Shakespeare cut-out from Toy-A-Day (click picture for link).

My English teacher at school once told me: ‘Shakespeare is a greater poet than he is a dramatist.’

This isn’t meant to mean that Shakespeare wrote better poems than plays, which is clearly not the case. Rather it means that the poetry in his plays is what drives the drama, and it is in his poetic gifts that his claim to being our greatest writer lies.

This is what I think the great author Vladimir Nabokov meant when he said:

The verbal poetic texture of Shakespeare is the strongest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973, quoted in After Shakespeare: An Anthology

And also what Boris Pasternak was getting at in the following excerpt from Observations on Translating Shakespeare (1939-1946, translated by Ann Pasternak Slater), quoted in After Shakespeare: An Anthology:

Rhythm is fundamental to Shakespeare’s poetry. Half his thoughts, and the words that verbalised them, were prompted by metre. Rhythm is the basis of Shakespeare’s texts, not a framing last touch. Some of Shakespeare’s stylistic vagaries can be explained in terms of rhythmic bursts, while rhythmic flow governs the order of questions and answers in his dialogues, their speed of exchange, and the length and brevity of periods in his soliloquies.

For more on the essential rhythmic nature of Shakespeare’s drama, see my post on the Musical Structure of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Is this emphasis on the poetic over the dramatic in Shakespeare because we feel, like Martin Amis, that drama is an inferior form of literature?

I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s best jokes.
Martin Amis, Experience, footnote on page 91

Despite all this, I may be having a change of heart after all these years. Because on reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets for this month’s Culture Club, I’ve been struck by how dramatic they are. For me, part of the greatness of these poems lies in their narrative drive, in the substance of the principle characters and their motivations.

So now I’m confused. Is Shakespeare a greater poet or a greater dramatist? Or is he, as seems the obvious answer, both?

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.

I’m just reading Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Amazon affiliate link). I think she is my favourite interpreter of poetry, and this might be her greatest work. Every page is revelatory.

One of her major themes is that a consideration of ‘form’ in lyric poetry is vital for a full understanding of the poet’s expression: ‘A set of remarks on a poem which would be equally true of a prose paraphrase of that poem is not, by my standards, interpretation at all.’ (Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Introduction, note 5, page 40).

Vendler demonstrates that lyric poetry of the type represented by these sonnets has very little of interest to impart if we concentrate purely on the propositional ‘meaning’ on the surface:

‘I have insomnia because I am far away from you’ is the gist of one sonnet; ‘Even though Nature wishes to prolong your life, Time will eventually demand that she render you to death,’ is the ‘meaning’ of another. These are not taxing or original ideas, any more than other lyric ‘meanings’ (‘My love is like a rose’, ‘London in the quiet of dawn is as beautiful as any rural scene,’ etc.). Very few lyrics offer the sort of philosophical depth that stimulates meaning-seekers in long, complex, and self-contradicting texts like Shakespeare’s plays or Dostoevsky’s novels.

Vendler goes on to discuss how the poem’s ‘linguistic strategies’ need to be taken into account to yield a comprehensive interpretation of lyric poetry.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet form

The 14-line sonnet form as worked out by Shakespeare in his collection of sonnets consists of four parts: three four-line ‘quatrains’ and one ending ‘couplet’. As Vendler illustrates, Shakespeare (in a totally new way) manipulates the relations between these four parts, putting them in a wide range of logical relationships with each other.

Sometimes the parts are successive and equal, sometimes they contrast with each other, sometimes they’re analogous, at other times logically contradictory. The four ‘pieces’ of any given sonnet may also be distinguished from one another by changes of agency (‘I do this; you do that’), of rhetorical address (‘O muse’; ‘O beloved’), of grammatical form (a set of nouns in one quatrain, a set of adjectives in another), or of discursive texture (as the descriptive changes to the philosophical), or of speech act (as denunciation changes to exhortation). Each of these has its own poetic import and effect.

What Vendler demonstrates is that these formal features represent an ‘inner emotional dynamic’, as the fictive speaker of the Sonnets ‘sees more’, ‘changes his mind’, ‘passes from description to analysis’ and so on. In other words, these formal devices are ‘designed to match what he is recording – the permutations of emotional response’.

I found these perceptions invaluable in appreciating the extraordinary range of expression in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There seems to be an inexhaustible energy of creativity behind them, and once you take into account the ways that the formal and propositional elements interact to create wider perspectives of meaning, the true nature of Shakespeare’s genius emerges.

I wonder if this also accounts for the experience I had while reading through the complete sonnets in sequence – which I can only describe by saying that I fell in love with them. Reading Vendler’s analysis this makes total sense. Shakespeare’s Sonnets enact the emotional/logical confusion, perplexing variety and breadth of vision that accompanies love itself.

As Vendler asserts, ‘no poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets’.

The following links offer useful and free online resources for the study and analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Full text

• Shakespeare: Sonnets – easy access to all 154 sonnets
• The amazing web site of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – this site is a little clumsy to navigate, but does feature the complete texts plus useful commentaries and sonnets by contemporaries such as Sidney, Spencer and Drayton
• William Shakespeare Sonnets – full text plus background information
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets – free ebook from Project Gutenberg
• Free audio book of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – complete collection of audio files read by various non-professional contributors

Essays and Analysis

• An Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – full text plus paraphrased version for each sonnet and essays
• Spark Notes: Shakespeare’s Sonnets – summary and analysis of sonnets 1, 18, 60, 73, 94, 97, 116, 129, 130 & 146
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Cummings Study Guide – useful background information, anatomy of form and discussion of key themes
• Cliffs Notes Guide to Shakespeare’s Sonnets – includes an introduction, overview, analysis and original text for all sonnets
• Understanding Shakespeare’s Sonnets (YouTube video) – The University of Warwick celebrates the 400th anniversary of the sonnets in this discussion between Professory Stanley Wells, Jonathan Bate and Paul Edmondson. Also available on iTunes U (this link will attempt to open iTunes if you have it installed on your computer)

The Temptation and Fall of Eve, by William Blake - illustration to Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1808, pen and watercolour on paper)

At our Culture Club discussion on Milton’s Paradise Lost, one aspect of the narrative came up as a particular problem. This was the meaning of the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’, the instrument of humanity’s fall.

I think we all agreed that the tree is symbolic of something, but the nature of the symbol needs clarifying.

Before eating from the tree, Adam describes his creation to Raphael, and in his speech he inadvertently highlights the flaw in his character that will lead to the fall:

Tell me, how may I know him, how adore,
From whom I have that thus I move and live,
And feel that I am happier than I know…
Paradise Lost, Book VIII, lines 280-282

As soon as he is created, then, we learn that Adam wants to know more about the earth, the stars, and the nature of his creator. He is born with curiosity and a yearning to know more about the ‘objective world’.

The angel Raphael happily passes on some of this information, so clearly this is not forbidden knowledge. Therefore the knowledge that is being offered by the tree must be of a different kind. God calls it ‘knowledge of good and evil.’ But what does he mean by that?

To my mind, the key is offered in the quote from Adam above. Before tasting from the tree of knowledge, Adam is ‘happier than I know’. He is happy without being aware of why or how he is happy. After tasting from the tree, he and Eve are aware of their predicament in surprising new ways. What the tree brings is a type of knowledge peculiar to humanity: ‘consciousness’.

The Sin of Consciousness

It has long been believed, and yet to be disproved, that consciousness is the single unique-identifier of the human mind over that of other animals. It is our ability to ‘know that we know’ which makes us unique as a species. What the Bible story and Milton make clear is that this same knowledge can be a burden for humanity, when it takes the form of feelings such as guilt, shame, regret, etc.

Consider the immediate consequences of the knowledge that Adam and Eve gain by eating from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. After their lustful ‘amorous play’ they fall asleep and become ‘with conscious dreams/Encumbered’ (Book IX, line 1050-1051, my italics). They awake to find themselves ‘naked left/To guilty Shame’ (lines 1057-1058).

This shame that the couple feel is expressed through another kind of self-consciousness, an awareness of their nakedness, which they are immediately moved to cover:

But let us now, as in a bad plight, devise
What best may for the present serve to hide
The parts of each from other, that seem most
To shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen;’
Paradise Lost, Book IX, Lines 1091-1094

The idea that consciousness is central to the human condition has occupied all areas of human enquiry, including religion, philosophy, the arts and science.

In his book Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde Roger Scruton outlines the perspective of the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

According to Kant, human beings stand in a peculiar metaphysical predicament – one not shared by any other entity in the natural world. We see ourselves, he argued, in two contrasting ways – both as objects, bound by natural laws; and as subjects, who can lay down laws for themselves.

The human object is an organism like any other; the human subject is in some way ‘transcendental,’ observing the world from a point of view on its perimeter, pursuing not what is but what ought to be, and enjoying the privileged knowledge of its own mental states that Kant summarized in his theory of the ‘transcendental unity of apperception.’

It is not religious belief that forces us to see ourselves in this dualistic way. The need to do so is presupposed in language, in self-consciousness, and in the ‘practical reason’ that is the source of all human action and moral worth. Even if there were no God, that would not undermine the belief in human freedom or in the ‘transcendental’ viewpoint from which that freedom stems.
Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, by Roger Scruton, pg 123

Kant’s view was that our knowledge of the objective world was based on representation, and that we can never know ‘the thing-in-itself’ that lies behind this representation. Arthur Schopenhauer developed a philosophy built on Kant’s, but suggested that self-knowledge, or self-consciousness, can be a pathway to a true understanding of ‘the thing-in-itself’:

I have stressed that other truth that we are not merely the knowing subject, but that we ourselves are also among those entities we require to know, that we ourselves are the thing-in-itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without. It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken from outside.
Scopenhauer, quoted by Roger Scruton in Death-Devoted Heart, pg 127

Note that Schopenhauer describes this self-knowledge in terms that evoke the Biblical ‘fall’ story. It is treacherous, subterranean, forbidden.

For Schopenhauer the ‘thing-in-itself’ expresses itself as ‘Will‘. His definition of ‘Will’ is fascinating: something ‘one and immutable’, a ‘universal substratum from which every individual arises into the world of appearance, only to sink again after a brief and futile struggle for existence’. It is not hard to see an analogy here between Schopnhauer’s ‘Universal Will’ and the concept of ‘God’.

The Universal and the Individual

According to Schopenhauer, we have access to the universal will from within ourselves, and this is embodied in the transient ‘will to live’ of individual creatures:

Will is manifest in me, trapped as it were into a condition of individual existence by its restless desire to embody itself in the world of representation.
Death-Devoted Heart by Roger Scruton, pg 128

Will manifests itself in two ways: as Individual and as Idea.

Idea (much like Platonic idealism) is a universal pattern, presented to us at the level of ‘kinds’ and ‘species’. Schopenhauer goes on to say that the species should be favoured over the individual, since the species gives permanent form to the ‘Will’. The individual creature is simply a way of perpetuating the ‘Idea’ (i.e. the species).

Schopenhauer expresses these ideas beautifully in the following image:

Just as the spraying drops of the roaring waterfall change with lightning rapidity, while the rainbow which they sustain remains immovably at rest, quite untouched by that restless change, so every Idea, ie every species of living beings remains entirely untouched by the constant changes of its individuals. But it is the Idea or the species in which the will-to-live is really rooted and manifests itself; therefore the will is really concerned only in the continuation of the species.
Schopenhauer, quoted by Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart, pg 128

What’s more, Schopenhauer asserts that the universal will when incarnated as individual leads to torment, suffering, and conflict:

Individual existence is, from the individual point of view, a mistake, yet one into which the will to live is constantly tempted by its need to show itself as Idea. The will falls into individuality and exists for a while trapped in the world of representation, sundered from the calm ocean of eternity that is its home. Its life as an individual (my life) is really an expiation for original sin, which is ‘the crime of existence itself’.
Death-Devoted Heart by Roger Scruton, pg 129

Scruton here makes the link between Schopenhauer and the Biblical creation myth explicit (the italic on ‘falls’ is his not mine). Schopenhauer believed that our ‘salvation’ is impeded by our attachment to the phenomenal world, as we strive to affirm our separate existence as individuals.

In Paradise Lost this same concept is expressed as the self-consciousness that comes with forbidden knowledge of the reality of our existence. We are cursed by our awareness of our individuality, and can no longer be, as pre-lapsarian Adam was, ‘happier than I know’.

Schopenhauer’s philospohy (as he himself noted) has much in common with Eastern religion, as expressed in the Vedic Upanishads. Salvation is available to the soul with the loss of its individuality and its escape from the phenomenal world into ‘Brahman‘, the world spirit (analogous to the Universal Will in Schopenhauer).

From our modern perspective, we can also see that Schopenhauer’s theory looks forward to ideas of modern evolutionary biology. For example, a similar view is expressed in different terms in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Dawkins’s contention is that the genes that get passed on in a species are the ones whose consequences serve the interests of the gene, i.e to continue being replicated and thus propogate the species. Thus the meaning of existence for the gene is the species and not the individual organism which it is part of.

It is as if Judaism, Christianity, the Upanishads, Milton, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin and Dawkins (and many others) are all telling the same story using different symbols.

Summary

In the creation story as told by Milton, the fruit of the forbidden tree expresses the fundamental dualisms explored above: Objective world/Idea/Species/Universal Will vs the Subjective perspective and the self-aware Individual organism.

In Paradise Lost, the dualism is expressed through the symbol of ‘the state of human knowledge before and after eating the forbidden fruit’, i.e. with and without a capacity for consciousness. It is the difference between an innocent knowledge of the world, in harmony with God (Universal Will), and the more complex and troubled knowledge that comes with the individual’s awareness of itself, which itself leads to a conflict with God and the need for redemption.

The post-lapsarian man and woman in Paradise Lost are transcendent with new knowledge, but also flawed with all that consciousness brings.

The Creation of Eve, by William Blake

The following links offer useful resources for the study and analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Full text

• Paradise Lost, Project Gutenberg
• Paradise Lost, with Notes Explanatory and Critical, Edited by Rev. James Robert Boyd
• Paradise Lost, Milton Reading Room, Dartmouth College
• Paradise Lost, Electronic Literature Foundation

Resources

• Milton, Open Yale Course, YouTube (Video)
• Milton, Open Yale Course, iTunes (Audio and Video Podcasts)
• Paradise Lost Study Guide
• GradeSaver, Paradise Lost Study Guide
• Darkness Visible, a Resource for Studying Milton’s Paradise Lost
• Complete Paradise Lost Notes, Books 1-12
• E-texts of Milton’s Paradise Lost
• Illustrations to Milton’s Paradise Lost, by William Blake
• Romantic Comments on Milton’s Satan
• Christ’s College, University of Cambridge – Milton in the Old Library

Essays and Analysis

• Uxoriousness and the Expansion of Genesis in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
• A Critical Reading of Adam’s Fall in Paradise Lost
• The Forbidden Quest for Knowledge in Doctor Faustus and Paradise Lost
• Satan and Paradise Lost
• Cliff Notes, Character Analysis of Satan in Paradise Lost
• Satan in Paradise Lost: The Real Devil, a Biblical Exploration
• Perceptions of Satan in Paradise Lost, by Jamie Jensen
• Milton’s Attitude to Knowledge in Paradise Lost (Document Download)
• Margaret Baker, Paradise Lost
• Free Will, Eternal Providence, and Knowledge in Milton’s Paradise Lost

Charlotte Higgins is only joking, in her piece on the Guardian Culture blog: Jeremy Prynne for poet laureate!

But I think it’s a great idea. He may write obscure and difficult poems, but wouldn’t it be refreshing to get the nation scratching its head on a regular basis? And after all, he is the most important living English poet.

The campaign starts here. Make J.H. Prynne the new poet laureate!

I found this link, with audio of a lecture by Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams. The notes say:

First half of a class by Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams and prosody. Included are discussions on Williams’s poems: “Thursday,” “To Elsie,” “Horned Purple,” and “The Term.” This class also covers the importance of Williams to Robert Creeley and Williams’s translations from Chinese.

Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, reads excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men in the film Apocalypse Now. Here is his reading of the entire poem, much of which was cut from the movie, but was released later in the Apocalypse Now Complete Dossier on DVD.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKuA3iee4-c

Andrew Motion believes that the internet offers a better medium for poetry than books (picture from Telegraph.co.uk).

In light of traffic figuresto the Poetry Archive website, which is delivering 1 million page views a month and reaching 125,000 unique users, Andrew Motion suggests that the internet is providing a better medium for poetry than books: “Either books have not been doing the job or they are being outmanoeuvred by the internet.”

Full story at the Telegraph.co.uk.

Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness (1902).

T.S.Eliot, author of The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925).

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness had a special significance for T.S. Eliot. He made references to it in The Waste Land, as described in this note to the essay Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The Waste Land (1964, reproduced in The Waste Land Casebook Series):

In the first of the published letters between Pound and Eliot on the poem, Pound said, ‘I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation’ (Letters of Ezra Pound, p. 169). Hugh Kenner (p. 145) learned from Eliot that Pound referred to Eliot’s quotation of ‘The horror! The horror!’ from Heart of Darkness. As Pound suggested, Eliot removed the quotation. But Pound apparently was unaware that the words in lines 268-70 of The Waste Land were derived from the first page of Heart of Darkness (pointed out by Kenner, p. 145, and rediscovered by John Frederick Nims, ‘Greatness in Moderation’, in Saturday Review, 19 Oct 1963, p. 26), and that various passages in the poem concerning the Thames are strongly reminiscent of the first few pages of Conrad’s novel.

The lines from the Waste Land referred to above are the following from part III, the Fire Sermon:

Red sails
The barges drift
With the turning tide

This would appear to be inspired by this passage, from the second paragraph on page one of Heart of Darkness (although the significance of the reference is not clear):

In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished spirits.

Eliot also quotes from Hearts of Darkness on the title page of his poem the Hollow Men: ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’. (In a nod to this quotation, Coppola has Kurtz reading the Hollow Men in one of the final scenes of Apocalypse Now).

What did Heart of Darkness mean to Eliot, and why the recurring quotations? C. Day Lewis hints at the connection in his essay A Hope for Poetry (1934, reprinted in The Waste Land Casebook Series):

[The Waste Land] makes us aware of the nervous exhaustion, the mental disintegration, the exaggerated self-consciousness, the boredom, the pathetic gropings after the fragments of a shattered faith – all those symptoms of the psychic disease which ravaged Europe as mercilessly as the Spanish influenza. But in doing so it enlarged our conception of the field of poetic activity: as Eliot himself has said; ‘the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory’.