Title: <i>Neil Corcoran</i> Shakespeare and the Modern Poet<i>Shakespeare and the Modern Poet</i>. Neil Corcoran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. v+248.
Abstract: Previous articleNext article FreeNeil Corcoran Shakespeare and the Modern Poet Shakespeare and the Modern Poet. Neil Corcoran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. v+248.Jonathan F. S. PostJonathan F. S. PostUniversity of California, Los Angeles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLiterary studies are awash with “Afterlives” of late, but few will better Neil Corcoran’s penetrating, elegantly written, and sharply argued Shakespeare and the Modern Poet. The titular “the” is a bit disarming, but the table of contents quickly turns one into four—W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Ted Hughes—and subsequent discussion of these poets is preceded by an introductory chapter that nets a number of other Shakespearean fish swimming in the Great Modernist Sea: from England, including some First World War poets writing in English (Robert Graves, Laura Riding, William Empson, Edward Thomas, and David Jones); from the American shores (among them, H. D., John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anthony Hecht, and Louis Zukofsky); and from post–Warsaw Pact Europe (Boris Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rózewicz, Misoslav Holub, and Vladimir Nabokov).It is not breadth, however, but depth that drives this study, and for perfectly understandable reasons. Along with verse bearing signs of significant Shakespearean influence, Corcoran’s big four all wrote substantial or influential works of Shakespearean criticism. Those by Yeats and Eliot have long been part of the historical record, even as Corcoran shows that their views, especially as played out in the poems, have not been fully appreciated. Auden’s interests, too, are hardly news, and yet they acquire further meaning because of the belated publication of his Lectures on Shakespeare (2000). And Hughes achieved the full orbit of his Shakespearean interests, initiated in 1971 with his A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, only in the vast eccentricity known as Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992, revised 1993).Corcoran is an adept guide to these complicated crossovers. He is as much at home with Shakespeare (although he does make a duke out of Lord Amiens in As You Like It) as he is with modern British poetry, and every page bristles with keen observations of both a practical and a theoretical order. Readers mystified by Hughes’s Goddess—and there can’t be only a few—will be especially grateful for Corcoran’s patient and largely sympathetic exposition of that remarkable work, which generates out of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece an equation for reading all of Shakespeare in the wider socioreligious context of the Protestant Reformation leading up to the English Civil War. Throughout this study, Corcoran’s mind is fully immersed in the works he is reading and the connections he is making, as much among the four poets as between Shakespeare and his subsequent improviser. The links are often startlingly vivid. I hadn’t before heard the “unmistakable echo of Timon’s epitaph” at the end of Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben” (59). But, yes, there it is, and how fitting—or, rather, how discomfiting. And how right again to catch a whiff of Sonnet 86, the most familiar of the rival-poet sonnets, in entering the hallucinatory underworld of Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (96). One could easily continue in this mode of praise and include a right balancing of the place of Dante in this study of Shakespeare.Corcoran’s methods might be (too breezily) described as a mixture of Christopher Ricks and William Empson with a dash of Harold Bloom. Like Bloom, he is interested in the psychobiographical use to which Shakespeare is put by the various authors, although Corcoran is less inclined to read them anxiously or belatedly and more interested in the individual’s personal and historical predicaments. His understanding of Auden’s Shakespeare is especially tactful and telling, and there is a salutary note echoed throughout the study that while wary of Shakespeare’s genius—Eliot is especially—the authors often identified with Shakespeare not in his mastery but in his vulnerability. At the same time, Corcoran is remarkably attuned to the nuances of borrowings, about modes and theories of allusion and quotation, and their consequence. About Eliot’s echo of Ophelia’s famous lines in The Waste Land beginning “Good night ladies,” Corcoran notes, “this has undeniable, even exquisite pathos, as Eliot makes a melancholy poetry out of basic means. However, this is exclusively a pathos of discrepancy.…It cares about effect more than is consistent with true regard for Ophelia’s plight, such as William Empson, for instance, displays when he feels for ‘this poor Ophelia, in the exhaustion of her wreckage’” (95). To which one can only agree.Corcoran divides his discussion of each poet into a chapter on the Shakespeare criticism followed by a chapter on the poetry, which makes good structural sense and allows for a few surprises. Yeats, we’re reminded, wrote only one “full-length critical essay on Shakespeare, the slyly revisionist ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’” (27). But examining its central juxtaposition of Richard II, a “vessel of porcelain,” versus Henry Bolingbroke, a “vessel of clay,” the one possessing “a strain of ‘lyrical fantasy,’” the other a “‘resounding rhetoric’” (31), takes Corcoran a long way into both nationalist and family politics and poetics and ultimately leads to the necessary analysis of “tragic gaity,” the subject of Yeats’s great late poem “Lapis Lazuli.” (Corcoran typically concludes a section with an exemplary reading that ties both chapters together.) Perhaps more surprising still, “Eliot’s entire critical oeuvre contains only two full-length essays on Shakespeare: ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ and ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’” (64). There is more to the criticism, of course; however it is liberating, indeed exhilarating, to reread Eliot, or rather Corcoran on Eliot, without hearing (yet again) the ponderous drumbeat over Eliot’s place in the institutionalization of criticism in the academy but to be pointed, instead, to the ramification of the criticism for understanding Eliot’s Shakespearean (or “Shakespeherian”) poetry. Again, Corcoran saves one of the best interpretative moments for the last: Eliot’s mysterious little poem “Marina.”One of the oddities that receives little direct comment is how differently whacky Shakespeare could become in the hands of Auden and Hughes, as the twentieth century wore on. I do not know if this is a distinguishable feature of the century’s aging, but Shakespeare provoked Auden into making some of his strangest statements, many deliberately outrageous, some less so, or less easy to determine (“It is a commonplace that Shakespeare’s characters are all rather like each other at emotional climaxes” [177]. Really?) Along with his fabled preference for Falstaff over Hal, later Auden also revealed a special penchant for other marginalized Shakespeare figures such as Autolycus in “Forty Years On,” as Corcoran notes—a kind of poetic alter ego (159). I am not quite sure what to make of this connection, or of The Sea and the Mirror (1944). Although a recognized masterpiece by some, indeed inspiring an excellent critical edition by Arthur Kirsch (2003), I don’t always find the commentary on Auden’s commentary on Shakespeare’s play to the point. But that would be to miss the point, I suppose, in a work that is decidedly metapoetic and after the fact. To be sure, there is a kind of ironic genius at work in having Caliban sound like Henry James for pages on end, and there is further wit in having the critical prose (intentionally?) mimicking and explaining this artful extravaganza, but I still find the work exceedingly strange. Corcoran recognizes as much and attributes its effects to Auden acting out a competition with Shakespeare, in which he (Auden) is the bad boy, Antonio. But this explanation takes us only so far—back into the work again, in a reflexive gesture that writers of “Afterlives” can find too often irresistible.Perhaps another way of speaking to this concern—and it’s a concern that a book as fine as this prompts—involves the question of return. To what degree does Shakespeare figure into the making of an author’s best poems? We’re far enough away from Yeats and Eliot to nod with some degree of confidence, although Eliot’s “Coriolan” poems certainly raise some questions (Corcoran has interesting things to say about their “ferocious intertextual complexity” [104]). But the case of Auden (and perhaps more so of Hughes) is still up in the air. I was glad to be reminded of Hamlet as a possible source for the reference to “the guts of the living” from “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” but turning to some of Auden’s other great poems—such as “Musée des Beaux Arts,” “In Praise of Limestone,” or “The Shield of Achilles”—I wonder, do we see signs of Shakespeare’s influence—however construed—at work? Or are their excellences arrived at by different means altogether? Maybe we’re witnessing Shakespeare’s withdrawal, his distancing as a source of inspiration, into what Peter Robinson has called “loose ends”?1Shakespeare and the Modern Poet is too concentrated and interpretively supple to be used as a map or index of twentieth-century interest in the Bard’s writings. Shakespeare’s poems, oddly, rarely figure in this book about poetic inheritance (Hughes is the major exception, followed by Eliot, then Auden). Yeats was drawn to the Histories, but also to a few of the Tragedies; Eliot, to the Tragedies, the Roman Plays, The Tempest, and Pericles; Auden and Hughes, to The Tempest, the latter in part through Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (1965) but also because he shared with Yeats a mythic view of the poet. Corcoran wearies, as well he might, of Poet Laureate Hughes, but there is also a sense with the later Hughes of Birthday Letters (1998) that for all his breadth of interest in Shakespeare, the game is being played out on a narrow field, a battleground of sorts with the ghost of Sylvia.Book dust jackets, soon stripped and lost, are best remembered by their authors. Corcoran’s is a good one: Carel Weight’s fascinating Hamlet (1962). A rather youthful-looking grave digger prepares to hand over a skull to another youth, presumably Hamlet, with another youth in the background watching. One of the glosses on the Internet, supplied (I think) by the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Lancashire, where the picture hangs, is “fear and confusion are everywhere.” That is not a reading of the painting one would come to through a reckoning of this very fine book. Notes 1See Peter Robinson, “Shakespeare’s Loose Ends and the Contemporary Poet,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 599–617. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 1August 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675960 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot