Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

  

Shakespeare is a major influence on poets writing in English, but the

dynamics of that influence in the twentieth century have never been as

closely analysed as they are in this important study. More than an

account of the ways in which Shakespeare is figured in both the poetry

and the critical prose of modern poets, this book presents a provoca-

tive new view of poetic interrelationship. Focusing on W. B. Yeats,

T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Neil

Corcoran uncovers the relationships – combative as well as sympa-

thetic – between these poets themselves as they are intertwined in their

engagements with Shakespeare. Corcoran offers many enlightening

close readings, fully alert to contemporary theoretical debates. This

original study beautifully displays the nature of poetic influence – both

of Shakespeare on the twentieth century, and among modern poets as

_{n e i l c o r c o r a n} they respond to Shakespeare. is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at

the University of Liverpool. His previous publications include

  SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN POET

  NEIL CORCORAN

  

c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,

São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo

Cambridge University Press

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521199827

  

© Neil Corcoran 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without the written

permission of Cambridge University Press.

  

First published 2010

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

  

Corcoran, Neil.

Shakespeare and the modern poet / Neil Corcoran.

p. cm.

_isbn 978

• 0-521-19982-7 (hardback)

  1

. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shakespeare,

William, 1564–1616 – Influence. 3. Poetry, Modern – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. Poetry,

Modern – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title.

  PR2970.C67 2010 821

'.909–dc22

  

2010000327

  

Contents

  Acknowledgements page vi

  1 Introduction

  part i yeats’s shakespeare

  25

  1

  27 Setting a sail for shipwreck: Yeats’s Shakespeare criticism

  2

  41 Myself must I remake: Shakespeare in Yeats’s poetry

  part ii eliot’s shakespeare

  61

  3

  63 That man’s scope: Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism

  4

  90 This man’s gift: Shakespeare in Eliot’s poetry

  part iii auden’s shakespeare 121

  

Acknowledgements

  Friends and colleagues have very generously read and commented on sections of this book and some have helped it along in other ways. I am extremely grateful for the advice and encouragement I received. I want to thank Patrick Crotty, Michael Davies, Paul Driver, Warwick Gould, David Hopkins, John Kerrigan, Willy Maley, Andrew Murphy, Bernard

O’Donoghue, Stephen Procter, Neil Rhodes, Neil Roberts, Stan Smith, Sue Vice and Marina Warner

  I am also very grateful to the School of English in the University of Liverpool for a semester of research leave and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a research leave award. Long may it continue to support individual research in the Arts and Humanities. The Department of English in the University of Bristol invited me to lecture at a conference on Shakespeare and Modern Poetry in 2007. Comments afterwards were extremely helpful; and I am especially grateful to John Lyon for raising the name of Patrick Cruttwell and for very kindly giving me a copy of The Shakespearean Moment.

  

Introduction

  i n f l u e n c e The most influential modern critic to study poetic interrelationships is Harold Bloom in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and several of its successors. Bloom’s theories of influence were developed while he was writing about one of the central figures in what follows here, W. B. Yeats. They were also almost certainly in part indebted to Richard Ellmann, a dedicatee of The Anxiety of Influence, who, in Eminent Domain (1967), a study of six modern writers including two given attention in what follows, Yeats and Auden, tacitly developed a well-known tenet of another, T. S. Eliot (that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’) into this:

  

That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of

those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The

behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move

upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking

down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they

₁

  2 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet preface in which he explains that in the first he had deliberately hidden the Shakespearean origin of its key term, ‘misprision’, which derives from sonnet 87, ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’. The relevant lines in the sonnet are ‘So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, / Comes home again, on better judgement making’. Used by Bloom as ‘an allegory of any writer’s … relation to tradition’, the word therefore puts Shakespeare at the origin of influential anxiety; and the new preface introduces a further memorable category to Bloom’s impressive arsenal by denominating ‘the ₃ anguish of contamination’. Bloom’s sole example is the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe, about which he has arresting things to say. He now plays down the Freudianism of the original theory and, in describing the way Shakespeare took a very long time to overcome Marlowe, he in effect – if not in theory – reinscribes in the relationship between writers a form of psychological agency which any Oedipal theory must, necessarily, consign to the realm of the unconscious.

  The theory of the anxiety of influence has saved literary criticism from indulging any sentimentality about writerly interaction; and it makes a great deal of sense in relation to particular poets and poems. But, as the preface to Bloom’s second edition, now openly under the sway of Shakespeare, seems almost on the verge of admitting, it does not tell the whole story. Neither does the now conventional use of the word ‘intertextuality’ to define the relationship between writers and between texts. In Julia Kristeva, who first, in her readings of Bakhtin, gave the term currency, intertextuality has to do not with human agency, with intersubjectivity, but with the ‘transposition ₄ of one (or several) sign-system(s) into another’. So unhappy did Kristeva

  3 Introduction Bloom, that relationships between writers and texts can be – indeed, cry out to be – viewed as species of things other than melancholy; and that this is often the case too when poets writing in English take cognisance of that poet who must seem in all sorts of ways the most anxiety-inducing of all, William Shakespeare. Belatedness is certainly sometimes an affliction: and in what follows I describe circumstances in which some form of suffering obtains.

  But to be an heir can also be a consolation. Corroboration may happen as well as competition. Similarly, the term ‘appropriation’ is often used to figure the relationship, which suggests that the earlier writer is being laid claim to as a kind of property; but negotiation and even collaboration – that admittedly two-edged sword of a word – sometimes obtain too.

  The relationship between modern poets and Shakespeare can be provok- ing or sterilising; it can involve the sharing of humane inquiry or represent the fundamental foreclosure of opportunity; it can give rise to awed obei- sance or irreverently disfiguring travesty; it can be parabolic, or it can be self- projecting. And many other things. The fascination lies precisely in the many things it can be, and in the many things it makes possible, among them some of the greatest poems of our modernity and some of the most arresting literary-critical prose. In the relationships I describe in this book poets encountering Shakespeare are also profoundly encountering them- selves and, occasionally, one another; and in this process too Shakespeare becomes in many ways the first modern. t h e f i r s t m o d e r n

  4 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet ‘

  Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, and an edited version by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Unpicking the poem, they say that ‘All of these alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic crossword puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being ₆ incompatible with any others.’

  Riding and Graves in fact carefully discriminate between difficulties of understanding in Shakespeare and in cummings, saying that ‘Shakespeare is more difficult than Mr cummings in thought, though his poems have a familiar look on the page: Mr cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar to him what is common to everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the conven- ₇ tional form of the time, with greater accuracy, what is peculiar to himself.’

  Nevertheless, their comparison ignores one salient difference: the fact that cummings was self-consciously deviating from conventional norms whereas Shakespeare had none to deviate from. It is plain, then, that in this survey of ‘ modernist’ poetry the comparison is made polemically. A method of read- ing appropriate to a modern(ist) poet is also appropriate to Shakespeare. Therefore what may initially look bizarre and appear unfathomable in modernist poems will come, with closer scrutiny, to seem justified as the method necessary to the fusion of ‘alternate meanings’. Modernist difficulty is sanctioned by Shakespearean practice; and Shakespeare becomes the first modern(ist).

  That a Shakespearean sonnet may be read as a furiously dynamic cross- word puzzle clearly registered strongly with Empson; and Shakespeare is also a central figure in Seven Types of Ambiguity. He is an exemplar of all

  5 Introduction Here Empson picks up Edgar’s famous words in King Lear: ‘Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet / Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.’ This allusion has weighty reverence in this poem of filial feeling and its caution against what we would now call ‘ageist’ presumption. What allu- sion, in fact, could be more weighty with reverence for a parent in age, more subdued to pietas? But Empson’s poetry nowhere engages with Shakespeare more fully than in the way of passing allusion, and neither does that of Robert Graves. What Empson says of Shakespeare in his criticism, on the other hand, is of such interest and memorability that I find myself often citing it in what follows, and sometimes too as humane counterbalance to insensitivity, or excess, elsewhere. s h a k e s p e a r e i n t h e f i r s t w o r l d w a r

  Many modern poets, and poems, however, do figure Shakespeare in extended and intricate ways. English poetry of the First World War is complicatedly concerned with Shakespeare. In Edward Thomas Shakespeare in wartime provides emblems for the poet as solitary traveller. In the first of two poems called ‘Home’, a poem strung between ambivalent longings for the first place and the last, between nostalgia and melancholia, stoical irresolution is ghosted by allusions to Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy so fleeting as to seem themselves almost vagrant, finding no adequate home in this poem of emo- tional destitution. A similar vagrancy inheres in ‘The Owl’, in both the lonely persona of the traveller and in an allusion to the song ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Unlike Shakespeare’s, Thomas’s wartime owl,

  6 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet figure is named multifariously during the poem: he is ‘my ancient’, ‘Lob-lie- by-the-fire’, ‘Lob’, ‘tall Tom’, ‘Hob’ and ‘our Jack’. ‘Jack’ is also Falstaff’s name; and, as ‘tall Tom’, this figure has encountered Shakespeare himself:

  This is tall Tom that bore The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall Once talked, when icicles hung by the wall.

As Herne the Hunter he has known hard times.

  This Shakespearean evocation combines another allusion to the Love’s Labour’s Lost song with one to the figure identified by Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the legend of Herne the Hunter becomes her means of taunting Falstaff.

  The poem makes other allusions to Shakespeare too. In a poem much given to naming, notably of English places themselves, Lob is the namer of birds and of flowers, one of which is love-in-idleness, the magically trans- formative flower used by Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As ‘tall Tom’, and as one who knows ‘thirteen hundred names for a fool’, he may remind us also of Edgar in King Lear transformed into the mad ‘poor Tom’; and the very name ‘Lob’ figures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream too when the fairy addresses Puck as ‘thou lob of spirits’. Towards the end of the poem, the squire’s son himself metamorphoses into yet another representa- tion of the poem’s ‘ancient’, uttering a lengthy list of further names for the figure. These include Jack Cade, the leader of the Kent peasants’ revolt of 1450 which Shakespeare dramatises in one of the most memorable episodes of Henry VI.

  7 Introduction its depths. However, as the squire’s son ‘disappear[s] / In hazel and thorn tangled with old-man’s-beard’ at the poem’s conclusion, the ideal seems to be disappearing too, an irrecoverably aporetic ‘it’ conjured again only for poet and readers to receive ‘one glimpse of his back’. For all its passion of naming, ‘Lob’ is actually discovering what Thomas’s poem ‘The Word’ calls ‘ an empty thingless name’, and the footpath identified and opened at the poem’s origin becomes, in fact, impassable: a literal ‘aporia’, a shut-off path.

  Shakespeare also talks to the lords of No Man’s Land in In Parenthesis. This long ‘writing’ – Jones’s word for its imbrications of prose and verse – was first published in 1937. It is therefore a work long meditated by a combatant private soldier, one of the ‘jacks’. Set in an early phase of the war, December 1915 to July 1916, it is a poem which holds itself in a kind of tense apposition with Henry V. In one of its sometimes lengthy footnotes Jones tells us that ‘Trench life brought that work pretty constantly to the mind’; and his preface says that ‘No one … could see infantry in tin-hats, with ground-sheets over their shoulders, with sharpened pine-stakes in their hands, and not recall “… or we may cram / Within this wooden O …”.’

  Part 2 of the poem’s seven parts is called ‘Chambers Go Off, Corporals Stay’, after a stage direction at the end of act 3 scene 1 of the play and a petition which Nym makes to Bardolph at the opening of the following scene: ‘Pray thee, corporal, stay. The knocks are too hot; and for mine own ₈ part, I have not a case of lives.’

  In the poem itself the allusions are not at all, as we might anticipate, intended as ironic contrast between past and present, between some form of military heroism then and some form of contemporary military compulsion

  8 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet ‘ mostly Londoners with an admixture of Welshmen’, as the preface tells us, they are members of a battalion of the Royal Welch [sic] Fusiliers. In Jones, however, the phrase which is comically inclined in the play comes to take on an aura of dignified endurance in the face of a shared threat – as when the men first move into position under fire in Part 3:

  

With his first traversing each newly scrutinised his neighbour; this voice of his

Jubjub gains each David his Jonathan; his ordeal runs like acid to explore your fine

feelings; his near presence at break against, at beat on, their convenient hierarchy.

  

Lance-Corporal Lewis sings where he walks, yet in a low voice, because of the

Disciplines of the Wars. He sings of the hills about Jerusalem, and of David of the

White Stone.

  When Lewis is killed in Part 7 an elegiac passage imagines a tutelary spirit called ‘The Queen of the Woods’ blessing the dead in ways appropriate to their origins. The rite for Lewis, the Welshman, joins together Welsh myth and Henry V:

  

She carries to Aneirin-in-the-nullah a rowan sprig, for the glory of Guenedota. You

couldn’t hear what she said to him, because she was careful for the Disciplines of

the Wars.

  Fluellen’s comic catch-phrase is in these instances literally elevated by being raised into upper case as a significant element of ritual benediction. In In Parenthesis, therefore, it is as though Fluellen and what he represents are being repositioned from the periphery to the centre of the Shakespearean text.

  In an outstanding essay on the poem John Barnard, reading this as the

  9 Introduction experience. This produces a critical, even deconstructive reading which is not a ‘misreading’ in the Bloomian sense but a provocatively insightful counter-reading which then becomes newly and differentiatingly genera- tive, producing the responsively creative thing which is In Parenthesis itself. s h a k e s p e a r e i n a m e r i c a

  Shakespeare takes many shapes in modern American poetry, including his treatment in a vast, bizarre ‘critical’ work by the Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky and an engagingly experimental long poem by H. D., the erst- while Imagist poet Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), which he wrote between 1947 and 1960, is the product of a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare, whose work he first saw performed in Yiddish. It is a vast book, accompanied in a second volume by an operatic setting of Pericles by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia. Parts of the book are redistributed in the text of Zukofsky’s huge poem almost lifelong in its composition, ‘A’. Much taken up with music and philosophy, Bottom: On Shakespeare is in part an eccentric anthology and is remote indeed from any orthodox critical study of Shakespeare. Its decision to lay out a poetics and a theory of knowledge under the aegis of an engagement with Shakespeare must be read, however, as a spectacular act of cross-cultural and cross-historical poetic homage.

  H. D.’s By Avon River (1949) ought to have survived better than it has. Like In Parenthesis, the text combines verse and prose, but in separate sections. A long, three-part poem called ‘Good Friend’ (after the warning

  10 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

  Claribel, the birds shrill, Claribel, Claribel echoes from the rainbow-shell

I stooped just now to gather from the sand.

  Invisible, voiceless, ‘a mere marriage token’, Claribel, the silenced woman, is brought to a kind of visibility and audibility in H. D.’s configuration of various circumstances and identities for her. Claribel imagines herself being created out of ‘a shadow / On his page’; hers is posited as the voice calling Shakespeare just before his death, even though Ariel’s might have seemed the more obvious one to do so; and she may have been a nurse to the wounded in wartime Venice. So that this poem, written at the end of the war, is very much a woman’s wartime poem too. This Venetian transformation of Claribel into ‘Clare-the-fair, / Claribel, not a Poor Clare’ – into an active agent of benevolence, that is, rather than a conventual nun retired into another kind of silence – is an unpredictable conclusion to H. D.’s poem and not an entirely successful one. By Avon River suddenly lapses from the intensity of its Shakespearean concentra- tion into what must be a matter of more private psychological and emotional moment. Nevertheless, By Avon River is a notable contribution to modern poetic reinventions of Shakespeare. It engages in the activity of what ‘The Guest’, which is, essentially, a reverie on various Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, calls ‘Remembering Shakespeare always, but remembering him differently’. This combination of mnemonic deference and difference might well act as a motto for more recent feminist readings of Shakespeare.

  11 Introduction closely about them. When Shakespeare wrote, “Two loves I have,” reader, ₁₀ he was not kidding.’ Sonnet 144, ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, is one of the ‘dark lady’ sonnets and is among the most striking in the entire sequence, not least in its obscenities. Berryman’s comment is forceful and unforgettable, and embedded in it is a strong reaction against T. S. Eliot’s theories of poetic impersonality which he had once espoused but had come to regard as a preventative against, rather than an enablement of, his own poetry.

  Italics in critical prose, however, can be almost menacingly pre-emptive. Here, they simply ignore the extensive debate about how far the sonnets may be read as autobiographical at all; and, more insidiously perhaps, they imply that genuine poetry must always be forcefully truth-telling. This may contain a truth, although certainly not the whole truth, about the kind of poetry Berryman was himself trying to write, but it is a profound untruth about many kinds of English poetry and poetics. The truest poetry is also the most feigning, in that richly provocative observation of Touchstone’s in As You Like It, which draws on a debate in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry and out of which W. H. Auden makes a superb poem which I discuss in my chapter on his poetry. As a view of poetry Berryman’s remark also contains its dangers: and we may be inclined to read some ‘confessional’ poetry – although not, in my view, Berrryman’s own – as in fact hurtfully pre- emptive of the poet’s own experience and feelings, or, more damagingly, of other people’s. Shakespeare resists being made honorarily confessional in this way. For all we know, when he wrote ‘Two loves I have’, reader, he was actually kidding; even if ‘kidding’ hardly approaches the fraught urgency of

  12 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet nonce word for what Macbeth could never be, since ambition is the very thing that makes him what he is. Berryman’s other coinage, ‘Cawdor- uneasy’, itself almost Shakespearean in its compound, works, precisely, to compound the evaporation of identity involved in the death of love, which is made to seem by the allusion terrifyingly disarming. Hamlet is present at the origin of the long catalogue of pain and rebuke that is song 168

  : ‘and God has many other surprises, like / when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother / and chilling other’. The Hamlet problem and catastrophe, which may have been Berryman’s own too, initiate a series in this song which leaves Henry, for once, speechless in his abjection, capable only of abandoning his theme and turning to the following song, and perhaps delaying, in this, his confrontation with the truly terrifying thing, just as Hamlet procrastinates in his revenge. The rhyming of ‘mother’ and ‘other’ suggests that all consequent ills are contained in the figure of the alien mother and intimates therefore a kind of genetic seriality. To which an ‘antic disposition’ may be a not incom- prehensible response: and what adjective better fits Henry’s disposition in many of the Dream Songs?

  Further than this, however, Shakespeare is undoubtedly a profound influence on Berryman’s later poetic style, on his distinctive idiolect with its electric instabilities, edgy approximations and accommodations of dic- tion, register and tone, its headlong verbal opportunism. To demonstrate this in any less impressionistic way, however, would be beyond my com- petence. John Haffenden says in his introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare that ‘even if we did not get Berryman’s edition of King Lear, we have gained

  13 Introduction makes reference to Twelfth Night. It does so in that way Lowell’s allusions sometimes have of turning what initially seem almost wildly unlikely connections suddenly into startled appropriateness by reconfiguring the dynamic of the source text. ‘Caligula’ takes part of its point from the fact that Lowell’s nickname, Cal, was drawn from Caligula (although also, it seems, from Caliban). ‘Tell me what I saw / To make me like you’, the poem opens, in a first-person address and with a punning on the verb ‘like’ which suggests a double kind of collusiveness between poet and historical addressee.

  The poem then evokes the hideousness of Caligula’s body as an implicit image for the hideousness of the body politic under his rule. It does so in what is itself a hideous inversion or perversion of the Renaissance rhetorical trope of the blazon. In Twelfth Night Olivia parodies and pillories this masculine poetic conceit, by which the female body is anatomised and itemised, when in act 1 scene 5 she tells the cross-dressed Viola that her – Olivia’s – beauty shall be ‘inventoried’: ‘as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth’. Lowell’s poem partly feminises Caligula, imagining him rouged, in a way appropriate to the subject of a blazon. The allusion to Twelfth Night homes in, horribly, on the neck, in a couplet whose identical rhyme sticks exclamatorily in its own gullet, as Lowell remembers and yokes together both Olivia’s neck and Caligula’s most famous remark. Caligula soothes himself to sleep by itemising parts of his body, and Lowell writes, out of a reconfiguring perversion of energies latent in Shakespearean comedy, a poetry of repulsion and disgust:

  14 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet possibility when the innocuous definite article in the penultimate line is made to carry a heavily and meaningfully trochaic weight:

  

What does he care for Thomas More and Shakespeare

pointing fingers at his polio’d body; for the moment he is king; he is the king saying: it’s better to have lived, than live.

  And, also in History, ‘Coleridge and Richard II’ ruminates on Coleridge ruminating on Shakespeare’s king. Lowell recognises Coleridge’s ‘kinship’ with Richard in ‘the constant overflow of imagination / proportioned to his dwindling will to act’, but also the fact that he is not ‘flatter-blinded’ by this. So little so, indeed, that any potential narcissism in Coleridge is diverted from ‘the jungle of dead kings’ to his preoccupation with slavery and ‘ negroes in 1800 London’.

  Lowell displays an awareness here of the way the political moment, in this case the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, puts its pressure on Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism. There is presumably self-recognition or even self-justification in this, since the sequence History (developed from sequences called Notebook 1967–8 and then just Notebook) forms, as its title suggests, a stubborn refusal to separate or sieve out the aesthetic from the political. The last line of ‘Coleridge and Richard II’ also proposes an exem- plary quality in Coleridge: he is ‘the one poet who blamed his failure on himself’. If failure is to be risked in the huge enterprise represented by Lowell’s History, which is made out of dedicated, even obsessive, rewriting as well as writing, then Lowell, taking on the risk, may here be recognising himself in

  15 Introduction ‘

  A Love for Four Voices’ is therefore a Shakespearean recension of a Shakespearean recension, almost a Russian doll of intricately allusive play- fulness. Its headiness is perhaps given permission by the fact that it is also an imitation, in language, of the formal procedures of music. The closing lines of Hermia’s (the first violin’s) final address to the audience celebrate ‘ the world / Here where we fall transposingly in love’; and the adverb is multiply punning. Shakespeare’s Hermia herself is transposed into Hecht/ Haydn’s violin; music is transposed into language; A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ are transposed into ‘A Love for Four Voices’; and all of these things are transposed, in the musical sense, by this new poem: they are shifted into a new key. This is poetry as delighted repossession and self-possession: but it is also poetry as, very much, belated subsequence. s h a k e s p e a r e a n d t h e w a r s a w p a c t

  Robert Lowell’s Imitations (1961) includes a version of a poem called ‘

  Hamlet’ by Boris Pasternak. This is one of several outstanding poems making use of Shakespeare, and notably of Hamlet itself, published by poets of post-revolutionary Russia and poets from the countries of the Warsaw Pact after the Second World War. These poems are, characteri- stically, intensely alert to political resonances in Shakespeare. Appearing in prominent English translations from the 1960s on (and notably in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, whose general editor was A. Alvarez), some of these poems became influential on succeeding gen-

  16 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet The strong sense of fatality in Pasternak’s poem, and the solitude of its

  Hamlet figure, which Lowell makes more prominent by adding the word ‘ soliloquy’ to the original title, are intensified by its resonant, stoical, separated final line. A proverbial Russian saying, and so drawing on a traditionally sanctioned common language not exclusively the poet’s own, the line may also represent the lonely, fated poet’s attempt at a kind of assuagement of his crossed condition by the Russian language itself. In Lowell’s translation it reads, ‘To live a life is not to cross a field.’ His version of Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet’ may be read as a kind of testimonial meditation on Pasternak’s predicament. By means of the acknowledgement of a shared cultural inspiration in Shakespeare, Lowell’s poem also evinces from this famous American poet willing to assume public political positions in the United States a form of solidarity with one who found such things much more problematic in Soviet Russia. This is the point, I think, of Lowell’s retitling the poem ‘Hamlet in Russia’. This ‘soliloquy’ of a modern Hamlet makes possible a kind of piercing colloquy between poets on opposing sides during the cold war.

  Several East European poems published in the early 1960s, in the agonised wake of the Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Rising, configure a Hamlet appropriate to the time and place; and, unpredictably, they sometimes do so by refiguring poems by T. S. Eliot. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, published in his volume Study of the Object (1961), takes up where Shakespeare leaves off, and Herbert’s Fortinbras has a forbiddingly steely resolve in his consciousness of the ₁₃ inheritance: ‘The rest is not silence but belongs to me.’ Patient, compe-

  17 Introduction

  

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos

and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

  Fortinbras’s unpunctuated, repeated concluding question here has both hopelessness and regret in its cadence. ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’ gives voice, therefore, to a form of bleak self-knowledge and self-acceptance. The state, as Fortinbras understands its needs, requires of him a dutiful dedication of which, he knows, Hamlet would have been incapable; but he also knows that ‘ what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy’. Zbigniew Herbert’s figu- ration, in Warsaw Pact Poland, of Fortinbras as the representative of political power elegising Hamlet, prince and poet, and acknowledging his own inferiority but then, nevertheless, willingly and stoically getting on with the job, has shelving ironies within it. Out of its Shakespearean occasion this truly haunting poem makes a parable which ramifies in many directions still, but is also notably attuned to the political moment of its composition and the choices demanded of intellectuals, including poets, then.

  Not least among its ironies, as a post-war Polish poem, is the fact that its concluding lines appear to echo the cadences, the marine imagery and the absence of orthodox punctuation of the opening lines of T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeareanly derived ‘Marina’: ‘What seas what shores what grey rocks

  ’ and what islands / What water lapping the bow . . . . Czeslaw Milosz’s English translation very closely follows the rhythmic and structural patterns ₁₄ of the original; and Eliot, we know from Herbert’s ‘To Ryszard Krynicki –

  A Letter’, is one of the few poets whose reputations will, in his opinion, survive their century. Eliot is therefore, we must assume, one of the few

  18 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet

  

prove what is proven,

stab with a needle ₁₅ or pin on an order.

  Ominously, however, this Polonius is also a poet: so we might read him as a truly terrifying combination of Herbert’s Hamlet and Fortinbras. He would represent, then, the warping of imagination and creative intelligence by political demand. Holub’s ‘Polonius’ is a poem which harmonises desolately with Auden’s ‘“The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning”’ in which the possibility that a love poem may be contorted into a political eulogy under extreme necessity is seriously canvassed. ‘Polonius’ has an optimistic for- titude, nevertheless, as it projects the demise of its protoplasmic eponym:

  …

when the spore-creating mould

of memory covers him over, when he falls arse-first to the stars,

the whole continent will be lighter,

earth’s axis straighten up and in night’s thunderous arena a bird will chirp in gratitude.

  ‘ Prince Hamlet’s Milk Tooth’, which appeared in The So-Called Heart

  (1963), is less patient of straightforward explication, which is one signal of its less optimistic, more desolately baffled inclination. A surreal fantasy which makes prominent and indubitable allusion to Eliot, in this case to The Waste

  19 Introduction burden of loss, have sounded so bleak. Nevertheless, it is striking that for both Herbert and Holub – and in the same year, 1961 – Hamlet is reinvented as the possibility, however remote, of an alternative to political pragmatism and necessity, an alternative to the totalitarian. The frailty of the conception, however, is inherent in the genres used: elegy is burdened with melancholy, and surreal fantasy with the velleity of wish-fulfilment.

  The Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz has a poem called ‘Conversation with the Prince’, published in the volume of that title in 1960, which offers in its use of the figure of Polonius a potentially even greater affront than Holub’s. Set at a time in which, its opening lines say, ‘Fangs have pierced the earth’, making ‘our well-behaved intentions / tremble’, the poem’s ‘conversation’ alludes directly not only to Shakespeare but also to Eliot – primarily, but not only, to ‘Mr Prufrock’ in his ‘Hamletic mood’. As the poem weaves in and out of allusions to these works of high culture, its first person singular takes on the servile accents of Polonius and, scandalously, finally identifies itself as that of ‘a contemporary poet / the year is 1958’. This is an even more radical identification of Polonius with the poet than Holub’s in ‘Polonius’, and one that seems to call into question the very art which its mode of allusion would appear to acknowledge and even defer to. Różewicz’s speaker anticipates the Prince’s contempt for what such a ‘contemporary poet’ might be:

  indifferent he talks to the indifferent blinded he signals to the sightless he laughs and

  20 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet have. Such critiques might well seem reinforced by a further poem of Różewicz’s which makes use of Shakespeare, ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’, from an again eponymous volume published in 1962. Here Caliban ‘ waits’ for whatever revelation Prospero might offer, but Prospero’s ‘magic robes’ disclose nothing as ‘nothing from loudspeakers / speaks to nothing / about nothing’, where those loudspeakers presumably blare the public pronouncements and warnings of a totalitarian regime. The poem’s con- clusion seems to bring King Lear into the reckoning in a way that completely overwhelms The Tempest:

  nothing begets nothing

nothing brings up nothing

nothing awaits nothing nothing threatens nothing condemns nothing pardons

  The negativity of this brings ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’ close to being something other than a poem altogether – a post-poem; an ex-poem; an anti-poem? And it is a manifest influence on the formal disintegrations in the English poems of Ted Hughes’s Crow (1970). In its destructiveness, however, ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’ has the energy of outrage too, as it commits its sacrilege on what, at the time of the poem’s publication, was usually considered Shakespeare’s play of ‘redemption’. The poem’s disinte- grations seem won through to, or lost through to, by the hardest experience, and its integrity and memorability prevent it from being merely nihilistic. If

  21 Introduction of a poem. The Russian novelist-in-exile Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) presents itself as the scholar Charles Kinbote’s critical edition, with extensive commentary, of a long poem by John Shade called ‘Pale Fire: A

  Poem in Four Cantos’. Nabokov, unlike the post-war poets of the coun- tries of the Warsaw Pact, is profoundly unappreciative of T. S. Eliot; and the poem he has Shade write echoes Eliot with depreciatory intent. An excellent Nabokov critic, Brian Boyd, believes that what we have here is an argument with Eliot’s view of Shakespeare in The Waste Land. Nabokov opposes what he understands as Eliot’s ‘pointed sterility’ in the pastiche of Antony and Cleopatra in ‘A Game of Chess’ with his own sense of ₁₉ Shakespeare’s ‘stupendous fecundity’. In my view, Eliot finds far more than ‘sterility’ in Shakespeare. However, that a novelist of the stature of

  Nabokov should find in a poet of the stature of Eliot an attitude to Shakespeare such as to require the writing of a fictional poem and a fictional critical edition of his own, which together constitute a remarkable modern novel, seems a form of interest, obligation, argument, acknowl- edgement and, yes, repudiation which may well be allowed to shadow what follows in this book.

  Pale Fire, a novel of shadows and ghosts and shades, is the only one of Nabokov’s to take its title from another writer. It derives from Timon of Athens:

  

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;

  22 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet s h a k e s p e a r e a n d t h e m o d e r n p o e t These are all fascinating cases and deserve further study; and there are others, including, prominently, D. H. Lawrence and Thom Gunn. I take note of Lawrence’s ‘When I Read Shakespeare’, with its negative view of Shakespearean character, in my chapter on W. H. Auden’s criticism below, because Auden does. But there is also ‘The Ship of Death’, published posthumously in 1932, in which Hamlet’s question about whether a man might ‘his quietus make with a bare bodkin’ is repeated across the poem’s third and fourth parts in a way which, when answered in the negative, generates the rest. It is probable too that the repetitions of the phrase ‘we are dying, we are dying’ across the poem’s sixth and seventh sections are caught up from Antony’s ‘We are dying, Egypt, dying’ in Antony and Cleopatra. The whole of ‘The Ship of Death’ might be regarded, then, as a form of Shakespearean regeneration, as Lawrence meditates a response to his own mortality out of a response to Shakespearean tragedy.

  Gunn’s early work is deeply indebted to Shakespeare, not least in the way it approaches sexuality. The epigraph to My Sad Captains (1961), whose title derives from Antony and Cleopatra, is taken from Troilus and Cressida and intimates oppositions and contraries often addressed in Gunn’s early books. In addition, as Clive Wilmer has demonstrated in an illuminatingly sym- pathetic piece of literary detective work, Gunn had the best possible reason to play extensively, as Shakespeare himself does in the Sonnets, on the word, and the name, ‘will’. For reasons which Wilmer identifies with delicacy, Gunn had changed his name: the one on his birth certificate is William

  23 Introduction their poetry, and my rationale for writing about these four poets at length is that they have all written extensively about Shakespeare and usually bril- liantly and thought-provokingly. Shakespeare is, for each of them, a figure of central, consuming, protean and permanent critical as well as poetic concern.

  I am also interested in the ways in which Shakespeare may be contras- tively figured in the critical and creative work of poets, in their prose and their poetry; and, again, these poets provide ample scope for such a study. They are also poets in whose poems – and in whose most notable poems – Shakespeare is figured variously and extensively. Finally, these poets relate to one another through their relation to Shakespeare: and this relation supplies a constant and developing subtext to the text of the critical narrative I have written here. It is itself, in my view, a narrative of great interest.

  All four poets were also playwrights, Hughes rather less well known as such than the others but in fact writing for the theatre intermittently from the 1960s on. Although I do not take much cognisance of their plays, I do think it matters that in this regard too they were creatively as well as critically preoccupied with Shakespeare; and I occasionally have things to say about what they say about Shakespeare which have relevance to their drama as well as to their poetry.

  

p a r t i

Yeats’s Shakespeare

  

c h a p t e r 1

Setting a sail for shipwreck: Yeats’s Shakespeare

criticism

  s h a k e s p e a r e i n i r e l a n d ‘

  The best way of marking an end to Victorian Shakespeare,’ says Adrian Poole, marking an end to his own excellent study of the topic, ‘is to look ₁ towards Dublin.’ There, at the turn of the century, Oscar Wilde, James