Shakespeare and the modern poet

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 provocative 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 sympathetic – 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 they respond to Shakespeare n e i l c o r c o r a n is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool His previous publications include Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Clarendon Press, 2004) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2007) SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN POET NEIL CORCORAN cambridge university press 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) Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Influence Poetry, Modern – 19th century – History and criticism Poetry, Modern – 20th century – History and criticism I Title PR2970.C67 2010 821'.909–dc22 2010000327 isbn 978-0-521-19982-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Contents Acknowledgements page vi Introduction part i 25 yeats’s shakespeare Setting a sail for shipwreck: Yeats’s Shakespeare criticism 27 Myself must I remake: Shakespeare in Yeats’s poetry 41 part ii 61 eliot’s shakespeare That man’s scope: Eliot’s Shakespeare criticism 63 This man’s gift: Shakespeare in Eliot’s poetry 90 part iii 121 auden’s shakespeare A plenum of experience: Auden’s Shakespeare criticism 123 147 The reality of the mirror: Shakespeare in Auden’s poetry part iv ted hughes’s shakespeare A language of the common bond 181 183 The Shakespearean moment 200 Survivor of cease: Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath in Ted Hughes’s poems 223 Index 242 v 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 vi Introduction influence 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 require They not borrow, they override.1 Rewritten with energetic conviction and terminological brio, this is essentially the view of The Anxiety of Influence too, in which poetic interrelationships are read as a species of neo-Freudian, Oedipal melancholy, a version of the ‘family romance’ Poetry, as a consequence, is ‘misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance’.2 The first edition of Bloom’s book pays very little attention to Shakespeare and regards literary history from Homer to Shakespeare as a form of prelapsarian ‘generous’ influence: anxiety is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon For the second edition published in 1997, however, Bloom writes a Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p 95 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 anguish of contamination’.3 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 not with human agency, with intersubjectivity, but with the ‘transposition of one (or several) sign-system(s) into another’.4 So unhappy did Kristeva become, in fact, with its more casual usage that she began to employ instead the term ‘transposition’ Not soon enough, however, to prevent the word’s common and persistent (mis)use in contemporary literary criticism Although it is far too late to sabotage that now, the takeover has meant that the word ‘allusion’ has come, in some circles, to seem a bit tame, outmoded and even reactionary Although I make use of the term ‘intertextuality’ in what follows, to signal a larger and more diffused relationship between texts than ‘allusion’ is liable to suggest, I retain the latter term too in this book, notably in relation to Eliot, and I am interested in its reformulation in the work of Walter Benjamin and, after him, Marjorie Garber I also believe, pace Harold The Anxiety of Influence (2nd edn, 1997), p xi Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1974), repr Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp 89–136, p 111 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 provoking or sterilising; it can involve the sharing of humane inquiry or represent the fundamental foreclosure of opportunity; it can give rise to awed obeisance or irreverently disfiguring travesty; it can be parabolic, or it can be selfprojecting 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 themselves and, occasionally, one another; and in this process too Shakespeare becomes in many ways the first modern the first modern There is one sense in which poets are manifestly responsible for making Shakespeare the first modern: the fact that he figures crucially in the literary criticism of the poet William Empson, which was influenced by the poet Robert Graves In his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, originally published in 1930, Empson says that Graves was ‘the inventor of the method of analysis I was using here’.5 He is thinking of A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) by Graves and Laura Riding, which includes a chapter entitled ‘William Shakespeare and e.e cummings: A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling’ The originality of cummings’s typography, which looked very ‘modern’ indeed in 1927, now seems an element of his occasionally attractive but often cloying faux-naiveté Riding and Graves compare it to the original Q 1609 version of sonnet 129, William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; 2nd edn, 1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p 14 234 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet Kings is a manifestation of the voice of God, but the voice issuing in this poem, foretelling the price of fame, is that of a very menacing god indeed: ‘Fame will come Fame especially for you Fame cannot be avoided And when it comes You will have paid for it with your happiness, Your husband and your life.’ By contrast, ‘Freedom of Speech’, a poem of deep yearning and grief, is a poem of portent become posthumous to itself Imagining a sixtieth birthday for Plath, it enters into almost uncanny correspondence with her own deeply unsettling poem ‘A Birthday Present’ Hughes’s poem is, literally, a ‘birthday letter’; except that the person addressed could never have had a sixtieth birthday and cannot receive a letter In Plath’s poem a mysterious veiled object sits between the speaker and an apostrophised ‘you’, and the poem asks anxious, repeated questions about its identity These waver disconcertingly between the realistic and the surreal; and the element of panic is enforced by a reference to a suicide attempt As the poem’s address proceeds it more and more co-opts the addressee in a way both menacing and anguished: he (for we assume it is a he) is cajoled, reprimanded, blamed and persuaded, sometimes in imperative injunctions Finally, apparently in contradistinction to the veiled gift actually proffered, the speaker says, ‘There is this one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me’: and ‘it’ becomes the subject and object of some of the poem’s final evocations, one of which includes the possibility that ‘it’ may be death, and therefore that this birthday may be a deathday too Among these evocations in the poem’s solemn concluding unrhyming couplets there is this: ‘Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty / By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.’ ‘Freedom of Speech’ opens, ‘At your sixtieth birthday, in the cake’s glow, / Ariel sits on your knuckle’, which has a piercing echo of ‘Littleblood’ (‘Sit on my finger, sing in my ear’); and the poem, apostrophising Plath, imagines a party of friends – ‘Some famous authors, your court of brilliant minds’ – gathered in benign laughter; and the word ‘laughter’ recurs several times in its four brief verses The laughter also includes that of ‘your Mummy’, ‘your children’ and even ‘your Daddy’, the Otto Plath who has figured in ways inducing no laughter whatever elsewhere in the sequence (and the capitalisation of whose name cannot but recall the poem title ‘Daddy’) None of these is actually present at the party, though, and the Daddy, indeed, ‘Laughs deep in his coffin’ The laughter also includes that of poppies, candles and stars, those radiantly emblematic properties in Survivor of cease 235 Plath – the poppies of ‘Poppies in October’, for instance, the candles of ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, and the stars of ‘Crossing the Water’: so that ‘Freedom of Speech’ seems a reprise of some of her most unforgettable work Bracketing this chorus of celebratory acclaim, however, are the opening and closing verses In the opening one Ariel sits on Plath’s knuckle while she remains solemnly outside the circle of joy; and at the poem’s conclusion former husband and wife collude in a kind of blankly desolate joylessness: And Ariel – What about Ariel? Ariel is happy to be here Only you and I not smile ‘Let it not come by word of mouth’, ‘The Birthday Present’ prays Hughes’s title, ‘Freedom of Speech’, may respond to that and could be read as his invention for Plath of the birthday present which, in her own poem, she imagines waiting for until she is sixty ‘Freedom of Speech’ hauntedly, and hauntingly, imagines what might have been and joins it to what has been and what is, and does so under the auspices of Shakespeare’s Ariel Literally ‘auspices’, since Ariel is conjured as an ominous bird taking grapes from Plath’s lips in a way that seems both erotic and occult: ‘auspice: an observation of birds for the purpose of obtaining omens; a sign or token given by birds’ (OED) ‘Freedom of Speech’ is heavy with omen, but omen exhausted or fulfilled, desolately plunged into the posthumous So, although Ariel is ‘happy to be here’ at the poem’s conclusion, he is notably not himself joining in the general laughter Prospero does call Ariel ‘my bird’ (4.1.184), so Hughes has Shakespearean sanction for this figuration; but it is still very striking that he conjures the figure of Ariel, in a poem about Plath, in a way that far more prominently remembers Shakespeare’s than Plath’s own (whose Ariel, in the title poem of her posthumous volume, is, famously, a horse) In this, ‘Freedom of Speech’ is prepared for by ‘Setebos’ which precedes it in the sequence, in which the honeymoon of Hughes and Plath is presided over by Ariel too: Ariel Entertained us night and day The voices and sounds and sweet airs Were our aura Ariel was our aura In these lines Hughes voices his own sounds and sweet airs as an interweaving with Ariel’s, sounding the sweet assonances of ‘Ariel’, ‘Entertained’, 236 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet ‘day’, ‘airs’, ‘aura’, ‘Ariel’ and ‘aura’: a consort of harmony cruelly disrupted by the atonal energies crowding the culmination of this devastated poem But Ariel is the defining volume which created Plath’s posthumous fame: so it may also be regarded as the birthday present brought by Hughes, its editor, in the poem ‘Freedom of Speech’ A great deal has been said about the problems involved in Hughes’s editing of Plath (‘a so-called neutral activity weighed down by the heaviest of psychosexual, aesthetic and ethical investment’, says Jacqueline Rose, justly); and these give prominence to his controversial editorial decisions about Ariel.8 Although ‘Ariel’ is a poem about a horse-ride and nowhere refers to Shakespeare, it is impossible not to recall Shakespeare’s figure in relation to Plath’s title, particularly if we know that an early title for her first book, The Colossus, was Full Fathom Five, which is one of Ariel’s songs.9 She explains the title, which is also that of a poem in the book, like this in her journal: It relates more richly to my life and imagery than anything else I’ve dreamed up: has the background of The Tempest, the association of the sea, which is a central metaphor for my childhood, my poems and the artist’s subconscious, to the father image – relating to my own father, the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted, to the sea-father neptune [sic] – and the pearls and coral highlywrought to art: pearls sea-changed from the ubiquitous grit of sorrow and dull routine.10 Birthday Letters relates more explicitly, if not necessarily more richly, to Sylvia Plath’s life and imagery than anything else Ted Hughes dreamed up; and when ‘Freedom of Speech’ returns Ariel from the name of Plath’s horse to the name found in a Shakespeare play which deeply appealed to Plath, we should read into the gesture appeal, apology, anxiety and attempted reparation, together with, certainly, an absolute recognition of the ubiquitous grit of sorrow, even amid the joyous laughter of this birthday party which can exist only in the eternal posthumousness of the poetic imagination In Hughes’s prose on Plath her truest poetic voice is always called her ‘Ariel voice’; and in the essay ‘Sylvia Plath and Her Journals’ he characterises her greatest poetry as ‘roots only’ – ‘Or as if all 10 The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, p 74 Marjorie Perloff’s ‘The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon’ is a key document here; and in 2004 Ariel: The Restored Edition, describing itself as ‘A facsimile of Plath’s manuscript, reinstating her original selection and arrangement’, was published by Faber and Faber, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes Even so, the title The Colossus itself has a Shakespearean association: with Julius Caesar, in which Cassius says of Caesar that he ‘bestrides the narrow world like a colossus’ The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, ed Karen V Kukil (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p 381 Survivor of cease 237 poetry were made up of the feats and shows performed by the poetic spirit Ariel Whereas her poetry is the biology of Ariel, the ontology of Ariel – the story of Ariel’s imprisonment in the pine, before Prospero opened it’ (WP, p 178) But who permits freedom of speech to whom in this poem? It is Hughes’s poem, so it is his speech that operates freely: but it is Plath who has the commanding presence, even in her solemn silence In this respect, and in some others, it may be regarded as a riposte to, or apology for, ‘Bad News Good!’, a much earlier, savagely unappeased poem published in 1963, the year of Plath’s death, but never subsequently collected by Hughes himself It portrays a woman ‘under crow-possession’ who ‘Will pluck out her evil tidings / From your eye’s lightest confession, / Then flap off with the evidence bleeding’ Her ‘bodings’ – the ‘bad news’ of the title, presumably, ‘good’ only in that this is the only news there is – victimise and kill, in what appears a premeditated exercise of malignity; and at the poem’s conclusion the Shakespeare play evoked as analogue is not The Tempest but, with hideous aptness, Othello: What of Iago, idiot, or revenge There is in her, I not know – Lust to rend and to derange Is the nature of a crow: Messenger innocence of God’s will, Delivering the black of Hell – Till every word that wounds be buried Where it comes closest to kill This is a venomous poem, apparently bent on coded revenge, and congruent with detail offered in the biographies of the part played by rumour, gossip, innuendo and Aurelia Plath in the Hughes–Plath marriage ‘Bad News Good!’ may be read as an alternative Ur-Crow poem: and this would plot Shakespeare even more integrally into Crow, putting Iago, as it were, in at the kill laureate poems Ariel is the name of a bird in ‘Freedom of Speech’ but is once more the name of a horse in ‘A Unicorn Called Ariel’, the fourth poem in the sequence ‘The Unicorn’, written in 1992 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne This is one of several complicatedly mythological poems praising the endurance and validity of monarchy 238 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet which Hughes wrote as Poet Laureate In its composite mythology, as a footnote explains – needs to explain – the Queen is figured as three aspects of a supernatural Pegasus-Unicorn figure, one of which is ‘her horse-like magical vehicle (named Ariel, after Prospero’s magical servant in Shakespeare’s The Tempest)’ which ‘trots off in the earthly likeness of a racehorse’; and in another aspect this supernatural figure becomes ‘a woman, the racehorse’s owner, who likes a bet’.11 It is hard to judge if Hughes intends any humour in these figurations, and in one of his aspects as Poet Laureate it is not difficult to imagine him situating the supernatural at Royal Ascot: Gaudete, which situates it in a Northern English town, would have been useful preparation Even if levity inheres in the conception, though, it is still strangely disconcerting to witness Hughes naming as Ariel any horse other than Plath’s, even if he does so here, once more, specifically with reference to The Tempest It is more than tempting to feel that Sylvia Plath, in some weird form of psychological and mythological synapse, has infiltrated Hughes’s conception of the super-historical transcendentalism – for that is what his conception of monarchy amounts to – of this female monarch Shakespeare, if not Sylvia Plath, figures elsewhere too in Hughes’s laureate poems This sequence also includes, for instance, a poem called ‘Falstaff’ which illustrates how, for all his monarchical mythologising, Hughes has a beady eye on the problems of the House of Windsor’s public image in the early 1990s, on ‘the tabloid howl that tops the charts’ Falstaff is offered as an alternative to the ‘Court Jesters’ who accept cash for giving stories to the press and becomes, thereby, an image of the best of British: ‘Britain, Falstaff in disguise, / Laughs with the Queen and keeps her wise.’ This laughter is characterised in the accompanying footnote as ‘bound to nobody, free, affectionate, all-accepting, all-forgiving, illuminating, liberating – as the laughter of a Zen master ought to be’.12 Hughes’s reluctance to confront the real damage done to the monarchy by these stories – by, that is, the behaviour of the royal family – is betrayed by this shining-upward-faced idealising of Falstaff, whose Zen laughter would, no doubt, have been music to the ears of those ‘mortal men, mortal men’ of whom he venally makes canon fodder in Henry IV Part II, and who, after all, had to be cast off before Hal could become, not ‘be kept’, wise as Henry V, whatever was lost in transit The conception of Falstaff as Zen master is even more hyperbolic than Auden’s conception of him as Christ, and without as justified a 11 Collected Poems, p 1224 12 Ibid., p 1222 Survivor of cease 239 rationale William Empson would undoubtedly have reminded Hughes, as he reminded Auden, that Falstaff is an ‘old brute’ too.13 Shakespeare is also very much part of the intricately woven texture of the sequences ‘A Birthday Masque’ and ‘An Almost Thornless Crown’ In the latter, as another of Hughes’s fascinatingly peculiar footnotes tells us, the ‘slightly thorny’ crown of the poem is partly ‘in memory of the nettle and weed-flower crown worn by King Lear in Shakespeare’s play, at the moment of his rebirth, the point at which he becomes like an idiot-savant, a grey-bearded infant saint in Cordelia’s arms, a kind of almost risen Christ in the arms of a kind of Mary’.14 Although the imprecision of the repeated ‘a kind of’ and the qualification ‘almost’ suggest insecurity in the conception even in its articulation, this attempts to Christianise some of Hughes’s perceptions in the Goddess in a way possibly acknowledging that the Queen is Head of the Church of England and that therefore the laureateship is a post with Christian associations, even responsibilities.15 However, this in fact seems much more Roman Catholic than even High Anglican in its Marian, pietà imagery, in a way that may return our minds to the concluding poem-hymns of Gaudete When Hughes subsequently says that the Flower Crown ‘associates the Queen with the King who is not only the hero of the crucial work by our national prophet and seer, but is the only king in British legendary history who was originally a god’, we must fear that the Queen, had she taken the point – and we should not, I suppose, assume that she did not – may well have found the association with Lear (who had very difficult children) less than entirely diplomatic or ‘helpful’, despite its apparent offer of apotheosis Anyone writing on Ted Hughes and Shakespeare must note the Shakespearean presence in Hughes’s laureate work, but in general these poems – in this respect, if in few others, like numerous poems by other poets laureate – fail to sustain much interest Although sometimes breathtakingly imaginative in conception (even if we must decipher this from the prose glosses rather than the poems themselves), they are heraldic, ritualised, burnished and deliberated to the point of deep obscurity and are, in the main, something other than poems: ‘masques’, maybe, as one of them is 13 14 15 William Empson, ‘The Just Man Made Innocent’ (1963), in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, edited and introduced by John Haffenden (1987; London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), pp 378–81 Collected Poems, p 1217 Neil Roberts writes illuminatingly about Hughes as laureate in Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 240 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet actually entitled, after that form which more or less died with Charles I, or prayers to the ancient god of hierarchical monarchy In all of these respects too they may be compared with those poems in which Hughes more officially, as it were, recognises Shakespeare, in ways paralleling, and effectively glossed by, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being I am thinking of such poems as ‘An Alchemy’, written in 1973 for the Shakespeare Birthday Celebration at the Globe Theatre and published in the Poems for Shakespeare series of pamphlets, which traces a virtual diagram of the Equation in which Shakespeare’s plays and characters (including the memorably phrased ‘Icicle Angelo’) metamorphose into one another; ‘Unfinished Mystery’, published in 1980, in which a similar metamorphic process produces, out of a parade of Shakespearean characters, an ‘Oliver Milton’ and the sense of a still uncompleted English history of Protestant individualism; and ‘A Full House’, also written for Poems for Shakespeare, in 1987, a sequence in which a further versification of the Equation is staged as the conceit of a reading of some of Shakespeare’s works as a set of playing cards One poem in this sequence, ‘King of Hearts’, was reprinted separately as ‘Shakespeare, drafting his will’, one of the last poems Hughes saw to press Although to my mind of little intrinsic interest, it does, therefore, offer a final testimony to the way Shakespeare was present to Hughes from first to last – as both ‘omen and amen’, as Seamus Heaney has it in the title of his essay on ‘Littleblood’ ophelia ‘Ophelia’, one of the poems in River (1983), includes Shakespeare but is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the heraldic It spots Ophelia tumbling animatedly in the water among trout, leading a submarine afterlife in a way possibly deriving from Gertrude’s amazing description of her death by drowning: ‘Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.’ Although the poem actually uses the word ‘death’, it is wonderfully lively and tender, its anapaests and dactyls evoking fleeting glimpses of Ophelia at beginning and end: Where the pool unfurls its undercloud – There she goes … There she goes Darkfish, finger to her lips, Staringly into the afterworld Survivor of cease 241 Finger to her lips – like the mad nun of the ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’ essay in Winter Pollen – she is saying nothing and taking her dark knowledge with her, but going with eyes wide open, even if the memorable ‘staringly’ also activates its now obsolete meaning: ‘wildly’ or ‘frantically’ Is it possible that in this tender fantasy or figuration of the suicide Ophelia as a ‘darkfish’ staringly entering the afterworld, Hughes is once more crossing Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath? Finger to its own lips, this poem is not saying: but Ted Hughes’s imagination is itself manifestly possessed by both, and by both simultaneously.16 16 In a letter to Janos Csokits, of August 1967, Hughes interprets his story ‘The Suitor’, written in 1962 and published in Wodwo (1967) Calling it ‘a story of death & the maiden’, he describes it as ‘a prophecy’, and says that ‘the girl is my spirit of light, my Ophelia’ (Letters of Ted Hughes, p 274) Index Albright, Daniel, 44, 52 Alvarez, A New Poetry, The, 190 Penguin Modern European Poets series, 15 Andrewes, Lancelot, 198 Ansen, Alan, 124, 128 Table Talk, 151 Arendt, Hannah, 127 Arnold, Matthew, 69, 98 On the Study of Celtic Literature, 32, 57 Artaud, Antonin, 217 Auden, W H., 11, 22, 33, 36, 45, 119, 123–79, 199, 218 About the House ‘Cave of Making, The’, 158 ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, 148 Age of Anxiety, The, 129 ‘Ars Poetica’, 167 ‘At the Grave of Henry James’, 173 ‘Balaam and His Ass’, 123, 160 ‘Brothers and Others’, 137 Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, The, 123, 125, 128, 129, 134, 137, 139 Enchafèd Flood, The, 133 ‘For The Time Being’, 162, 163 Forewords and Afterwords, 123, 141 ‘Forty Years On’, 148, 157–9 ‘Globe, The’, 131, 136, 144 ‘Horae Canonicae’, 171 ‘If I Could Tell You’, 132 ‘In Memory of W B Yeats’, 147–8 ‘Joker in the Pack, The’, 126, 130, 131, 137, 138, 156 lectures, 127 on Coriolanus, 127, 130 on Henry IV and Henry V, 129, 151 on Henry VI, 127 on Julius Caesar, 127, 130 on Measure for Measure, 130 on Merchant of Venice, The, 145 on Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 127, 135 on Much Ado About Nothing, 127 on Othello, 138 as Oxford Professor of Poetry, 123 on Romeo and Juliet, 129 on Tempest, The, 160 Lectures on Shakespeare, 124, 147 ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 143 ‘Music in Shakespeare’, 123 ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’, 143 Paid On Both Sides, 177 ‘Prince’s Dog, The’, 137, 138–9, 141 ‘Protestant Mystics, The’, 141 ‘Sea and the Mirror, The’, 14, 132, 134, 135, 137, 142, 146, 159–179, 230 ‘September 1, 1939’, 149 ‘Shakespearian City, The’, 123, 140 ‘Shield of Achilles, The’, 155 ‘Spain’, 167 ‘“Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning, The”’, 18, 154–7, 159 ‘Under Which Lyre’, 148–52, 158 ‘Whitsunday in Kirchstetten’, 171 Augustine, 127 City of God, The, 123 Bacon, Francis, 210 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Baldick, Chris, 191 Ballets Russes, 70 Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of Shakespeare, 165 Beckett, Samuel, 199 Endgame, 113 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 46, 81 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 90, 111 Bennett, Arnold, 70 Benson, Frank, 28 Berryman, John, 10–12, 124, 152, 193 Berryman’s Shakespeare, 10, 12 Dream Song 29, 83 Dream Songs, 11–12 Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, 12 ‘Shakespeare at Thirty’, 10 242 Index Blackburn, Thomas, 125 Blake, William, 28, 58, 184 ‘Everlasting Gospel, The’, 30 Bloom, Harold, 56 Anxiety of Influence, The, 1–3 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 140 Boyd, Brian, 21 Bradley, A C., 72, 131, 222 ‘Rejection of Falstaff, The’, 126 Bradshaw, Graham, 218 Brancusi, Constantine, 40 Brecht, Bertolt, 107 Brodsky, Joseph, 150 Brontë, Emily, ‘Plead for Me’, 162 Brook, Peter, 191, 198 Brooks, Cleanth, 63 Browning, Robert, 119 Bruno, Giordano, 194, 217 Buber, Martin, 127 Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 38 Calvin, John, 200 camelots du roi, 107 Carroll, Lewis, Alice Through the LookingGlass, 171 Cavafy, C P., ‘In a Township of Asia Minor’, 155 Cavalcanti, Guido, ‘Ballata, written in exile at Speranza’, 91 Cervantes, Don Quixote, 160 Césaire, Aimé, 33 Une Tempête, 161 Chaplin, Charlie, 70, 71 Charles I, 240 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 38, 56, 94, 184, 232 Clare, John, 217 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 67, 75, 94, 184, 187, 216, 220 ‘Christabel’, 184 Shakespeare lectures, 125 Collinson, Patrick, 205 Conant, James Bryant, 151 Courbet, Gustave, 99 Cromwell, Oliver, 200, 206, 211, 219 Cruttwell, Patrick, 206, 218 Shakespearean Moment, The, 186 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 43 cummings, e.e., 3–4 Dante, 79, 82–6, 96, 100, 193, 219, 221–2, 232 Divina Commedia, La, 221 Inferno, 90, 137, 169, 221 Paradiso, 221 Vita Nuova, La, 141 Davies, Michael, 205 243 Deane, Seamus, 204 Derrida, Jacques, 185 Desai, Rupin W., 39 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 171 Donne, John, 186, 206 ‘Whispers of Immortality’, 93 Donoghue, Denis, 88 Words Alone, 114 Doolittle, Hilda See H D Douglas, Keith, 196 Dowden, Edward, 31, 32, 34, 40, 49, 58 Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, 29 Dryden, John, 67, 68, 87 Edwards, Philip, 28 Eliot, T S., 11, 16, 20, 21, 34, 39, 45, 63–120, 126, 136, 140, 145, 171, 186, 187, 192, 199, 202, 205, 217, 219, 220–2 After Strange Gods, 99, 100–1 ‘Apology for the Countess of Pembroke’, 68 Ara Vos Prec, 103 ‘Ode’, 65, 103–6 Ash-Wednesday, 78, 91–3, 120 ‘Beating of a Drum, The’, 63, 69 ‘Ben Jonson’, 73, 83 ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, 73, 97, 113–15 ‘Burial of the Dead, The’, 110 ‘Burnt Norton’, 108 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, 79, 98 Clark lectures, 66 Collected Poems (1936), 105 ‘Cooking Egg, A’, 105 ‘Coriolan’, 71, 76, 89, 102–10, 117, 127 ‘Triumphal March’, 105, 106–9 ‘Difficulties of a Statesman’, 105, 108 ‘Dante’, 82, 84, 85 ‘Death by Water’, 112 ‘Dirge’, 112–13, 115 ‘East Coker’, 77, 82, 99, 163 Edinburgh lectures, 114, 116 Elizabethan Dramatists, 65 ‘Figlia Che Piange, La’, 86 ‘First Debate between the Body and Soul’, 86 Four Quartets, 79, 108, 178, 221 ‘Frontiers of Criticism, The’, 65 ‘Game of Chess, A’, 21, 95, 111, 114 ‘Gerontion’, 103, 117 ‘Goethe as the Sage’, 78 ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, 64, 65, 67, 72, 74 ‘Hollow Men, The’, 78, 86 ‘Interlude in a Bar’, 102 ‘Little Gidding’, 86, 98, 99, 100–1, 103, 163, 229 244 Index Eliot, T S., (cont.) ‘Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The’, 19, 68, 78, 93–6 ‘Mandarins’, 102 ‘Marina’, 17, 72, 115–20, 178 ‘Music of Poetry, The’, 80–1, 192 ‘Nocturne’, 86, 94 On Poetry and Poets, 64 ‘Poetic Drama, The’, 89 ‘Poetry and Drama’, 64, 82 ‘Possibility of a Poetic Drama, The’, 70, 79 ‘“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama’, 72, 86 Sacred Wood, The, 64, 65, 82 ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, 79, 118 ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, 64, 65, 66, 75, 83, 118 ‘Shakespeares Verkunst’, 64 ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, 70, 109 ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’, 99, 178 ‘Three Voices of Poetry, The’, 73 ‘To Criticize the Critic’, 64, 72, 74–5 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 84, 100 Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The, 102 Waste Land, The, 18, 21, 65, 73, 78, 85, 90, 97, 99, 102, 105, 110–16, 120, 178 ‘What Dante Means To Me’, 82, 85, 86 Wheel of Fire, The (G Wilson Knight), introduction to, 76, 82, 116 Yeats Lecture, 99 Eliot, Valerie, 112, 115 Eliot, Vivien, 106 Elizabeth I, 204, 206, 210 Elizabeth II, 239 Ellmann, Richard, 56 Eminent Domain, Empson, William, 67, 95, 115, 126, 139, 193, 239 Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3, Some Versions of Pastoral, Structure of Complex Words, The, 4, 72 ‘To an Old Lady’, 4–5 English Civil War, 187, 206, 207, 211, 219 Euripides, Hippolytus, 203 Fanon, Frantz, 33 Fenton, James, 143 Feuer, Donya, 222 Fiedler, Leslie, Stranger in Shakespeare, The, 218 First World War, poetry of the, 5–9 Ford, John, 66 Ford, Mark, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 131 Frye, Northrop, 63, 218 Fuller, John, 147, 164, 173 Fuller, Roy, 183, 185, 199 Fuseli, Henry, ‘Nightmare, The’, 48 Garber, Marjorie, 2, 90, 105 Gardner, Helen, 97 Gilbert, Sandra M., 192 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 67, 75, 94 Golding, William, The Inheritors, 206 Gonne, Maud, 46, 53 Grady, Hugh, 63, 71 Granville-Barker, Harley, 67 Graves, Robert, 5, 204, 216 Survey of Modernist Poetry, A, 3–4 White Goddess, The, 200 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 28, 29, 32, 34 Griffin, Howard, 124 Gross, Kenneth, Shakespeare is Shylock, 113 Gunn, Thom, 22 My Sad Captains, 22 Gwynn, Stephen, Experiences of a Literary Man, 34 Hall, Joseph, 206 Halpern, Richard, 63, 65 Hawkes, Terence, 88, 106, 109 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 14 Hayward, John, 97 Hazlitt, William, 30, 126 H D., By Avon River, 9–10 Heaney, Seamus, 140, 228, 230 ‘Omen and Amen: On “Littleblood” ’, 240 Hecht, Anthony, 151 Transparent Man, The ‘A Love for Four Voices’, 14–15 Henry VIII, 210 Herbert, Zbigniew, 19 Study of the Object, ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, 17 ‘To Ryszard Krynicki – A Letter’, 17 Heywood, Thomas, 66 Hill, Geoffrey, 22 Hitler, Adolf, 108, 129, 133, 164 Holub, Miroslav Primer, ‘Polonius’, 18, 19 So-Called Heart, The, ‘Prince Hamlet’s Milk Tooth’, 18–19 Homer, 155 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 184, 185, 187 ‘Heaven-Haven’, 186 Housman, A E., 127 Hughes, Ted, 77, 81, 87, 143, 145, 183–241 ‘Alchemy, An’, 240 ‘Almost Thornless Crown, An’, 239 Index ‘Bad News Good!’, 237 Birthday Letters, 188, 231–7 ‘Birthday Masque, A’, 239 Calm, The, 233 Cave Birds, 223, 227, 230 ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’, 228 ‘Epilogue’, 213 ‘Finale’, 230 ‘Green mother, A’, 228 ‘Knight, The’, 228 Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, A, 187, 189, 201, 212, 218 Collected Poems, 226 Crow, 20, 223–8, 230 ‘Dream of Horses, A’, 190 Earth-Numb, 226 ‘Freedom of Speech’, 234–5 ‘Full House, A’, 240 Gaudete, 223–5, 228–31, 238, 239 Hawk in the Rain, The, 183, 190 ‘Hawk in the Rain, The’, 187 ‘Horses, The’, 183 ‘King of Hearts’, 240 Lupercal, ‘View of a Pig’, 215 ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’, 183, 185, 188, 190, 241 New Selected Poems, 226 Orghast, 198 ‘Ouija’, 233 Poems for Shakespeare, 240 ‘Poetic Self, The’, 192, 220 ‘Prospero and Sycorax’, 226–7 Recklings, ‘Dolly Gumption’s Addendum’, 201 River, ‘Ophelia’, 240 Selected Poems, 226 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, 36, 185, 186, 189, 191, 192, 194, 198, 200–22, 223, 228, 231, 239, 240 ‘Unfinished Mystery’, 240 ‘Unicorn Called Ariel, A’, 237 Winter Pollen, 241 Wodwo, ‘Warriors of the North, The’, 201 Hunt, Violet, 28 Husserl, Edmund, 107 Huxley, Aldous, 145 Hyde, Douglas, 28 Irish Literary Theatre, 28 Isherwood, Christopher, 135 James I, 210 James, Henry, 137, 164, 173, 176, 177, 178 Wings of the Dove, The, 173 Jarrell, Randall, 134, 173 245 Jenkins, Nicholas, 129 Johnson, Samuel, 44, 68–9, 80, 127, 193 Jones, David, In Parenthesis, 6–9 Jonson, Ben, 73, 83, 116 Joyce, James, 27 Finnegans Wake, 195 Ulysses, 195 Julius, Anthony, 101, 115 Kafka, Franz, 160 Kallman, Chester, 134, 141, 142, 163, 165, 166, 177 Keats, John, 142, 159, 184 Keegan, Paul, 223 Kermode, Frank, 162 Kerrigan, John, 139 Kiberd, Declan, 33 Kierkegaard, Søren, 127, 132 Kipling, Rudyard, 127 Kirsch, Arthur, 124, 127, 131, 133, 168 Kittredge, G L., 124 Knight, G Wilson, 63, 71–2, 74, 76, 80, 81, 109, 116–17, 118, 120, 126 Crown of Life, The, 116 Imperial Theme, The, 76 Thaisa, 116 Knights, L C., 63, 218 Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 20, 217 Kristeva, Julia, Laforgue, Jules, 94, 104 Langbaum, Robert, 95 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 184 Larkin, Philip, ‘At Grass’, 190 Lawrence, D H., 127, 192, 219, 233 ‘The Ship of Death’, 22 ‘When I Read Shakespeare’, 22, 127 Women in Love, 172 Leavis, F R., 143, 186, 218 Leishman, J B., 161 Levin, Harry, 151 Lewis, Wyndham, 20, 40, 71–2, 74, 84, 205, 217 Lion and the Fox, The, 75, 107, 126, 218 Lloyd, Marie, 70 Lowell, Robert, 10, 12–14, 231 Day by Day, ‘Epilogue’, 233 For the Union Dead, ‘Caligula’, 13 History ‘Bosworth Field’, 13 ‘Coleridge and Richard II’, 14 Imitations, ‘Hamlet in Russia, A Soliloquy’, 15–16 Ludendorff, Erich, Coming War, The, 107 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 76 MacNeice, Louis, 48 ‘Autolycus’, 158 246 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 98, 176 Manet, Édouard, 99 Marlowe, Christopher, 79, 186 Hero and Leander, 153 Marvell, Andrew, 89 Mason, H A., 103, 104–5 Massine, Léonide, 70 Maurras, Charles, L’Avenir de l’Intelligence, 107 McDiarmid, Lucy, Saving Civilisation, 186 McDonald, Peter, 163 Menand, Louis, Discovering Modernism: T S Eliot and His Context, 39, 105 Mendelson, Edward, 142, 150, 154 Michelangelo, 58 Milosz, Czeslaw, 17 Milton, John, 80, 187 Milward, Peter, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 204 Modern Poetry in Translation, 195 Morris, William, 28, 38 Movement, The, 190 Muldoon, Paul, 190 ‘7 Middagh St’, 33 Murphy, William M., 34 Murry, Middleton, 77 Mussolini, Benito, 108, 155 Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire, 20–1, 162 Neruda, Pablo, 195 New Criticism, 4, 72 New Historicism, 63 New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, 128 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 127 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 73, 126 Orwell, George, 167 Ovid, 153, 197 Metamorphoses, 202 Owen, Wilfred, 56 Palfrey, Simon, 211 Palmer, Samuel, 32 Pascal, Blaise, 176 Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago, 15 ‘Hamlet’, 15–16 Pater, Walter, ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’, 34 Paulin, Tom, 204 Perloff, Marjorie, 236 Perse, St John, 195 Anabase, 106 Petronius, Satyricon, 65 Phoenix Society, 70 Piers Plowman, 229 Index Pilinszky, Janos, 195 Pirandello, Luigi, Henry IV, 113 Plath, Sylvia, 214, 220, 223–41 Ariel, 188, 236 Colossus, The, 236 ‘Daddy’, 142, 231, 234 Plato, Symposium, 141 Poole, Adrian, 27 Popa, Vasko, 195 Pope, Alexander ‘Essay on Criticism, An’, 162 ‘Rape of the Lock, The’, 154, 157 Pound, Ezra, 78, 112, 113 Cantos, 146 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 217 Proust, Marcel, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, 134 Puttenham, George, Arte of English Poesie, The, 191 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, Racine, Jean, 70 Raine, Craig, 114 Raleigh, Walter, 218 Ramazani, Jahan, 33, 49 Rastelli, Enrico, 70 Rhodes, Neil, 191 Ricks, Christopher, 78, 87, 90, 102, 113, 115, 187 T S Eliot and Prejudice, 114 Riding, Laura, Survey of Modernist Poetry, A, 3–4 Rilke, Rainer Maria ‘Archaic Torso’, 132 ‘Der Geist Ariel’, 161–2 Rimbaud, Arthur, 127 ‘Génie’, 127 Roberts, Neil, 187 Robertson, J M., 74, 76, 110 Rose, Jacqueline, 226, 236 Rossiter, A P., 218 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 133 Rousseau, Théodore, 99 Różewicz, Tadeusz, 19–20 ‘Conversation with the Prince’, 19 ‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’, 20 Rumi, 217 Rylands, George, 126 Schuchard, Ronald, 114 Schwartz, Delmore, 11 Scofield, Martin, 75, 97 Scott, Sir Walter, 184 Seneca, 79, 104 Hercules Furens, 118–19 Index Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well, 193–5, 208 Antony and Cleopatra, 21–2, 44, 49, 50, 69, 73, 74, 80, 85, 87, 97, 102, 110, 111, 113–14, 132, 135, 136, 144, 209, 211, 214, 224 As You Like It, 11, 42, 54, 123, 152–4, 156, 221 Coriolanus, 49, 72, 74, 76, 102–10, 127, 130, 132, 209 Cymbeline, 42 Hamlet, 5, 15–19, 22, 29, 36, 38, 48, 55, 58, 64, 68, 72, 74–5, 81, 101, 102, 105, 110, 111, 113, 126, 133, 135, 144, 148, 175, 186, 191, 199, 202, 208, 214, 219, 220, 223, 240 Henry IV, 123, 128, 129, 139, 151, 166 Part I, 224 Part II, 148, 228, 238 Henry V, 7–9, 30, 32–3, 46, 128, 129, 136, 151, 172 Henry VI, 6, 127, 214, 218 Julius Caesar, 104, 127, 130, 135, 144 King John, 145 King Lear, 5, 12, 42, 43, 48, 53, 55, 58, 69, 110, 111, 113, 132, 133, 160, 172, 198, 207, 209–10, 215, 226, 239 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5, 49, 80, 135 Macbeth, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 69, 104, 208, 224, 228 Measure for Measure, 103, 130, 135, 208 Merchant of Venice, The, 113–15, 123, 135, 137–8, 145, 174 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 6, 14, 58, 127, 135, 228 Much Ado About Nothing, 123, 127 Othello, 43, 67, 72, 113, 123, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 156, 208, 237 Pericles, 72, 115–20, 171, 178 Rape of Lucrece, The, 203–4 Richard II, 30–1, 32–3, 35, 46, 49, 135, 145 Richard III, 79, 129, 136 Romeo and Juliet, 45–6, 64, 81, 86, 129, 133, 135, 217 Sonnets, 22, 75, 128, 136, 141–4, 198, 202, 206, 217, 218, 222 sonnet 29, ‘When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes’, 91–3 sonnet 55, ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme’, 146 sonnet 66, ‘Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry’, 199 sonnet 73, ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’, sonnet 86, ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse …?’, 96 247 sonnet 111, ‘O, for my sake you with Fortune chide’, 124 sonnet 121, ‘No, I am that I am, and those that level’, 143 sonnet 124, ‘If my dear love were but the child of state’, 139 sonnet 129, ‘The’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, sonnet 144, ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’, 11 Taming of the Shrew, The, 145 Tempest, The, 9, 13, 29, 33, 69, 85, 110–13, 115, 119, 120, 123, 135, 137, 160–79, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213–14, 218, 221, 226, 228, 231, 232–3, 236, 237, 238 Timon of Athens, 21, 47, 58, 72, 76, 209 Troilus and Cressida, 22, 76, 144, 145, 208 Twelfth Night, 13, 123, 132 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 93 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 128 Venus and Adonis, 80, 202–5, 207, 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 233 Winter’s Tale, The, 43, 157, 158, 210 Shaw, George Bernard, 27 Sidney, Philip, 68 Defence of Poetry, 11, 153 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 184 Skelton, John, Magnificence, 177 Smart, Christopher, 184 Sophocles, 68 Spenser, Edmund, 28, 37, 41, 218 Stevens, Wallace, ‘Sunday Morning’, 51 Swift, Jonathan, 98 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 72 ‘That Shakespearean Rag’, 111 Thomas, Edward, 5–7 ‘Home’, ‘Lob’, 5–7 ‘The Owl’, Tottel, Richard, 184, 188, 189 Traversi, Derek, 218 Treaty of Versailles, 106, 107 Ure, Peter, 47 van Doren, Mark, 123 Vega, Lope de, 165 Vendler, Helen, 41, 42 Villon, Franỗois, 170 Virgil, 85 Aeneid, 214 248 Index Wagner, Erica, 231 Warner, Marina, 215 Warsaw Pact, 17, 18, 21 Weil, Simone, 127 Welles, Orson, 107 Wellesley, Dorothy, 47 West, Nathaniel, 140 Whitman, Walt, 104 Wilde, Oscar, 27 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 175 Wilmer, Clive, 22 Wilson, Richard, Secret Shakespeare, 204 Wilson, Woodrow, 106 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 125, 127, 198, 199 Wizard of Oz, The, 171 Woolf, Virginia, 127 Between the Acts, 127 Orlando, Waves, The, 175 Wordsworth, William, 80, 141 Wright, George T., 197 Wyatt, Thomas, 184, 188, 189 Yeats, J B., 35 Yeats, W B., 27–59, 73, 101, 144, 171, 176, 184, 199, 220–1, 229 ‘Acre of Grass, An’, 57 ‘Ancestral Houses’, 31 ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, 27, 28, 31, 34, 40, 46, 131, 219 Autobiographies, 32, 34, 38, 56 ‘Bronze Head, A’, 53 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 33 ‘Celtic Element in Literature, The’, 31–2 ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion, The’, 57, 58 Collected Poems, 59 ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, 40 Crazy Jane poems, 42–5 ‘Crazy Jane Reproved’, 42 ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, 42, 43 ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, 46 ‘Discoveries’, 38 Explorations, 48 ‘General Introduction for my Work, A’, 28, 50, 53 ‘Gyres, The’, 50 Ideas of Good and Evil, 27, 31 ‘Lapis Lazuli’, 49, 51–7 Last Poems, 49 ‘Leda and the Swan’, 46 ‘Man and the Echo’, 33 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, 31 ‘Municipal Gallery Revisited, The’, 53 New Poems, 49 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, 42, 48 On Baile’s Strand, 46 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, The (Introduction), 99 ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, 52, 53 ‘Parting’, 44–6, 56 ‘Poetry and Tradition’, 50 ‘Prayer for my Daughter, A’, 45 Purgatory, 100 Responsibilities, 35 ‘Rosa Alchemica’, 53 Samhain, 49 ‘Solomon and the Witch’, 46 ‘Spur, The’, 100 ‘Statues, The’, 40, 46 ‘Three Bushes, The’, 41 ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’, 46 ‘Tower, The’, 40, 48 ‘Under Ben Bulben’, 59 ‘Vacillation’, 98 Vision, A, 37, 39–40, 56, 200 Winding Stair and Other Poems, The, 44 ‘Three Movements’, 41 Woman Young and Old, A, 44 Words for Music Perhaps, 42 Zukofsky, Louis Bottom: On Shakespeare, ... Shakespeare and the Modern Poet shakespeare and the modern poet These are all fascinating cases and deserve further study; and there are others, including, prominently, D H Lawrence and Thom Gunn... John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p 316 The Art of Poetry, no 16’, The Paris Review, 53 (1972), p 12 Shakespeare and the Modern Poet nonce word... 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