is the great scandal that resentment cannot accommodate, and Shakespeare remains the most original writer we will ever know.
By calling Shakespeare "nonideological," and by joining Bloom in hailing him as a refutation of all those ideologies that offer us no hope of "liberation from liberation," I am not claiming that he passed his life in a hermetically sealed realm of pure aesthetics, blissfully unaware of the passions and ideas that were tearing apart the English nation. Quite the contrary: where Elizabethans were unanimous in their worldview (hierarchy, Great Chain of Being, immortality of the soul, etc.), Shakespeare was one with his contemporaries.
But where his countrymen differed and hurled themselves into the conflict over ideas, Shakespeare participated by dramatizing the conflict, not by contributing to it. And that is the source of his greatness; for the aesthetic, properly understood, subsumes all ideologies by understanding them from within and by giving us true liberation through that understanding. Balthasar and Bloom converge at this point, one from a theological and the other from a literary perspective; but perhaps Bloom can illustrate the point better because of the way Shakespeare has managed to liberate Bloom himself from his own previous excessive attachment to Freud:
Here they [that is, the professional Resenters] confront insurmountable difficulty in Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic strength: he is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not by prefiguration but by postfiguration, as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare’s; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare, or would if we could bear a reduction that crosses the line into absurdities of loss. Coriolanus is a far more powerful reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon than any Marxist reading of Coriolanus could hope to be.
No doubt Shakespeare shared in the stereotypes of his day. In fact, one will occasionally come across the complaint that Shakespeare’s thought is too homespun, too reliant on proverbs and folk wisdom, too "bromidic," as it were, to be of service to a philosopher or theologian—or ideologue. George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell frequently opined in this manner. But this observation (which contains a grain of truth) misses a central point: the ideas that do appear in the plays—monarchism, hierarchy, ambition, fidelity to one’s marriage vows or to one’s king, the ideal of chastity in some, the celebration of concupiscence in others, etc.—all function, so to speak, as actors in the plot. That is, Shakespeare presents no overarching idea meant to serve as a soapbox from which the playwright can browbeat the audience with his convictions. The folk wisdom that gets expressed from time to time by various actors thus serves as a kind of implicit Greek chorus commenting on the action. And precisely because the proverbs and folk wisdom being expressed are true, and recognized as true by the audience, they create a bond between the meaning of the play and the experience of the spectators.
Both Orwell and Shaw thus have a point when they accuse Shakespeare of having a philosophy that rarely transcends the hackneyed, time–tested saws of folk wisdom. But the truth of this wisdom is what counts. Moreover, one of the rarely noticed gifts that make his plays so engaging is his ability to turn bromides, clichés, and proverbs into music. Somewhat like Mozart transforming the rather silly libretto for The Magic Flute into the most extraordinary melodies, Shakespeare can take the rather pedestrian awkwardness of English, with its clumsy consonant clusters, random stress accents, and unmusical cadences, and turn it into an arresting melody.
I can cite only two examples here. Just before the Friar marries Romeo and Juliet in a secret ceremony, Romeo shows up in church too excited and in love to prepare himself properly for the sacred rite. The Friar upbraids him for his adolescent hot blood and sternly admonishes him, using words whose message scarcely means much more than "haste makes waste" but whose musical phrasing immediately awakens the audience to the real meaning of the couple’s tragedy:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore, love moderately; long love doth so:
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
Similarly with evil. Everyone knows that evil is a real force in the world and cuts a hole in the fabric of Being; but that gash in Being is also what makes evil, in the metaphysical sense, a non–entity, a gap, a privation. Everyone also knows that good can come out of evil, as when a plague of insects devastates the fields of a one–crop economy, forcing the region to diversify. (There is a statue of the cotton–destroying boll weevil in front of the statehouse in Birmingham, Alabama, for just this reason.) But every hospital chaplain also knows that patients are not in the least comforted by being told that "God draws good out of evil," or that "evil is only a privation in relation to being."
Now, any playwright who can compose King Lear and Othello needs no instruction from metaphysicians or theologians on the nature of evil as a real and active force in human history and in the human personality. But Shakespeare also had an abiding sense of evil’s strange, shadowy evanescence, especially in the later plays, where a reconciling mood seems to lift evil off its hinges. But this reconciliation never seems forced or cheaply won, because the truth of the bromides "evil is a privation" and "God draws good out of evil" are enacted, not pronounced. Wittgenstein gets this point exactly right when he says that "Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. Hence he has to be objective; otherwise he would not so much display the dance of human passions—as talk about it."
The enactment, however, must still at some point include a "speech act" pointing out the meaning of the action, and here once more Shakespeare is able to exploit the resources of folk wisdom, to turn it into music, and to place it in the mouth of one of his characters, who at that moment becomes the chorus commenting on the meaning of the play. But because Shakespeare rarely uses an actor whose sole role is to play the chorus, he avoids the danger of didacticism, and lets the wisdom embed itself in the action of the play (which is why so many of Shakespeare’s characters, including even Iago, both seem and do not seem to express the playwright’s viewpoint). Somewhat at random I shall cite this example from Henry V:
Gloucester, ’tis true that we are in great danger;
The greater therefore should our courage be.
There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distill it out.
For our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful and good husbandry.
Besides, they are our outward consciences,
And preachers to us all, admonishing
That we dress us fairly for our end:
Thus may we gather honey from the weed,
And make a moral of the devil himself.
No wonder, then, that Dr. Johnson could say of Shakespeare that "he seems to produce, without labor, what no labor can improve." How he manages to have characters speak lines in such arresting melodies enunciating such obvious truths and yet in a voice that seems to correspond exactly both to the personality of the character and to the situation of the moment is, of all Shakespeare’s achievements, the most mysterious to explain and the hardest to specify.
The editors of First Things did not choose Shakespeare for their millennium series, preferring Calvin for the sixteenth century and Pascal for the seventeenth. I concur. For the singular, universal genius of Shakespeare makes him a poor representative of those ideologically riven centuries, while at the same time his sublime freedom makes him the obvious choice for man of the millennium, the one man of the past one thousand years who can promise us liberation from liberation. Who else is there?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is the author of Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum).
Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 98 (December 1999): 17-24.
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom
Riverhead Books, $35
by Robert Atwan
When I was teaching Shakespeare years ago to bright but culturally disengaged engineering students, I remember searching for an effective way to help them appreciate the awesome complexity of the plays. I wanted them to set aside for a moment abstract ideas ("revenge") and personality traits (Hamlet's "procrastination") and concentrate instead on the intricacy of the play as a whole. By this I did not simply mean the discovery of recurring metaphors or patterns of imagery; I hoped instead to open up for inspection a poetic and dramatic interrelatedness-passage echoing passage and scene mirroring scene-of such magnitude that the only authentic response could be astonishment.
The traditional "organic" approach to the plays-seeing each one as a living thing in which all parts coalesced into a unified whole-failed to inspire the imagination of my technologically oriented students. One evening while wiring up a new hi-fi system, however, I happily hit upon the global image I needed. The next day I unfolded the schematic diagram that accompanied the equipment, and invited the students to imagine the play in terms of integrated circuitry, to envision it as a vast map of linkages and interconnections. I found that they quickly caught on to the overarching complexity of Shakespeare's dramatic language. Today such a mechanistic, two-dimensional model is of course electronically obsolete, and I might now display an imaging map suggesting the tremendous interconnectivity of the cerebral cortex.
While the multilayered architecture and the dramatic intricacy of the major plays never ceases to amaze me, I never supposed anyone would approach the level of admiration Harold Bloom reaches in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. For Bloom, Shakespeare stands alone not only as the greatest literary genius who ever lived, but the greatest intellect of all time, so far ahead of anyone who came before or after him that we can never catch up. He represents the outer reaches of human intelligence, and when we immerse ourselves in his plays we enter territory as yet uncharted. This means that even the most gifted critical minds-Bloom's included-cannot contain Shakespeare; he contains them. As Bloom puts it, "no one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean."
The great critics of the English Romantic period (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb) also held Shakespeare in awe, but for the most part they viewed his genius as merely an all-encompassing creative power. No one else, they believed, came closer to capturing human nature in its widest variety. Shakespeare's brilliance, moreover, had little to do with power of observation. Shakespeare captured so much of humanity not because he was a gifted observer but because he had only to look deeply into his own mind to find everything he needed to know. In 1811, Charles Lamb summarized this power in one convoluted sentence:
We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere of humanity' he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
Lamb's praise approaches what George Bernard Shaw in 1901 termed "Bardolatry." Though it anticipates Bloom's argument, however, Lamb's comment still falls short of Bloom's overall assessment of Shakespeare's genius. Bloom finds nothing wrong with the worship of Shakespeare; in fact, he claims that it "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is." Bloom believes not only that we can't fully explain Shakespeare, but that "Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us." It is a gigantic, intriguing-and by all means a provocative-leap from imagining a Shakespeare who is the "sphere of humanity" to imagining that he outright invented humanity. But what exactly does that mean?
In his monumental study of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, another of Bloom's literary idols, sensibly points out that when Shakespeare began to write there was very little systematic study of the human mind and emotions. When Bloom claims that Shakespeare invented the human, however, he doesn't merely mean that he pioneered these psychological fields in literature before they became established in what gradually became our modern disciplines. According to Bloom, Shakespeare-especially in his creation of Falstaff and Hamlet-so utterly altered human consciousness that after him the world was a different place and we were different creatures. In other words, Shakespeare re-created humanity.
This a bold claim, and one expects to find ample discussion of it. Yet here Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human disappoints. For Bloom chooses to devote most of the book to critical essays on each of the plays, leaving himself only some fifty pages of front and back matter to explain what he means by his provocative subtitle. Though richly packed with brilliant observations from a lifetime of reading and teaching Shakespeare, these essays do not add up to the kind of systematic support Bloom's central claim deserves and demands. A book devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's cognitive power and his decisive role in the alteration of human consciousness would have allowed for a more coherent and persuasive argument. It would have given Bloom the opportunity to explain more precisely what Shakespeare's unique intelligence consists of and why "the aesthetic achievement of Shakespeare cannot be separated from his cognitive power." Had he not restricted himself to a chapter-by-chapter coverage of each of the plays, Bloom could have focused more closely on his favorite plays and characters-Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, Rosalind, and Macbeth-and established more cogently how they shaped our vision of the human. The play-by-play organization seems also to work against Bloom's own critical disposition: for example, he proudly acknowledges that to "exalt Falstaff above his plays" is to commit a formalist and historicist "sin." Yet if Bloom believes the corpulent Sir John is "more than a role" (indeed, if "Hamlet and Falstaff have become our culture"), then why confine his fullest treatment of Falstaff to a chapter on Henry IV?
Even if Bloom's central assertion cannot be proven-historically, empirically, or deductively-it might have inspired more reflective and speculative criticism. Why was the spark of modern consciousness set into motion by a single dramatist from one small nation and not by the general European intellectual movement we customarily call the Renaissance? Did Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Dürer make any contributions to the invention of the human-or was this invention entirely a business of words? Assuming Shakespeare did indeed transform human consciousness, how quickly did the change occur? Though they clearly appreciated Shakespeare's enormous gifts, did his contemporaries realize their limited minds were suddenly being permanently altered and enlarged?
Bloom's thesis raises countless questions like these that he rarely addresses or anticipates. It's also difficult to know how far to take his claim. He makes no attempt to define what he means by "human" either in its post-Shakespearean or pre-Shakespearean sense. Surely, when we read Plato or Sophocles or Juvenal or Petrarch or Dante or Rabelais we cannot help but recognize their vital and convincing connection to the human spirit. Yet, how "human" were they? It's not at all clear how Bloom wants us to understand the great minds that preceded Shakespeare (should we consider them "old human"? "pre-human"? ), but coming as they did before the "invention of the human," they cannot, in Bloom's view, speak to us in the ways that Shakespeare has now accustomed us to be spoken to. Their "inwardness" is insufficient. Though they may transmit important messages, their bandwidths are simply too narrow. If by some historical intervention they were given the opportunity to read Shakespeare, would Erasmus have been able to comprehend Hamlet? Could Machiavelli grasp Richard III?
Let's suppose that Shakespeare did invent the human. How good an invention did it turn out to be? Bloom claims that if Shakespeare had died at twenty-nine, like his friend Christopher Marlowe, the world would be a different place: "we would be very different, because we would think and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare's ideas before they were our own." But would a non-Shakespearean world be a better or worse place to inhabit? Did Shakespeare, with his powerful creations of abusive, tyrannical, and murderous egoists, supply the future with the best "role" models? Should it make us uneasy that Hitler, in an attack against modernist theatrical filth, praised Shakespeare (along with Goethe and Schiller) as one of the great dramatists of all times? Isn't the playwright also responsible for fashioning the modern psychopath or, as Bloom might have it, the "criminal visionary"? To be sure, Bloom recognizes the full spectrum of benignity and malignity included under the word "human." He writes in his discussion of Richard III: "To invent Richard is to have created a great monster, but one that will be refined into Shakespeare's invention of the human, of which Iago, to everyone's delight and sorrow, will constitute so central a part." That still leaves us with a societal implication one wishes Bloom had unpacked: if Shakespeare had never written his major plays would the world be a kinder, gentler, more equitable, and harmonious place to live?
Bloom might also have devoted more attention to his theory's critical and philosophical ramifications. If throughout four centuries Shakespeare has remained the circumference of our intellectual possibilities (if he wholly "contains" us, as Bloom likes to put it) then might we also-imagine Shakespeare's art as an immense prison system that has kept his human invention tranquilly confined within its intellectual walls for life? If Shakespeare, as Bloom predicts, will also "go on enclosing those likely to come after us," could it be about time for humanity to make its break? What intellectual world might lie on the other side of this enormous jailhouse? Or is it Bloom's contention that from Shakespeare there is no exit?
Imprisonment is one of Shakespeare's dominant tropes, one that figures in nearly every play, whether there is an actual jail or not. "Denmark's a prison," says Hamlet, echoing his ghostly father's complaint about his own purgatorial "prison-house." "Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower," says the Duke of Clarence in Richard III, as he recounts a ghastly dream of escape that leads to an even more smothering imprisonment. In Measure for Measure, a vastly underrated play given over entirely to the idea of imprisonment (Bloom's analysis is brilliant), even death offers no escape: the unfortunate Claudio imagines that to die is "To be imprison'd in the viewless winds." It's possible that the repeated images of confinement and entrapment suggest a psychological obsession on Shakespeare's part, but they also raise an aesthetic issue that goes to the heart of reading the major plays.
"The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," thinks Hamlet, as he plainly equates dramatic composition with a baited trap. We may profitably consider how close this image brings us to Shakespeare's artistic core. Bloom points out that Shakespeare always seems way ahead of us; though Bloom relishes the intellectual challenges we face in continually trying to catch up, he doesn't address the peculiar frustrations of that impossibility. Like Nabokov (another literary genius fascinated with prisons and traps), Shakespeare exerts terrific intellectual pressure on even the most sophisticated reader. The more we read Shakespeare, the more we find our interpretive responses not only anticipated but voiced by characters whose perspectives we have learned not to trust. And no character's voice goes completely unchallenged. Bloom concentrates only on the liberating dimensions of the major plays, and one can only agree with him that they teach us to be smarter readers of literature-all literature. Yet he ignores the frustrations of being continually ensnared by Shakespeare's genius. The complexity of any one of the major plays can be so overwhelming that it seems impossible to form a conclusive or comprehensive vision of the play as a whole.
What surprises me most about Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is that Bloom surrenders so eagerly to Shakespeare's superiority. Throughout his career Bloom has stoutheartedly struggled against all kinds of political, religious, and cultural dominance-so why not intellectual sovereignty as well? Indeed, intellectual strife, the Emersonian sort, is one of Bloom's dominant tropes. Yet Emerson could say in his journals: "The only objection to Hamlet is that is exists." If Bloom believes William Shakespeare "contains," "encloses," or "circumscribes" him, why is he so uncharacteristically comfortable with the fact? Why doesn't he measure the limits of his and our confinement? If anyone could mastermind the great escape from the Shakespearean dungeon and show us the way to a post-Shakespearean world it would surely be Harold Bloom. Even if he had to tunnel his way out.
Samuel Johnson thought that Shakespeare should be criticized "without envious malignity or superstitious veneration." Bloom never shows any sign of envious disrespect for Shakespeare, and he does find flaws in the plays, especially in the minor works, but even in some of the great ones. But when he says that if "any author has become a mortal god, it must be Shakespeare," are we approaching "superstitious veneration" and starting to slide down a slippery slope from harmless Bardolatry to offenses against Moses's first and second commandments? Bloom is careful to claim that Shakespeare invented, not created, the human, but throughout his book we are repeatedly introduced to a humanity that has apparently been re-created by Shakespeare in his image, presumably as a revision of Adam and Eve. Bloom's critical genius has always drawn its inspiration from Milton and Blake's daringly rebellious Lucifer. In Shakespeare has he found a master who finally makes subversion unthinkable?
Originally published in the February/March 1999 issue of Boston Review
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harold Bloom
Riverhead Books, $35
by Robert Atwan
When I was teaching Shakespeare years ago to bright but culturally disengaged engineering students, I remember searching for an effective way to help them appreciate the awesome complexity of the plays. I wanted them to set aside for a moment abstract ideas ("revenge") and personality traits (Hamlet's "procrastination") and concentrate instead on the intricacy of the play as a whole. By this I did not simply mean the discovery of recurring metaphors or patterns of imagery; I hoped instead to open up for inspection a poetic and dramatic interrelatedness-passage echoing passage and scene mirroring scene-of such magnitude that the only authentic response could be astonishment.
The traditional "organic" approach to the plays-seeing each one as a living thing in which all parts coalesced into a unified whole-failed to inspire the imagination of my technologically oriented students. One evening while wiring up a new hi-fi system, however, I happily hit upon the global image I needed. The next day I unfolded the schematic diagram that accompanied the equipment, and invited the students to imagine the play in terms of integrated circuitry, to envision it as a vast map of linkages and interconnections. I found that they quickly caught on to the overarching complexity of Shakespeare's dramatic language. Today such a mechanistic, two-dimensional model is of course electronically obsolete, and I might now display an imaging map suggesting the tremendous interconnectivity of the cerebral cortex.
While the multilayered architecture and the dramatic intricacy of the major plays never ceases to amaze me, I never supposed anyone would approach the level of admiration Harold Bloom reaches in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. For Bloom, Shakespeare stands alone not only as the greatest literary genius who ever lived, but the greatest intellect of all time, so far ahead of anyone who came before or after him that we can never catch up. He represents the outer reaches of human intelligence, and when we immerse ourselves in his plays we enter territory as yet uncharted. This means that even the most gifted critical minds-Bloom's included-cannot contain Shakespeare; he contains them. As Bloom puts it, "no one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean."
The great critics of the English Romantic period (Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb) also held Shakespeare in awe, but for the most part they viewed his genius as merely an all-encompassing creative power. No one else, they believed, came closer to capturing human nature in its widest variety. Shakespeare's brilliance, moreover, had little to do with power of observation. Shakespeare captured so much of humanity not because he was a gifted observer but because he had only to look deeply into his own mind to find everything he needed to know. In 1811, Charles Lamb summarized this power in one convoluted sentence:
We talk of Shakespeare's admirable observation of life, when we should feel, that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters which surrounded him, as they surround us, but from his own mind, which was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very 'sphere of humanity' he fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us recognizing a part, think we comprehend in our natures the whole; and oftentimes mistake the powers which he positively creates in us, for nothing more than indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only waited the application of corresponding virtues in him to return a full and clear echo of the same.
Lamb's praise approaches what George Bernard Shaw in 1901 termed "Bardolatry." Though it anticipates Bloom's argument, however, Lamb's comment still falls short of Bloom's overall assessment of Shakespeare's genius. Bloom finds nothing wrong with the worship of Shakespeare; in fact, he claims that it "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is." Bloom believes not only that we can't fully explain Shakespeare, but that "Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us." It is a gigantic, intriguing-and by all means a provocative-leap from imagining a Shakespeare who is the "sphere of humanity" to imagining that he outright invented humanity. But what exactly does that mean?
In his monumental study of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, another of Bloom's literary idols, sensibly points out that when Shakespeare began to write there was very little systematic study of the human mind and emotions. When Bloom claims that Shakespeare invented the human, however, he doesn't merely mean that he pioneered these psychological fields in literature before they became established in what gradually became our modern disciplines. According to Bloom, Shakespeare-especially in his creation of Falstaff and Hamlet-so utterly altered human consciousness that after him the world was a different place and we were different creatures. In other words, Shakespeare re-created humanity.
This a bold claim, and one expects to find ample discussion of it. Yet here Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human disappoints. For Bloom chooses to devote most of the book to critical essays on each of the plays, leaving himself only some fifty pages of front and back matter to explain what he means by his provocative subtitle. Though richly packed with brilliant observations from a lifetime of reading and teaching Shakespeare, these essays do not add up to the kind of systematic support Bloom's central claim deserves and demands. A book devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's cognitive power and his decisive role in the alteration of human consciousness would have allowed for a more coherent and persuasive argument. It would have given Bloom the opportunity to explain more precisely what Shakespeare's unique intelligence consists of and why "the aesthetic achievement of Shakespeare cannot be separated from his cognitive power." Had he not restricted himself to a chapter-by-chapter coverage of each of the plays, Bloom could have focused more closely on his favorite plays and characters-Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, Rosalind, and Macbeth-and established more cogently how they shaped our vision of the human. The play-by-play organization seems also to work against Bloom's own critical disposition: for example, he proudly acknowledges that to "exalt Falstaff above his plays" is to commit a formalist and historicist "sin." Yet if Bloom believes the corpulent Sir John is "more than a role" (indeed, if "Hamlet and Falstaff have become our culture"), then why confine his fullest treatment of Falstaff to a chapter on Henry IV?
Even if Bloom's central assertion cannot be proven-historically, empirically, or deductively-it might have inspired more reflective and speculative criticism. Why was the spark of modern consciousness set into motion by a single dramatist from one small nation and not by the general European intellectual movement we customarily call the Renaissance? Did Leonardo, Michaelangelo, and Dürer make any contributions to the invention of the human-or was this invention entirely a business of words? Assuming Shakespeare did indeed transform human consciousness, how quickly did the change occur? Though they clearly appreciated Shakespeare's enormous gifts, did his contemporaries realize their limited minds were suddenly being permanently altered and enlarged?
Bloom's thesis raises countless questions like these that he rarely addresses or anticipates. It's also difficult to know how far to take his claim. He makes no attempt to define what he means by "human" either in its post-Shakespearean or pre-Shakespearean sense. Surely, when we read Plato or Sophocles or Juvenal or Petrarch or Dante or Rabelais we cannot help but recognize their vital and convincing connection to the human spirit. Yet, how "human" were they? It's not at all clear how Bloom wants us to understand the great minds that preceded Shakespeare (should we consider them "old human"? "pre-human"? ), but coming as they did before the "invention of the human," they cannot, in Bloom's view, speak to us in the ways that Shakespeare has now accustomed us to be spoken to. Their "inwardness" is insufficient. Though they may transmit important messages, their bandwidths are simply too narrow. If by some historical intervention they were given the opportunity to read Shakespeare, would Erasmus have been able to comprehend Hamlet? Could Machiavelli grasp Richard III?
Let's suppose that Shakespeare did invent the human. How good an invention did it turn out to be? Bloom claims that if Shakespeare had died at twenty-nine, like his friend Christopher Marlowe, the world would be a different place: "we would be very different, because we would think and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare's ideas before they were our own." But would a non-Shakespearean world be a better or worse place to inhabit? Did Shakespeare, with his powerful creations of abusive, tyrannical, and murderous egoists, supply the future with the best "role" models? Should it make us uneasy that Hitler, in an attack against modernist theatrical filth, praised Shakespeare (along with Goethe and Schiller) as one of the great dramatists of all times? Isn't the playwright also responsible for fashioning the modern psychopath or, as Bloom might have it, the "criminal visionary"? To be sure, Bloom recognizes the full spectrum of benignity and malignity included under the word "human." He writes in his discussion of Richard III: "To invent Richard is to have created a great monster, but one that will be refined into Shakespeare's invention of the human, of which Iago, to everyone's delight and sorrow, will constitute so central a part." That still leaves us with a societal implication one wishes Bloom had unpacked: if Shakespeare had never written his major plays would the world be a kinder, gentler, more equitable, and harmonious place to live?
Bloom might also have devoted more attention to his theory's critical and philosophical ramifications. If throughout four centuries Shakespeare has remained the circumference of our intellectual possibilities (if he wholly "contains" us, as Bloom likes to put it) then might we also-imagine Shakespeare's art as an immense prison system that has kept his human invention tranquilly confined within its intellectual walls for life? If Shakespeare, as Bloom predicts, will also "go on enclosing those likely to come after us," could it be about time for humanity to make its break? What intellectual world might lie on the other side of this enormous jailhouse? Or is it Bloom's contention that from Shakespeare there is no exit?
Imprisonment is one of Shakespeare's dominant tropes, one that figures in nearly every play, whether there is an actual jail or not. "Denmark's a prison," says Hamlet, echoing his ghostly father's complaint about his own purgatorial "prison-house." "Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower," says the Duke of Clarence in Richard III, as he recounts a ghastly dream of escape that leads to an even more smothering imprisonment. In Measure for Measure, a vastly underrated play given over entirely to the idea of imprisonment (Bloom's analysis is brilliant), even death offers no escape: the unfortunate Claudio imagines that to die is "To be imprison'd in the viewless winds." It's possible that the repeated images of confinement and entrapment suggest a psychological obsession on Shakespeare's part, but they also raise an aesthetic issue that goes to the heart of reading the major plays.
"The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," thinks Hamlet, as he plainly equates dramatic composition with a baited trap. We may profitably consider how close this image brings us to Shakespeare's artistic core. Bloom points out that Shakespeare always seems way ahead of us; though Bloom relishes the intellectual challenges we face in continually trying to catch up, he doesn't address the peculiar frustrations of that impossibility. Like Nabokov (another literary genius fascinated with prisons and traps), Shakespeare exerts terrific intellectual pressure on even the most sophisticated reader. The more we read Shakespeare, the more we find our interpretive responses not only anticipated but voiced by characters whose perspectives we have learned not to trust. And no character's voice goes completely unchallenged. Bloom concentrates only on the liberating dimensions of the major plays, and one can only agree with him that they teach us to be smarter readers of literature-all literature. Yet he ignores the frustrations of being continually ensnared by Shakespeare's genius. The complexity of any one of the major plays can be so overwhelming that it seems impossible to form a conclusive or comprehensive vision of the play as a whole.
What surprises me most about Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is that Bloom surrenders so eagerly to Shakespeare's superiority. Throughout his career Bloom has stoutheartedly struggled against all kinds of political, religious, and cultural dominance-so why not intellectual sovereignty as well? Indeed, intellectual strife, the Emersonian sort, is one of Bloom's dominant tropes. Yet Emerson could say in his journals: "The only objection to Hamlet is that is exists." If Bloom believes William Shakespeare "contains," "encloses," or "circumscribes" him, why is he so uncharacteristically comfortable with the fact? Why doesn't he measure the limits of his and our confinement? If anyone could mastermind the great escape from the Shakespearean dungeon and show us the way to a post-Shakespearean world it would surely be Harold Bloom. Even if he had to tunnel his way out.
Samuel Johnson thought that Shakespeare should be criticized "without envious malignity or superstitious veneration." Bloom never shows any sign of envious disrespect for Shakespeare, and he does find flaws in the plays, especially in the minor works, but even in some of the great ones. But when he says that if "any author has become a mortal god, it must be Shakespeare," are we approaching "superstitious veneration" and starting to slide down a slippery slope from harmless Bardolatry to offenses against Moses's first and second commandments? Bloom is careful to claim that Shakespeare invented, not created, the human, but throughout his book we are repeatedly introduced to a humanity that has apparently been re-created by Shakespeare in his image, presumably as a revision of Adam and Eve. Bloom's critical genius has always drawn its inspiration from Milton and Blake's daringly rebellious Lucifer. In Shakespeare has he found a master who finally makes subversion unthinkable?
Originally published in the February/March 1999 issue of Boston Review
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Richard Bausch talks about Peace
http://www.pri.org/arts-entertainment/books/richard-bausch-peace.html
Three Soldiers, from NYTimes 2008
PEACE
By Richard Bausch.
171 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $19.95.
Of all the grim theaters of conflict in World War II, none were more dismal and murderous than Italy in the winter of 1944. As American forces slogged and scrambled their way north, the Germans gave way with brutal reluctance, while Italian partisans fought Fascists, and others welcomed the “liberators” or just sullenly watched. The war took place in a world of ambush, treachery and uncertainty. This is the setting for Richard Bausch’s 11th novel, a short, bleakly brilliant one-act drama depicting the futility and moral complexity of combat.
If they talk about war at all, veterans quite often recall one moment of revealing horror, when civilized behavior lurched out of kilter and the sheer nastiness of what ordinary men were doing to one another was suddenly illuminated. “Peace” begins with such a moment. A unit of American troops stops a farmer’s donkey cart full of wet straw on an icy road somewhere near the town of Cassino. When the cart is rolled over in the search for contraband or weapons, an escaping German soldier and his whore tumble out. The German shoots two of the men and is killed in turn by Robert Marson, the novel’s central character. The woman curses and claws at her captors. The unit sergeant places a carbine to her forehead and casually murders her. All Marson sees, when he looks around, is “the curve of her calves, the feet in a man’s boots where they jutted from the grass.”
This is the defining event of the novel, the central image and the insistent moral conundrum as the men march on into the freezing rain. “Robert Marson thought about how they were all witnesses. And nobody could look anybody in the eye.” Was such an act necessary or indefensible? Should it be defended or denounced? Or conveniently forgotten? As a matter of history, several similar crimes were committed by Allied soldiers in this conflict and the perpetrators never brought to justice, as Rick Atkinson related in his masterly account of the Italian campaign, “The Day of Battle,” published last year.
The question of how to preserve justice and personal integrity amid war’s insanity is the central concern of Bausch’s novel. “How you live your life,” as Marson puts it. “What you do while you’re here.” One senses some inherited autobiography here. Marson is the grandson of German immigrants; his comrade, Asch, is the grandson of a German Jew who fought for the Kaiser in World War I. Bausch has dedicated the book to a father who “served bravely in Africa, Sicily and Italy.”
As in his earlier fiction, Bausch is adept at capturing the cadences of everyday American speech, and the questioning of ordinary, decent men. His tense, economic prose chimes with the precise, laconic language of soldiers. The worst writing about war is either black-and-white or Technicolor. The best, like this, is in shades of gray, evoking the personal equivocations, the doubts, the discomfort and the sheer, crushing boredom and fatigue that constitute the real nature of war. Marson faces death in a titanic struggle against Nazism, but what obsesses him is the blister on his heel, the image of the dead woman’s legs in the grass.
Bausch’s war is real, but his characterization of the warriors is less assured, sometimes veering close to stereotype: Joyner, the brash teenager from the Michigan sheep farm, with the foul mouth, the barely suppressed racism and the sturdy heart; Asch, the tender Jewish boy with chubby cheeks; Marson himself, a former star athlete and Roman Catholic self-interrogator, trying to keep command, trying to pray.
The members of this typecast crew stagger grimly over a frozen mountainside on night patrol, stalked by a sniper, guided by an elderly Italian peasant who may or may not be waiting for the moment to betray them. In the near distance, they hear volley after volley of gunfire, the retreating Germans methodically murdering the Jews in a local village. Asch, distraught at what he can hear and imagine, recites the Mourner’s Prayer for the dead and vows to report the woman’s death if he gets back alive.
“I’m gonna report a murder.”
“... After this?”
“Yes. ... Especially after this. Especially after this, goddamn it.”
The message is a little thumping, standing in contrast to the subtlety with which Bausch draws the internal struggles of three very different men attempting to appease their consciences and stay alive. At night, Asch and Marson sit hunched together over a miserable fire in the sleeting rain, searching for some kind of peace to share. The moment recalls the two German soldiers in gentle communion in “All Quiet on the Western Front”: “We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death.” At the novel’s climax, Marson must also find out whether the spark of his own humanity is bright enough to stay alight in the freezing deluge of combat.
Great writing about war — by Primo Levi, Erich Maria Remarque, Wilfred Owen — asks the same questions. What would you do? How can you bear witness? How can you preserve dignity and humanity in an inhuman struggle? These are the most (perhaps the only) important questions in conflict, and they always have been, whether the battle is fought in Amiens, Anzio or Abu Ghraib.
Ben Macintyre’s latest book is “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal.”
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/books/review/Macintyre-t.html
By Richard Bausch.
171 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $19.95.
Of all the grim theaters of conflict in World War II, none were more dismal and murderous than Italy in the winter of 1944. As American forces slogged and scrambled their way north, the Germans gave way with brutal reluctance, while Italian partisans fought Fascists, and others welcomed the “liberators” or just sullenly watched. The war took place in a world of ambush, treachery and uncertainty. This is the setting for Richard Bausch’s 11th novel, a short, bleakly brilliant one-act drama depicting the futility and moral complexity of combat.
If they talk about war at all, veterans quite often recall one moment of revealing horror, when civilized behavior lurched out of kilter and the sheer nastiness of what ordinary men were doing to one another was suddenly illuminated. “Peace” begins with such a moment. A unit of American troops stops a farmer’s donkey cart full of wet straw on an icy road somewhere near the town of Cassino. When the cart is rolled over in the search for contraband or weapons, an escaping German soldier and his whore tumble out. The German shoots two of the men and is killed in turn by Robert Marson, the novel’s central character. The woman curses and claws at her captors. The unit sergeant places a carbine to her forehead and casually murders her. All Marson sees, when he looks around, is “the curve of her calves, the feet in a man’s boots where they jutted from the grass.”
This is the defining event of the novel, the central image and the insistent moral conundrum as the men march on into the freezing rain. “Robert Marson thought about how they were all witnesses. And nobody could look anybody in the eye.” Was such an act necessary or indefensible? Should it be defended or denounced? Or conveniently forgotten? As a matter of history, several similar crimes were committed by Allied soldiers in this conflict and the perpetrators never brought to justice, as Rick Atkinson related in his masterly account of the Italian campaign, “The Day of Battle,” published last year.
The question of how to preserve justice and personal integrity amid war’s insanity is the central concern of Bausch’s novel. “How you live your life,” as Marson puts it. “What you do while you’re here.” One senses some inherited autobiography here. Marson is the grandson of German immigrants; his comrade, Asch, is the grandson of a German Jew who fought for the Kaiser in World War I. Bausch has dedicated the book to a father who “served bravely in Africa, Sicily and Italy.”
As in his earlier fiction, Bausch is adept at capturing the cadences of everyday American speech, and the questioning of ordinary, decent men. His tense, economic prose chimes with the precise, laconic language of soldiers. The worst writing about war is either black-and-white or Technicolor. The best, like this, is in shades of gray, evoking the personal equivocations, the doubts, the discomfort and the sheer, crushing boredom and fatigue that constitute the real nature of war. Marson faces death in a titanic struggle against Nazism, but what obsesses him is the blister on his heel, the image of the dead woman’s legs in the grass.
Bausch’s war is real, but his characterization of the warriors is less assured, sometimes veering close to stereotype: Joyner, the brash teenager from the Michigan sheep farm, with the foul mouth, the barely suppressed racism and the sturdy heart; Asch, the tender Jewish boy with chubby cheeks; Marson himself, a former star athlete and Roman Catholic self-interrogator, trying to keep command, trying to pray.
The members of this typecast crew stagger grimly over a frozen mountainside on night patrol, stalked by a sniper, guided by an elderly Italian peasant who may or may not be waiting for the moment to betray them. In the near distance, they hear volley after volley of gunfire, the retreating Germans methodically murdering the Jews in a local village. Asch, distraught at what he can hear and imagine, recites the Mourner’s Prayer for the dead and vows to report the woman’s death if he gets back alive.
“I’m gonna report a murder.”
“... After this?”
“Yes. ... Especially after this. Especially after this, goddamn it.”
The message is a little thumping, standing in contrast to the subtlety with which Bausch draws the internal struggles of three very different men attempting to appease their consciences and stay alive. At night, Asch and Marson sit hunched together over a miserable fire in the sleeting rain, searching for some kind of peace to share. The moment recalls the two German soldiers in gentle communion in “All Quiet on the Western Front”: “We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death.” At the novel’s climax, Marson must also find out whether the spark of his own humanity is bright enough to stay alight in the freezing deluge of combat.
Great writing about war — by Primo Levi, Erich Maria Remarque, Wilfred Owen — asks the same questions. What would you do? How can you bear witness? How can you preserve dignity and humanity in an inhuman struggle? These are the most (perhaps the only) important questions in conflict, and they always have been, whether the battle is fought in Amiens, Anzio or Abu Ghraib.
Ben Macintyre’s latest book is “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal.”
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/books/review/Macintyre-t.html
Monday, November 30, 2009
"Learning To Read" — by Franz Wright
Learning To Read
by Franz Wright
If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.
My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.
My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and
to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;
two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.
Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.
I get down on my knees and thank God for them.
Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.
by Franz Wright
If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.
My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.
My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and
to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;
two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.
Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.
I get down on my knees and thank God for them.
Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.
GOD'S SILENCE
GOD'S SILENCE
Poems.
By Franz Wright.
Offhand and comic, and yet intense and searching too, Franz Wright's poems present a speaker who is emotionally naked and vulnerable. They invite us into a fitful, continuing monologue in which Wright's "I" addresses a (frequently) capitalized "You," his name for God. The "I" is a shuffling, self-mocking example of "some hairy / primate's fall from grace — / one of the patients of God, / one of the orphans of light." God keeps silent, but his silence is resonant. Wright hears in it an anticipation of the end of things, an apocalyptic release (desired, not dreaded) from the tragicomic suffering and injustice that is his vision of life in America today.
When Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his previous book of poetry, "Walking to Martha's Vineyard," he followed the example of his father, James Wright, who also won the award. The poet's connection to his father, who died in 1980, has made him a figure of some fascination in the poetry world. The son's poetry can sometimes seem to channel the father's poignant self-accusations and ecstatic sympathies; and like his father, he has struggled with alcoholism and depression. Wright is also known for an exchange of letters with William Logan, a famously sharp-tongued critic. When Logan called his poems "the Hallmark cards of the damned," Wright wrote to the editor of The New Criterion to complain. Logan responded by publishing a letter Wright had written to him privately, in which he warned the reviewer: "I do not wish to kill you or hurt you, and so I beg you to get away from me, without delay, if you realize we are in the same room somewhere." In the polite world of poetry criticism, trash talk is rare.
What kind of apocalypse does Wright imagine in his new poems? He is not waiting for the Rapture, but he is a Roman Catholic devotional poet of mystical hope. He is impatient with the real and visible ("concrete things stand for / invisible things"), and he pushes past them toward "real reality," "a higher unseeable / life, inconceivable / light / of which light is mere shadow." This impatience extends to people — "a human face" is "the mask / of some being no one can see" — as well as to language. Wright describes a moment of past vision in which "The mask was gone," "There was no / I," and
there was no text, only
what the words stood for;
and then
what all things stand for.
Wright's poems pursue this state of revelation, as if there were a word just out of reach, beyond the words on the page. He calls that goal "some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will."
In his best poems, Wright grasps at the "radiantly obvious thing" in short-lined short lyrics that turn and twist down the page. The urgency and calculated unsteadiness of these utterances, with their abrupt shifts of direction, jump-cuts and quips, mime the wounded openness of a speaker struggling to find faith as he recovers from addiction and despair.
At times, in his longer poems, the verbal tension drops, and, perhaps to counteract this, Wright raises his voice and loses rhetorical control. In "Delirium," we see both effects in quick succession. Here the poet says that when he dies he will become part of "the wheat, the changing light, the clouds." The catalog of clichés continues, ending in a pileup of hyphenated words when Wright suddenly brings up the question of whether God or man should be held responsible for genocide: "shimmering remoteness / the color of just barely audible / children's voices singing, the God- / did-not-allow-those-many-holocausts- / to-happen-we-did distances!"
Killing and collective guilt are often on Wright's mind. "Not all mankind will be cast into fire," he says in "Everyone's Elegy," "though / quite a number of them were / during the decade preceding my / birth and no doubt even more will be / shortly." The matter-of-factness of this sentence ("quite a number," "no doubt even more . . . shortly") may parody a murderous official announcement, but it risks giving the impression that Wright accepts cruelty as a fact of human nature. It does not help when he claims that the victims of mass murder in World War II were "burned / clean of themselves." For, he declares, "no one deserves this / and all deserve this, almost / all. . . . And only You / know which group, the spared or murdered, / represent the doomed and which / the blessed." In what sense could "all" or "almost all" possibly "deserve" to die in this way? To feel this way, one must believe that, as Wright declares in another poem, "To live is to do evil."
But it is not clear how seriously we should take this dark wit who, he admits, "was always the death of the party." He means to disturb us. His poems are full of a prophetic anger attacking American confidence and complacency. "The Sons: March 2003" marks the start of the Iraq war. "This Fourth World War with sticks and stones," Wright calls it, "This month in anesthesia history"; the poem ends when shrapnel brings a soldier to his knees, "and death was a red fog about him." Fear and anesthesia are routine at home too, in a nation divided by class and race and driven by the empty promises of consumer bliss. The bus passengers in "East Boston, 1996" know the rules: "No eye contact: the eyes of the terrified / terrify." In another poem Wright asks, "Why am I afraid / to go grocery shopping? / I suppose there is a pill for that, but / why?"
It may be that the apocalypse Wright longs for is simply freedom from that numbing pill. If so, as Wright suggests in "From a Line by Reverdy," Heaven is "not far"; in fact "a little face turns to the window / and it is there." Happily, at a moment like this, revelation does not mean the end of the world.
Langdon Hammer is chairman of the English department at Yale and poetry editor of The American Scholar.
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14hammer.html
Poems.
By Franz Wright.
Offhand and comic, and yet intense and searching too, Franz Wright's poems present a speaker who is emotionally naked and vulnerable. They invite us into a fitful, continuing monologue in which Wright's "I" addresses a (frequently) capitalized "You," his name for God. The "I" is a shuffling, self-mocking example of "some hairy / primate's fall from grace — / one of the patients of God, / one of the orphans of light." God keeps silent, but his silence is resonant. Wright hears in it an anticipation of the end of things, an apocalyptic release (desired, not dreaded) from the tragicomic suffering and injustice that is his vision of life in America today.
When Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his previous book of poetry, "Walking to Martha's Vineyard," he followed the example of his father, James Wright, who also won the award. The poet's connection to his father, who died in 1980, has made him a figure of some fascination in the poetry world. The son's poetry can sometimes seem to channel the father's poignant self-accusations and ecstatic sympathies; and like his father, he has struggled with alcoholism and depression. Wright is also known for an exchange of letters with William Logan, a famously sharp-tongued critic. When Logan called his poems "the Hallmark cards of the damned," Wright wrote to the editor of The New Criterion to complain. Logan responded by publishing a letter Wright had written to him privately, in which he warned the reviewer: "I do not wish to kill you or hurt you, and so I beg you to get away from me, without delay, if you realize we are in the same room somewhere." In the polite world of poetry criticism, trash talk is rare.
What kind of apocalypse does Wright imagine in his new poems? He is not waiting for the Rapture, but he is a Roman Catholic devotional poet of mystical hope. He is impatient with the real and visible ("concrete things stand for / invisible things"), and he pushes past them toward "real reality," "a higher unseeable / life, inconceivable / light / of which light is mere shadow." This impatience extends to people — "a human face" is "the mask / of some being no one can see" — as well as to language. Wright describes a moment of past vision in which "The mask was gone," "There was no / I," and
there was no text, only
what the words stood for;
and then
what all things stand for.
Wright's poems pursue this state of revelation, as if there were a word just out of reach, beyond the words on the page. He calls that goal "some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will."
In his best poems, Wright grasps at the "radiantly obvious thing" in short-lined short lyrics that turn and twist down the page. The urgency and calculated unsteadiness of these utterances, with their abrupt shifts of direction, jump-cuts and quips, mime the wounded openness of a speaker struggling to find faith as he recovers from addiction and despair.
At times, in his longer poems, the verbal tension drops, and, perhaps to counteract this, Wright raises his voice and loses rhetorical control. In "Delirium," we see both effects in quick succession. Here the poet says that when he dies he will become part of "the wheat, the changing light, the clouds." The catalog of clichés continues, ending in a pileup of hyphenated words when Wright suddenly brings up the question of whether God or man should be held responsible for genocide: "shimmering remoteness / the color of just barely audible / children's voices singing, the God- / did-not-allow-those-many-holocausts- / to-happen-we-did distances!"
Killing and collective guilt are often on Wright's mind. "Not all mankind will be cast into fire," he says in "Everyone's Elegy," "though / quite a number of them were / during the decade preceding my / birth and no doubt even more will be / shortly." The matter-of-factness of this sentence ("quite a number," "no doubt even more . . . shortly") may parody a murderous official announcement, but it risks giving the impression that Wright accepts cruelty as a fact of human nature. It does not help when he claims that the victims of mass murder in World War II were "burned / clean of themselves." For, he declares, "no one deserves this / and all deserve this, almost / all. . . . And only You / know which group, the spared or murdered, / represent the doomed and which / the blessed." In what sense could "all" or "almost all" possibly "deserve" to die in this way? To feel this way, one must believe that, as Wright declares in another poem, "To live is to do evil."
But it is not clear how seriously we should take this dark wit who, he admits, "was always the death of the party." He means to disturb us. His poems are full of a prophetic anger attacking American confidence and complacency. "The Sons: March 2003" marks the start of the Iraq war. "This Fourth World War with sticks and stones," Wright calls it, "This month in anesthesia history"; the poem ends when shrapnel brings a soldier to his knees, "and death was a red fog about him." Fear and anesthesia are routine at home too, in a nation divided by class and race and driven by the empty promises of consumer bliss. The bus passengers in "East Boston, 1996" know the rules: "No eye contact: the eyes of the terrified / terrify." In another poem Wright asks, "Why am I afraid / to go grocery shopping? / I suppose there is a pill for that, but / why?"
It may be that the apocalypse Wright longs for is simply freedom from that numbing pill. If so, as Wright suggests in "From a Line by Reverdy," Heaven is "not far"; in fact "a little face turns to the window / and it is there." Happily, at a moment like this, revelation does not mean the end of the world.
Langdon Hammer is chairman of the English department at Yale and poetry editor of The American Scholar.
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14hammer.html
Sunday, November 29, 2009
"Franz Wright, Poet and Muse" by Scott Simon
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1851833
Franz Wright Bio
Franz Wright was born in Vienna in 1953 and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and northern California. His most recent works include Walking to Martha's Vineyard and The Beforelife (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He works at the Edinburg Center for Mental Health and the Center for Grieving Children and Teenagers and lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Elizabeth.
"Letter" by franz Wright
Letter — Franz Wright
January 1998
I am not acquainted with anyone
there, if they spoke to me
I would not know what to do.
But so far nobody has, I know
I certainly wouldn't.
I don't participate, I'm not allowed;
I just listen, and every morning
have a moment of such happiness, I breathe
and breathe until the terror returns. About the time
when they are supposed to greet one another
two people actually look into each other's eyes
and hold hands a moment, but
the church is so big and the few who are there
are seated far apart. So this presents no real problem.
I keep my eyes fixed on the great naked corpse, the vertical
corpse
who is said to be love
and who spoke the world
into being, before coming here
to be tortured and executed by it.
I don't know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes—
it is infinite. What we experience
as space, the sky
that is, the sun, the stars
is intimate and rather small by comparison.
When I step outside the ugliness is so shattering
it has become dear to me, like a retarded
child, precious to me.
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
January 1998
I am not acquainted with anyone
there, if they spoke to me
I would not know what to do.
But so far nobody has, I know
I certainly wouldn't.
I don't participate, I'm not allowed;
I just listen, and every morning
have a moment of such happiness, I breathe
and breathe until the terror returns. About the time
when they are supposed to greet one another
two people actually look into each other's eyes
and hold hands a moment, but
the church is so big and the few who are there
are seated far apart. So this presents no real problem.
I keep my eyes fixed on the great naked corpse, the vertical
corpse
who is said to be love
and who spoke the world
into being, before coming here
to be tortured and executed by it.
I don't know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes—
it is infinite. What we experience
as space, the sky
that is, the sun, the stars
is intimate and rather small by comparison.
When I step outside the ugliness is so shattering
it has become dear to me, like a retarded
child, precious to me.
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Questions for "Peace"
1. In what way is Marson the central character of the novel? Who is the next most important character? Why?
2. What does Marson mean by the "surround"? (p71) And then later on in the novel? (p.148)
3. Why does Glick's statement ("this is all one thing" p.6) echo later in the novel? (p. 151)
4. What, finally, is Peace in the novel? Where? See page 169.
5. How does Angelo develop as a character? (see page 84) Why does Bausch do this?
6. What does the incident on page 117 do for the plot? theme? characterization?
7. What role does Mario play in the novel?
8. Examine the novel's musings on God and the world. See page 47 to start.
2. What does Marson mean by the "surround"? (p71) And then later on in the novel? (p.148)
3. Why does Glick's statement ("this is all one thing" p.6) echo later in the novel? (p. 151)
4. What, finally, is Peace in the novel? Where? See page 169.
5. How does Angelo develop as a character? (see page 84) Why does Bausch do this?
6. What does the incident on page 117 do for the plot? theme? characterization?
7. What role does Mario play in the novel?
8. Examine the novel's musings on God and the world. See page 47 to start.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
T. S. Eliot Bio (1888-1965)
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Burnt Norton (1941)
Collected Poems (1962)
East Coker (1940)
Four Quartets (1943)
Poems (1919)
Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)
The Dry Salvages (1941)
The Waste Land (1922)
Prose
After Strange Gods (1933)
Andrew Marvell (1922)
Dante (1929)
Elizabethan Essays (1934)
Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
John Dryden (1932)
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)
Poetry and Drama (1951)
Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)
The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)
The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
The Sacred Wood (1920)
The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)
Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)
Drama
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
The Cocktail Party (1950)
The Confidential Clerk (1953)
The Elder Statesman (1958)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Rock (1934)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Burnt Norton (1941)
Collected Poems (1962)
East Coker (1940)
Four Quartets (1943)
Poems (1919)
Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)
The Dry Salvages (1941)
The Waste Land (1922)
Prose
After Strange Gods (1933)
Andrew Marvell (1922)
Dante (1929)
Elizabethan Essays (1934)
Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
John Dryden (1932)
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)
Poetry and Drama (1951)
Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)
The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)
The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
The Sacred Wood (1920)
The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)
Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)
Drama
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
The Cocktail Party (1950)
The Confidential Clerk (1953)
The Elder Statesman (1958)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Rock (1934)
Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
from "Peace"--LCI
LCI 1091 - WWII Landing Craft
The last operational LCI in the United States now serves as the Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum. She looks virtually the same as she did when in combat more than 50 years ago.
LCI 1091 can be viewed from the dock behind the Go-fish cafe on Waterfront and Commercial Streets, or else lingering in her familiar berth at the foot of "U" Street, pretty much under the Samoa Bridge.
If you're really lucky you'll catch a glimpse of her gliding through the bay on her way to one of these two docks.
Here are some LCI 1091 stats:
•One of 912 built during WWII.
•Mission was to deliver troops and their equipment, directly on shore via ramp through bow doors; now welded over.
•Troop capacity about 200 with their gear.
•158' Long, 23' beam with a draft of approximately 5'.
•Commissioned Sept 21, 1944
•Placed on the inactive reserve in 1955
•In 1960 sold to an Alaskan fish company, reconfigured as a processing ship and worked the waters of Alaska and the Yukon River.
•Purchased by Dr. Ralph Davis in 1989 she continued to be utilized for fishing.
•After being moored just north of the Samoa Bridge for 20 years, Dr. Davis donated the ship to the Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum in 2006.
•Dedicated members of the museum continue to work on restoring "Ten Ninety-One" (civilian name) to it's original state.
Although she is not yet "officially" open, if the flag is flying and you see a hand on deck, it's most likely that they will be willing to answer your questions.
For more info on Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum contact:
Leroy Marsh 707.442.9333 or belsaw@suddenlink.net
The last operational LCI in the United States now serves as the Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum. She looks virtually the same as she did when in combat more than 50 years ago.
LCI 1091 can be viewed from the dock behind the Go-fish cafe on Waterfront and Commercial Streets, or else lingering in her familiar berth at the foot of "U" Street, pretty much under the Samoa Bridge.
If you're really lucky you'll catch a glimpse of her gliding through the bay on her way to one of these two docks.
Here are some LCI 1091 stats:
•One of 912 built during WWII.
•Mission was to deliver troops and their equipment, directly on shore via ramp through bow doors; now welded over.
•Troop capacity about 200 with their gear.
•158' Long, 23' beam with a draft of approximately 5'.
•Commissioned Sept 21, 1944
•Placed on the inactive reserve in 1955
•In 1960 sold to an Alaskan fish company, reconfigured as a processing ship and worked the waters of Alaska and the Yukon River.
•Purchased by Dr. Ralph Davis in 1989 she continued to be utilized for fishing.
•After being moored just north of the Samoa Bridge for 20 years, Dr. Davis donated the ship to the Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum in 2006.
•Dedicated members of the museum continue to work on restoring "Ten Ninety-One" (civilian name) to it's original state.
Although she is not yet "officially" open, if the flag is flying and you see a hand on deck, it's most likely that they will be willing to answer your questions.
For more info on Humboldt Bay Naval Sea/Air Museum contact:
Leroy Marsh 707.442.9333 or belsaw@suddenlink.net
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Stevens on "Thirteen Ways..."
"This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations."--Wallace Stevens, in a letter, about his poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900. He planned to travel to Paris as a writer, but after a working briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Times, he decided to study law. He graduated with a degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1904. He practised law in New York City until 1916.
Though he had serious determination to become a successful lawyer, Stevens had several friends among the New York writers and painters in Greenwich Village, including the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings.
In 1914, under the pseudonym "Peter Parasol," he sent a group of poems under the title "Phases" to Harriet Monroe for a war poem competition for Poetry magazine. Stevens did not win the prize, but was published by Monroe in November of that year.
Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., of which he became vice president in 1934. He had began to establish an identity for himself outside the world of law and business, however, and his first book of poems, Harmonium, published in 1923, exhibited the influence of both the English Romantics and the French symbolists, an inclination to aesthetic philosophy, and a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting.
For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business life. He began to publish new poems in 1930, however, and in the following year, Knopf published an second edition of Harmonium, which included fourteen new poems and left out three of the decidedly weaker ones.
More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.
Though now considered one of the major American poets of the century, he did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death. His major works include Ideas of Order (1935), The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and a collection of essays on poetry, The Necessary Angel (1951).
Stevens died in Hartford in 1955.
from: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/124
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900. He planned to travel to Paris as a writer, but after a working briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Times, he decided to study law. He graduated with a degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1904. He practised law in New York City until 1916.
Though he had serious determination to become a successful lawyer, Stevens had several friends among the New York writers and painters in Greenwich Village, including the poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings.
In 1914, under the pseudonym "Peter Parasol," he sent a group of poems under the title "Phases" to Harriet Monroe for a war poem competition for Poetry magazine. Stevens did not win the prize, but was published by Monroe in November of that year.
Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., of which he became vice president in 1934. He had began to establish an identity for himself outside the world of law and business, however, and his first book of poems, Harmonium, published in 1923, exhibited the influence of both the English Romantics and the French symbolists, an inclination to aesthetic philosophy, and a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting.
For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business life. He began to publish new poems in 1930, however, and in the following year, Knopf published an second edition of Harmonium, which included fourteen new poems and left out three of the decidedly weaker ones.
More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.
Though now considered one of the major American poets of the century, he did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death. His major works include Ideas of Order (1935), The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and a collection of essays on poetry, The Necessary Angel (1951).
Stevens died in Hartford in 1955.
from: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/124
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens (1917)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
"From The Frontier Of Writing" Seamus Heaney
From The Frontier Of Writing
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration—
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road
past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face
towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover
and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration—
a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.
So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating
data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.
And suddenly you're through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you'd passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road
past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)
Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and especially T. S. Eliot. His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry - stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917.
In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.
from http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound
Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917.
In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.
from http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound
"Erat Hora" by Ezra Pound
Erat Hora
“Thank you, whatever comes.” And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
“Thank you, whatever comes.” And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
Before Imagism: "Genteel" Poetry
In America in 1912, the most common and popular poetry was called genteel because it was very well-behaved. Since they were "genteel," these poems avoided controversial and realistic subject matter like sex or industrialization. Instead, genteel poetry tended to consist of short, inoffensive, traditional verse about inward feelings, written in a deliberately purified, rather vague, "poetic" language.
Take for example, Richard Watson Gilder's
The Woods that Bring the Sunset Near
The wind from out of the west is blowing
The homeward-wandering cows are lowing,
Dark grow the pine woods, dark and drear, —
The woods that bring the sunset near.
When o'er wide seas the sun declines,
Far off its fading glory shines,
Far off, sublime, and full of fear —
The pine woods bring the sunset near.
This house that looks to east, to west,
This dear one, is our home, our rest;
Yonder the stormy sea, and here
The woods that bring the sunset near.
The speaker depicts his home as a rather hazy, comfortable haven from the natural world outside, which, although he says it is "sublime, and full of fear," seems quite peaceful and non-threatening. The images presented are generic and comforting (lowing cows, pine woods, "our home") rather than specific, but not too substantial. Like the house in the poem, this kind of poetry is safe, restful, sentimental, and removed from the difficulties of life and the outside world. It's also pretty darn dull. Such poetry represents a kind of regression from the plain language of Romanticism back to the polished diction and noble sentiments of a poet like Thomas Gray.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Imagism
Around 1912 in London, some British and American poets led by Ezra Pound started a poetic movement called imagism. These poets reacted against genteel poetry, which they saw as sentimental, soft-edged, and emotionally dishonest. Instead, they advised, in Ezra Pound's formulation, "1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome" (Pound 3).
In 1913, Pound published the following advice for aspiring imagist poets:
An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. . . .
It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the greatest works of art.
It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. . . .
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. (Pound 4-5)
But imagism for Pound did not necessarily mean description:
Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a good deal more about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the 'Dawn in russet mantle clad' he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in the line nothing which can be called description; he presents. (Pound 5)
Finally, imagist poems were influenced by Japanese haiku, poems of 17 syllables which usually present only two juxtaposed images. This poetry strives to suggests more than its literal meaning, yet avoids overt figurative devices like allegory and even metaphor.
Here is perhaps the most famous imagist poem, one clearly influenced by haiku, Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." Pound said of the composition of this work: "I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity.' Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:—
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
("Vorticism" 89)
As one can tell by Pound's use of the word hokku, he clearly had haiku in mind when writing the poem. However, according to the modernist principle of "making it new," Pound does not simply copy haiku, but adapts it to the modern world of subway stations and anonymous faces in the crowd. The form of Pound's poem differs also from classical haiku: it has only two lines and more than 17 syllables. However, like many haiku, it does juxtapose two different images. Other ancient short forms were "made new" by the imagists, most notably the four-line Chinese lyric and the short poems and fragments from ancient Greece collected in the Greek Anthology.
Perhaps because Pound began to see imagism as a "stylistic movement, a movement of criticism rather than creation"("Vorticism" 82), he soon moved beyond imagism to a new poetic movement he called vorticism. While the rules and "don'ts" of imagism were designed to improve poetic writing but not necessarily to produce complete poems, vorticism was designed as a movement whose principles would apply to all the arts and be capable of producing complete works of art. Pound also wanted to add to the image further movement, dynamism, and intensity:
Vorticism is an intensive art. I mean by this, that one is concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance, of different sorts of expression. One desires the most intense, for certain forms of expression are "more intense" than others. They are more dynamic. I do not mean that they are more emphatic or yelled louder. ("Vorticism" 90)
To the single image, "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," Pound adds rushing dynamism of form and emotion:
The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. ("Vorticism" 92)
If this seems quite vague, perhaps it is because Pound had yet to figure out what a vorticist poem would look like. This definition does not even say whose ideas, the poet's or the reader's, are rushing from, through, and into this "cluster." How these ideas rush is also not clear. The strange collision of images and ideas that are The Cantos may be Pound's answer to what a vorticist poem might look like, but scholars are quite divided when it comes to assessing the success of the juxtaposition procedures of this long poem.
from:http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/imagism.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Works Cited
Jones, Peter, ed. Imagist Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Pound, Ezra. "A Retrospect" Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1935. 3-14.
---. "Vorticism." Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970. 81-94.
Take for example, Richard Watson Gilder's
The Woods that Bring the Sunset Near
The wind from out of the west is blowing
The homeward-wandering cows are lowing,
Dark grow the pine woods, dark and drear, —
The woods that bring the sunset near.
When o'er wide seas the sun declines,
Far off its fading glory shines,
Far off, sublime, and full of fear —
The pine woods bring the sunset near.
This house that looks to east, to west,
This dear one, is our home, our rest;
Yonder the stormy sea, and here
The woods that bring the sunset near.
The speaker depicts his home as a rather hazy, comfortable haven from the natural world outside, which, although he says it is "sublime, and full of fear," seems quite peaceful and non-threatening. The images presented are generic and comforting (lowing cows, pine woods, "our home") rather than specific, but not too substantial. Like the house in the poem, this kind of poetry is safe, restful, sentimental, and removed from the difficulties of life and the outside world. It's also pretty darn dull. Such poetry represents a kind of regression from the plain language of Romanticism back to the polished diction and noble sentiments of a poet like Thomas Gray.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Imagism
Around 1912 in London, some British and American poets led by Ezra Pound started a poetic movement called imagism. These poets reacted against genteel poetry, which they saw as sentimental, soft-edged, and emotionally dishonest. Instead, they advised, in Ezra Pound's formulation, "1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome" (Pound 3).
In 1913, Pound published the following advice for aspiring imagist poets:
An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. . . .
It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the greatest works of art.
It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. . . .
Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. (Pound 4-5)
But imagism for Pound did not necessarily mean description:
Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a good deal more about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the 'Dawn in russet mantle clad' he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in the line nothing which can be called description; he presents. (Pound 5)
Finally, imagist poems were influenced by Japanese haiku, poems of 17 syllables which usually present only two juxtaposed images. This poetry strives to suggests more than its literal meaning, yet avoids overt figurative devices like allegory and even metaphor.
Here is perhaps the most famous imagist poem, one clearly influenced by haiku, Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." Pound said of the composition of this work: "I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work 'of second intensity.' Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:—
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
("Vorticism" 89)
As one can tell by Pound's use of the word hokku, he clearly had haiku in mind when writing the poem. However, according to the modernist principle of "making it new," Pound does not simply copy haiku, but adapts it to the modern world of subway stations and anonymous faces in the crowd. The form of Pound's poem differs also from classical haiku: it has only two lines and more than 17 syllables. However, like many haiku, it does juxtapose two different images. Other ancient short forms were "made new" by the imagists, most notably the four-line Chinese lyric and the short poems and fragments from ancient Greece collected in the Greek Anthology.
Perhaps because Pound began to see imagism as a "stylistic movement, a movement of criticism rather than creation"("Vorticism" 82), he soon moved beyond imagism to a new poetic movement he called vorticism. While the rules and "don'ts" of imagism were designed to improve poetic writing but not necessarily to produce complete poems, vorticism was designed as a movement whose principles would apply to all the arts and be capable of producing complete works of art. Pound also wanted to add to the image further movement, dynamism, and intensity:
Vorticism is an intensive art. I mean by this, that one is concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance, of different sorts of expression. One desires the most intense, for certain forms of expression are "more intense" than others. They are more dynamic. I do not mean that they are more emphatic or yelled louder. ("Vorticism" 90)
To the single image, "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," Pound adds rushing dynamism of form and emotion:
The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. ("Vorticism" 92)
If this seems quite vague, perhaps it is because Pound had yet to figure out what a vorticist poem would look like. This definition does not even say whose ideas, the poet's or the reader's, are rushing from, through, and into this "cluster." How these ideas rush is also not clear. The strange collision of images and ideas that are The Cantos may be Pound's answer to what a vorticist poem might look like, but scholars are quite divided when it comes to assessing the success of the juxtaposition procedures of this long poem.
from:http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/imagism.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Works Cited
Jones, Peter, ed. Imagist Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Pound, Ezra. "A Retrospect" Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1935. 3-14.
---. "Vorticism." Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970. 81-94.
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