Shakespeare and the modern poet

SHAKESPEARE AND THE MODERN POETShakespeare 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

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

São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb 2 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

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no reproduction of any part may take place without the written

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9 Survivor of cease: Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath in Ted

v

Friends and colleagues have very generously read and commented onsections of this book and some have helped it along in other ways I amextremely grateful for the advice and encouragement I received I want tothank Patrick Crotty, Michael Davies, Paul Driver, Warwick Gould, DavidHopkins, John Kerrigan, Willy Maley, Andrew Murphy, BernardO’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 ofLiverpool for a semester of research leave and to the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council for a research leave award Long may it continue tosupport individual research in the Arts and Humanities The Department

of English in the University of Bristol invited me to lecture at a conference

extremely helpful; and I am especially grateful to John Lyon for raisingthe name of Patrick Cruttwell and for very kindly giving me a copy of TheShakespearean Moment

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i n f l u e n c eThe most influential modern critic to study poetic interrelationships isHarold Bloom in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and several ofits successors Bloom’s theories of influence were developed while he was

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,

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 do not borrow, they override.1

Rewritten with energetic conviction and terminological brio, this is tially the view of The Anxiety of Influence too, in which poetic interrelation-ships are read as a species of neo-Freudian, Oedipal melancholy, a version of

and regards literary history from Homer to Shakespeare as a form of

1 Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p 3.

2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p 95.

1

preface in which he explains that in thefirst he had deliberately hidden the

home again, on better judgement making’ Used by Bloom as ‘an allegory ofany writer’s … relation to tradition’, the word therefore puts Shakespeare atthe origin of influential anxiety; and the new preface introduces a furthermemorable category to Bloom’s impressive arsenal by denominating ‘the

between Shakespeare and Marlowe, about which he has arresting things

to say He now plays down the Freudianism of the original theory and, indescribing the way Shakespeare took a very long time to overcome Marlowe,

he in effect – if not in theory – reinscribes in the relationship betweenwriters 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 fromindulging any sentimentality about writerly interaction; and it makes a greatdeal of sense in relation to particular poets and poems But, as the preface toBloom’s second edition, now openly under the sway of Shakespeare, seemsalmost on the verge of admitting, it does not tell the whole story Neither

in her readings of Bakhtin, gave the term currency, intertextuality has to do

become, in fact, with its more casual usage that she began to employ instead

common and persistent (mis)use in contemporary literary criticism.Although it is far too late to sabotage that now, the takeover has meant

outmoded and even reactionary

signal a larger and more diffused relationship between texts than ‘allusion’ isliable 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 WalterBenjamin and, after him, Marjorie Garber I also believe, pace Harold

3 The Anxiety of Influence (2nd edn, 1997), p xi.

4 Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1974), repr Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp 89–136, p 111.

Bloom, that relationships between writers and texts can be– indeed, cry out

often the case too when poets writing in English take cognisance of that poetwho must seem in all sorts of ways the most anxiety-inducing of all, WilliamShakespeare Belatedness is certainly sometimes an affliction: and in whatfollows I describe circumstances in which some form of suffering obtains.But to be an heir can also be a consolation Corroboration may happen as

figure the relationship, which suggests that the earlier writer is being laid

The relationship between modern poets and Shakespeare can be ing or sterilising; it can involve the sharing of humane inquiry or representthe 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 themany things it can be, and in the many things it makes possible, amongthem some of the greatest poems of our modernity and some of the mostarresting literary-critical prose In the relationships I describe in this bookpoets encountering Shakespeare are also profoundly encountering them-selves and, occasionally, one another; and in this process too Shakespeare

t h e f i r s t m o d e r nThere is one sense in which poets are manifestly responsible for making

criticism of the poet William Empson, which was influenced by the poetRobert Graves In his preface to the second edition of Seven Types of

A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) by Graves and Laura Riding, which

A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling’ The originality of

an element of his occasionally attractive but often cloying faux-naiveté

5 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity ( 1930; 2nd edn, 1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p 14.

‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, and an edited version by Arthur

meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations ofwords and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic crossword puzzlewhich can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being

Riding and Graves in fact carefully discriminate between difficulties of

more difficult than Mr cummings in thought, though his poems have afamiliar look on the page: Mr cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar

to him what is common to everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the

cummings was self-consciously deviating from conventional norms whereasShakespeare had none to deviate from It is plain, then, that in this survey of

‘modernist’ poetry the comparison is made polemically A method of ing appropriate to a modern(ist) poet is also appropriate to Shakespeare.Therefore what may initially look bizarre and appear unfathomable inmodernist poems will come, with closer scrutiny, to seem justified as the

modern(ist)

That a Shakespearean sonnet may be read as a furiously dynamic word puzzle clearly registered strongly with Empson; and Shakespeare is

‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’ Shakespeare figures centrallyagain in this book’s successors, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and The

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.’

allu-sion, in fact, could be more weighty with reverence for a parent in age, moresubdued to pietas? But Empson’s poetry nowhere engages with Shakespearemore fully than in the way of passing allusion, and neither does that ofRobert Graves What Empson says of Shakespeare in his criticism, on the

citing it in what follows, and sometimes too as humane counterbalance toinsensitivity, 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

and intricate ways English poetry of the First World War is complicatedlyconcerned with Shakespeare In Edward Thomas Shakespeare in wartime

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

inherited from Shakespeare but transmuted to present purpose, obviatesthe need for the poet to do likewise more directly This owl, Shakespeareanand not Shakespearean, becomes the means by which Edward Thomasboth gives weight to, and avoids being weighed down by, the expectationthat poets in wartime should speak for others, should take on representativestatus

‘Lob’, a lengthy poem in rhyming couplets written in April 1915, matches

bring’ with a figure conjured from the past by the poem itself, one brieflyencountered, recalled, and never found again, who may be the same one

was free’ and who is ‘English as this gate, these flowers, this mire’ This

figure is named multifariously during the poem: he is ‘my ancient’, by-the-fire’, ‘Lob’, ‘tall Tom’, ‘Hob’ and ‘our Jack’ ‘Jack’ is also Falstaff’s

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’sLabour’s Lost song with one to the figure identified by Mistress Page inThe Merry Wives of Windsor, where the legend of Herne the Hunterbecomes her means of taunting Falstaff

The poem makes other allusions to Shakespeare too In a poem muchgiven to naming, notably of English places themselves, Lob is the namer of

poem, the squire’s son himself metamorphoses into yet another tion of the poem’s ‘ancient’, uttering a lengthy list of further names for thefigure These include Jack Cade, the leader of the Kent peasants’ revolt of

representa-1450 which Shakespeare dramatises in one of the most memorable episodes

of Henry VI

lords of No Man’s Land, good Lob’; and this passage of ‘Lob’ has something

of the defiant assertiveness of traditional identification which also inheres inthe passage known as Dai’s Boast in David Jones’s In Parenthesis, where the

strongly suggests that the idea itself may not lord it over No Man’s Land

anywhere.’ The loving conjuration of an ‘it’ in ‘Lob’, partly by means ofhighly charged Shakespearean allusion, makes the poet himself an archae-ologist of the ancient Wiltshire ground, retrieving an enduring spirit from

its depths However, as the squire’s son ‘disappear[s] / In hazel and thorntangled with old-man’s-beard’ at the poem’s conclusion, the ideal seems to

‘an empty thingless name’, and the footpath identified and opened at thepoem’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

tense apposition with Henry V In one of its sometimes lengthy footnotes

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

Stay’, after a stage direction at the end of act 3 scene 1 of the play and apetition which Nym makes to Bardolph at the opening of the following

part, I have not a case of lives.’8

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 ofmilitary heroism then and some form of contemporary military compulsion

or stoical endurance now In fact, In Parenthesis is set in the early phase ofthe war because Jones, controversially, sees continuities rather than discrep-ancies in traditions of war: he is fully aware that any later phase would not beamenable to such treatment Henry V, however, is not a play only aboutmilitary heroism It is a play about military terror too; and this is what the

frightened to go The allusions made by In Parenthesis to Henry V ignore the

common soldier In particular, several references are made to Fluellen’s

8 All quotations from Shakespeare in this book which are not derived from the texts I am writing about are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed G Blakemore Evans et al (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997).

‘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

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.

their origins The rite for Lewis, the Welshman, joins together Welsh mythand 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.

raised into upper case as a significant element of ritual benediction In InParenthesis, therefore, it is as though Fluellen and what he represents are beingrepositioned from the periphery to the centre of the Shakespearean text

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

thereby also transform the play’s balance between the serious and the comic

In an argument too complex to rehearse here, Barnard persuasively reasonsthat this points towards failures in the structure of Henry V, to do with boththe absence of Falstaff and the strain involved in writing a national epic Hebelieves that this may intimate something which can also be unearthed frominconsistencies in the Folio version of the play’s text: that we may sense the

‘shadowy outline of another Henry V which would have been of the same

figu-ration of Shakespeare in which one of his best-known plays is newlyscrutinised, and the moral implications of its thematic and structuralpatterns reorganised, in the light of catastrophic twentieth-century military9

John Barnard, ‘The Murder of Falstaff, David Jones, and the “Disciplines of War”’, in René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (eds.), Evidence in Literary Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p 25.

experience This produces a critical, even deconstructive reading which is

counter-reading which then becomes newly and differentiatingly tive, producing the responsively creative thing which is In Parenthesis itself

genera-s h a k e genera-s p e a r e i n a m e r i c aShakespeare takes many shapes in modern American poetry, including his

Zukofsky and an engagingly experimental long poem by H D., the

accompanied in a second volume by an operatic setting of Pericles byZukofsky’s wife, Celia Parts of the book are redistributed in the text ofZukofsky’s huge poem almost lifelong in its composition, ‘A’ Much taken

up with music and philosophy, Bottom: On Shakespeare is in part aneccentric anthology and is remote indeed from any orthodox critical study

of Shakespeare Its decision to lay out a poetics and a theory of knowledgeunder 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

on Shakespeare’s gravestone) is followed by a relatively short prose piece

Woolf’s Orlando, to which it may be indebted It parallels a memory of

H D.’s visit to Stratford on Shakespeare Day, 23 April, in 1945 with aninquiry into the circumstances and fate of Claribel, Alonso’s daughter fromwhose wedding the shipwrecked victims of The Tempest have been return-ing This is in turn paralleled with the journey of the ship the Sea-Adventure

to the Bahamas, an account of which is one of Shakespeare’s sources forthe play

H D.’s poem celebrates Shakespeare, certainly, but also engages in a kind

of proto-deconstructive intervention in which the character Claribel andvarious possibilities occluded in Shakespeare are further probed and inves-tigated; and this is a matter of almost obsessive vocational urgency:

Read through again, Dramatis Personae;

She is not there at all, but Claribel,

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

I stooped just now to gather from the sand.

is brought to a kind of visibility and audibility in H D.’s configuration ofvarious circumstances and identities for her Claribel imagines herself

voice calling Shakespeare just before his death, even though Ariel’s mighthave seemed the more obvious one to do so; and she may have been anurse to the wounded in wartime Venice So that this poem, written at theend of the war, is very much a woman’s wartime poem too This Venetian

Clare’ – into an active agent of benevolence, that is, rather than a

conclusion to H D.’s poem and not an entirely successful one By AvonRiver suddenly lapses from the intensity of its Shakespearean concentra-tion into what must be a matter of more private psychological andemotional moment Nevertheless, By Avon River is a notable contribution

to modern poetic reinventions of Shakespeare It engages in the activity of

remembering him differently’ This combination of mnemonic deference

of Shakespeare

spent a great deal of his life on the study of Shakespeare and, although theonly Shakespeare criticism he published during the course of it was the essay

‘Shakespeare at Thirty’, which conceives a Shakespeare ‘highlone in

collected by John Haffenden as the large volume Berryman’s Shakespeare

Lear, on which he worked extensively for many years; and he envisagedother Shakespeare studies too, including a critical biography

Almost everything we now have of Berryman on Shakespeare is ofinterest, but an observation in an essay on Robert Lowell is exceptionally

so in attempting, self-interestedly, to make Shakespeare an honorary

that poetry is composed by actual human beings, and tracts of it are very

closely about them When Shakespeare wrote,“Two loves I have,” reader,

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 isforceful and unforgettable, and embedded in it is a strong reaction against

T S Eliot’s theories of poetic impersonality which he had once espousedbut 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 sonnetsmay be read as autobiographical at all; and, more insidiously perhaps, theyimply that genuine poetry must always be forcefully truth-telling This maycontain a truth, although certainly not the whole truth, about the kind ofpoetry Berryman was himself trying to write, but it is a profound untruthabout many kinds of English poetry and poetics The truest poetry is alsothe 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

although not, in my view, Berrryman’s own – as in fact hurtfully emptive of the poet’s own experience and feelings, or, more damagingly, of

this sonnet and the demand it makes of the reader

Given his vast interest and knowledge, it is remarkable how littleimprint of Shakespeare there is on Berryman’s own poetry He says so

asked me why it was that all my Shakespearean study had never showed

up anywhere in my poetry, and I couldn’t answer the question … I seem

to have been sort of untouched by Shakespeare, although I have had him

‘bitter Henry, full of the death of love, / Cawdor-uneasy, disambitious,mourning / The whole implausible necessary thing’ Henry reading

10 John Berryman, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p 316.

11 ‘The Art of Poetry, no 16’, The Paris Review, 53 (1972), p 6.

nonce word for what Macbeth could never be, since ambition is the verything that makes him what he is Berryman’s other coinage, ‘Cawdor-uneasy’, itself almost Shakespearean in its compound, works, precisely, tocompound the evaporation of identity involved in the death of love,which is made to seem by the allusion terrifyingly disarming Hamlet ispresent at the origin of the long catalogue of pain and rebuke that is song168: ‘and God has many other surprises, like / when the man you fear

problem and catastrophe, which may have been Berryman’s own too,initiate a series in this song which leaves Henry, for once, speechless in hisabjection, capable only of abandoning his theme and turning to thefollowing song, and perhaps delaying, in this, his confrontation withthe truly terrifying thing, just as Hamlet procrastinates in his revenge

many of the Dream Songs?

Further than this, however, Shakespeare is undoubtedly a profoundinfluence on Berryman’s later poetic style, on his distinctive idiolect withits electric instabilities, edgy approximations and accommodations of dic-tion, register and tone, its headlong verbal opportunism To demonstratethis in any less impressionistic way, however, would be beyond my com-petence John Haffenden says in his introduction to Berryman’s Shakespeare

Lear’s speeches in his madness, on Berryman’s language and style is found but subterranean, hardly to be unearthed by any of the recognisableforms of literary-critical analysis

pro-Robert Lowell’s career as a ‘confessional’ poet has been read in some of itsaspects as a kind of competition with Berryman This is not very accurate orinteresting; but it is interesting that Lowell does not make much use of

12 John Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p xxxiv.

makes reference to Twelfth Night It does so in that way Lowell’s allusionssometimes have of turning what initially seem almost wildly unlikelyconnections suddenly into startled appropriateness by reconfiguring the

that Lowell’s nickname, Cal, was drawn from Caligula (although also, it

which suggests a double kind of collusiveness between poet and historicaladdressee

The poem then evokes the hideousness of Caligula’s body as an implicitimage for the hideousness of the body politic under his rule It does so inwhat is itself a hideous inversion or perversion of the Renaissance rhetoricaltrope of the blazon In Twelfth Night Olivia parodies and pillories thismasculine poetic conceit, by which the female body is anatomised and

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 soforth’ Lowell’s poem partly feminises Caligula, imagining him rouged, in away appropriate to the subject of a blazon The allusion to Twelfth Nighthomes in, horribly, on the neck, in a couplet whose identical rhyme sticksexclamatorily in its own gullet, as Lowell remembers and yokes togetherboth Olivia’s neck and Caligula’s most famous remark Caligula sootheshimself to sleep by itemising parts of his body, and Lowell writes, out of areconfiguring perversion of energies latent in Shakespearean comedy, apoetry of repulsion and disgust:

Item: your body hairy, badly made,

head hairless, smoother than your marble head;

Item: eyes hollow, hollow temples, red

cheeks rough with rouge, legs spindly, hands that leave

a clammy snail’s trail on your soggy sleeve …

a hand no hand will hold … nose thin, thin neck –

you wish the Romans had a single neck!

the foreknowledge of his posthumous literary representation, perhaps with

an implicit suggestion that this is a construction of Tudor propaganda, assome historians have thought Lowell’s metre, which sometimes deterio-rates almost to prose in the sequence, here realises a richly expressive

possibility when the innocuous definite article in the penultimate line ismade 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.

ruminating on Shakespeare’s king Lowell recognises Coleridge’s ‘kinship’

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

‘negroes in 1800 London’

Lowell displays an awareness here of the way the political moment, in thiscase the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, puts its pressure onColeridge’s Shakespeare criticism There is presumably self-recognition oreven self-justification in this, since the sequence History (developed from

suggests, a stubborn refusal to separate or sieve out the aesthetic from the

himself’ If failure is to be risked in the huge enterprise represented by Lowell’sHistory, which is made out of dedicated, even obsessive, rewriting as well aswriting, then Lowell, taking on the risk, may here be recognising himself inColeridge as Coleridge recognised himself in Shakespeare’s Richard

Of other modern American poetic engagements with Shakespeare, one ofthe most notable is Anthony Hecht’s sequence ‘A Love for Four Voices’ inThe Transparent Man (1980) The poem ingeniously reinvents Hermia,

string quartet written in homage to Haydn The quartet’s four movementsoffer variations on the play’s themes of love, sex, narcissism, mutability,metamorphosis and poetry itself The performance is elaborately formal,even baroquely so; which is appropriate in a tribute to Haydn, inheritor ofthe musical baroque As such, the poem enters into a kind of competition,

or at least conversation, with the formal variations, the Shakespeareanreinvention and the movement between ornate and contemporary-idiomatic registers, of Auden’s ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ It even includes

a passage of prose, albeit one much shorter and simpler than Auden’s

‘Caliban to the Audience’

‘A Love for Four Voices’ is therefore a Shakespearean recension of aShakespearean 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 closinglines 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 ismultiply punning Shakespeare’s Hermia herself is transposed into Hecht/Haydn’s violin; music is transposed into language; A Midsummer Night’s

Voices’; and all of these things are transposed, in the musical sense, by thisnew poem: they are shifted into a new key This is poetry as delightedrepossession and self-possession: but it is also poetry as, very much, belatedsubsequence

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 poemsmaking use of Shakespeare, and notably of Hamlet itself, published bypoets of post-revolutionary Russia and poets from the countries of theWarsaw Pact after the Second World War These poems are, characteri-stically, intensely alert to political resonances in Shakespeare Appearing

the Penguin Modern European Poets series, whose general editor was

A Alvarez), some of these poems became influential on succeeding erations of poets writing in English

gen-Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet’ was written in 1946 and published as the first of the

exclamatory version, all tension and nervous energy, audaciously joinsPasternak’s original to parts of two other Pasternak poems: the ‘Hamlet’poem forms the Lowell poem’s final four verses, with a separated final line.Pasternak conceives of an actor playing Hamlet suffering from stage frightand crosses this with what might be thought that instance of divine stage

poet himself in Stalinist Russia: the man with stage fright who, in Russianstadia at hugely popular readings, can command a vast audience but who, as

a consequence, takes on onerous, undesired obligations and becomesanswerable

The strong sense of fatality in Pasternak’s poem, and the solitude of its

‘soliloquy’ to the original title, are intensified by its resonant, stoical,

traditionally sanctioned common language not exclusively the poet’s own,the line may also represent the lonely, fated poet’s attempt at a kind ofassuagement of his crossed condition by the Russian language itself InLowell’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 onPasternak’s predicament By means of the acknowledgement of a sharedcultural inspiration in Shakespeare, Lowell’s poem also evinces from thisfamous American poet willing to assume public political positions in theUnited States a form of solidarity with one who found such things much

makes possible a kind of piercing colloquy between poets on opposing sidesduring the cold war

they sometimes do so by refiguring poems by T S Eliot The Polish poetZbigniew Herbert’s ‘Elegy of Fortinbras’, published in his volume Study ofthe Object (1961), takes up where Shakespeare leaves off, and Herbert’sFortinbras has a forbiddingly steely resolve in his consciousness of the

compe-tent, assured and ruthless (‘one has to take the city by the neck and shake it abit’), this military and political administrator addresses the dead Hamlet

‘man to man’ His tone – sorrowful, concerned, sympathetic – makes himnot unlikeable He is even enviously captivated by something in the prince:witness in particular the intimate, surreal tenderness with which he per-ceives Hamlet’s hands – which he ‘could never think of without smiling’ –

elegy, even a kind of love poem, and is entirely characteristic generically inits combination of mournfully melancholic lament and sharp self-interest.Prominently taken up, nevertheless, with Hamlet’s many incapacities, itends in a resigned insistence on the eternally unbridgeable difference anddistance between prince and political opportunist:

13 I am using the translation by Czeslaw Milosz, now available in Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956–1998 (New York: Ecco, 2007).

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

therefore, to a form of bleak self-knowledge and self-acceptance The state,

as Fortinbras understands its needs, requires of him a dutiful dedication ofwhich, 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 ration, in Warsaw Pact Poland, of Fortinbras as the representative of politicalpower elegising Hamlet, prince and poet, and acknowledging his owninferiority but then, nevertheless, willingly and stoically getting on withthe job, has shelving ironies within it Out of its Shakespearean occasionthis truly haunting poem makes a parable which ramifies in many directionsstill, but is also notably attuned to the political moment of its compositionand the choices demanded of intellectuals, including poets, then

figu-Not least among its ironies, as a post-war Polish poem, is the fact that itsconcluding lines appear to echo the cadences, the marine imagery and theabsence of orthodox punctuation of the opening lines of T S Eliot’s

English translation very closely follows the rhythmic and structural patterns

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 fewwhom Herbert regards as equal to modernity The way Herbert makesShakespeare of present use, then, by availing himself of Eliot transforming

Hamlet appears several times in the work of the Czech poet Miroslav

Stalinist regime, virtually protoplasmic in his pliability and opportunisticsubservience:

He slinks up the stairs, oozes from the ceiling, floats through the door ready to give evidence,

14 I am grateful for this information to my friend Professor Jerzy Jarniewicz.

prove what is proven, stab with a needle

or pin on an order.15

Ominously, however, this Polonius is also a poet: so we might read him as atruly terrifying combination of Herbert’s Hamlet and Fortinbras He wouldrepresent, then, the warping of imagination and creative intelligence bypolitical demand Holub’s ‘Polonius’ is a poem which harmonises desolately

possibility that a love poem may be contorted into a political eulogy under

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

makes prominent and indubitable allusion to Eliot, in this case to The WasteLand, the poem conceives of Hamlet’s loss of his tooth as the inception of

any more’ and ‘we’re on our way, Hamlet’ Both suggest what seems an

only response possible to intolerable personal and political circumstance

No optimism whatever is projected by this implicit crossing of Claudius’sDenmark with Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia All that can be managed is a

moss grows’ The poem does include a defiant address to Hamlet himself(‘one fine day / we’ll damn well prove our salt, / Hamlet’) before it

15 I am using the translations by several hands in Miroslav Holub, Poems Before and After: Collected English Translations (1990; expanded edn, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2006).

burden of loss, have sounded so bleak Nevertheless, it is striking that for

reinvented as the possibility, however remote, of an alternative to politicalpragmatism and necessity, an alternative to the totalitarian The frailty ofthe conception, however, is inherent in the genres used: elegy is burdenedwith melancholy, and surreal fantasy with the velleity of wish-fulfilment.The Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz has a poem called ‘Conversation withthe Prince’, published in the volume of that title in 1960, which offers in its

that seems to call into question the very art which its mode of allusion wouldappear to acknowledge and even defer to Różewicz’s speaker anticipates the

he weeps … he’s a voice without an echo 16

And the poem’s ‘conversation’ ends with a recognition and identification which are also the measure of an ashamed self-contempt:

self-‘you detect the windbag / behind the arras’

Admirers of Herbert’s astringently ironic, disabused and desolate but still

16 I am using the translations by Adam Czerniawski in Różewicz’s They Came to See a Poet (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1991).

17 See, for instance, Stanislaw Bara ńczak, A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987).

have Such critiques might well seem reinforced by a further poem ofRóżewicz’s which makes use of Shakespeare, ‘Nothing in Prospero’sCloak’, from an again eponymous volume published in 1962 Here Caliban

‘waits’ for whatever revelation Prospero might offer, but Prospero’s ‘magicrobes’ disclose nothing as ‘nothing from loudspeakers / speaks to nothing /about nothing’, where those loudspeakers presumably blare the publicpronouncements and warnings of a totalitarian regime The poem’s con-clusion seems to bring King Lear into the reckoning in a way that completelyoverwhelms The Tempest:

nothing begets nothing nothing brings up nothing nothing awaits nothing nothing threatens nothing condemns nothing pardons

anti-poem? And it is a manifest influence on the formal disintegrations in

commits its sacrilege on what, at the time of the poem’s publication, was

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 Ifthis is the writing degree zero to which Shakespeare is brought in modernpoetry in English translation, then there is sufficient in him to suggest thatthis is not an entirely inappropriate place Eliot, for instance, appreciates

‘Nothing in Prospero’s Cloak’ is the poem of all these Warsaw Pact poemsmost in tune with the recognitions made by the Polish critic Jan Kott’shugely influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1965), which readsShakespeare, as it were, by the searchlights of a police state

s h a k e s p e a r e a n d j o h n s h a d e

18 T S Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; 3rd enlarged edn, 1951), p 126.

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

Poem in Four Cantos’ Nabokov, unlike the post-war poets of the tries of the Warsaw Pact, is profoundly unappreciative of T S Eliot; andthe poem he has Shade write echoes Eliot with depreciatory intent Anexcellent Nabokov critic, Brian Boyd, believes that what we have here is anargument with Eliot’s view of Shakespeare in The Waste Land Nabokovopposes what he understands as Eliot’s ‘pointed sterility’ in the pastiche of

fictional critical edition of his own, which together constitute a remarkablemodern novel, seems a form of interest, obligation, argument, acknowl-edgement and, yes, repudiation which may well be allowed to shadowwhat follows in this book

Pale Fire, a novel of shadows and ghosts and shades, is the only one 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;

The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves

Timon’s contempt for universal thievery but his own vision of an

himself, though, knew a great deal about thievery, since almost all hisplays are rewritings of one kind or another; and it would not do tosentimentalise his generosity, or Nabokov’s own What follows in thisbook is sometimes an account of thievery, of a kind: but, in the relation-ship between Shakespeare and modern poets, vision always remains apossibility too

19 Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton University Press, 1999),

p 245.

20 Ibid., p 246.

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 areothers, including, prominently, D H Lawrence and Thom Gunn I take

Shakespearean character, in my chapter on W H Auden’s criticism below,

third and fourth parts in a way which, when answered in the negative,

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

Shakespearean regeneration, as Lawrence meditates a response to his ownmortality 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 titlederives from Antony and Cleopatra, is taken from Troilus and Cressida andintimates oppositions and contraries often addressed in Gunn’s early books

In addition, as Clive Wilmer has demonstrated in an illuminatingly pathetic piece of literary detective work, Gunn had the best possible reason

sym-to play extensively, as Shakespeare himself does in the Sonnets, on the word,

Gunn had changed his name: the one on his birth certificate is William

anything like the whole story of the relationship proposed by my title were

to be told In what follows in this book, however, I focus on four standing modern poets: W B Yeats, T S Eliot, W H Auden and Ted

allusive of poets, whose creative writing seems itself the most exacting andmost deeply absorptive form of critical reading, and whose criticism accom-panies and implicitly, sometimes explicitly, accounts for his creative proce-dures.22However, while every creator is also a critic, not all creators are what

substantial length In this book I am interested in poets’ prose as well as21

Clive Wilmer, ‘The Self You Choose’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 April 2008, pp 13–15.

22 Selected Essays, p 152.

their poetry, and my rationale for writing about these four poets at length isthat they have all written extensively about Shakespeare and usually bril-

of central, consuming, protean and permanent critical as well as poeticconcern

I am also interested in the ways in which Shakespeare may be

their poetry; and, again, these poets provide ample scope for such a study

to one another through their relation to Shakespeare: and this relationsupplies a constant and developing subtext to the text of the criticalnarrative I have written here It is itself, in my view, a narrative of greatinterest

All four poets were also playwrights, Hughes rather less well known assuch than the others but in fact writing for the theatre intermittently from

think it matters that in this regard too they were creatively as well ascritically preoccupied with Shakespeare; and I occasionally have things tosay about what they say about Shakespeare which have relevance to theirdrama as well as to their poetry

Yeats ’s Shakespeare

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

Joyce, George Bernard Shaw and W B Yeats were all writing, or about towrite, Shakespeare into their own work both critically and creatively; and, invarying degrees, controversially and even subversively This greatest ofEnglish writers was being defined and focused in alternative ways for thenew century by increasingly self-confident writers from across the Irish Sea.Yeats wrote only one full-length critical essay on Shakespeare, the slyly

sometimes striking originality and insight attest to a passionate lifelongengagement Yeats’s creative work has, throughout, its Shakespearean

Shakespeare, even if also drawing on Nietzsche, and realised in poemsoccasionally allusive to him, among them some of the greatest Yeats wrote

whom [the] past is always alive’, and feared that a certain timorousness – he

expression’:

Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to

1

Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), p 231.

2 And now available in W B Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: The Macmillan Press, 1961),

pp 96–110.

27

Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, that everything I love has come

to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.3

times through a single, syntactically unorthodox sentence, mirrors the torturing of Ireland itself in the preceding decades, which witnessed a war ofindependence against England followed by a civil war Yeats, for all his self-doubt, had supremely expressed both in some of his major poems of theperiod, in which he discovers definitive images for a country maimed by

self-‘great hatred, little room’

Yeats’s giving Shakespeare prominence in his anguished inheritance of aviolently self-divided tradition makes Shakespeare’s deeply problematicplace in the Irish literary and cultural imagination almost epigrammaticallymemorable This has distracted attention from the recuperative activitywhich he actually performs on Shakespeare when, aged only twenty-five in

1901, he writes ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ When ‘A General Introduction for

my Work’ wryly and almost shame-facedly confesses that ‘everything I lovehas come to me through English’, he must be thinking partly of the Irishmythological and folk materials which he used in his work but could not

Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory and others The Stratford essay, however,may be read as combatively appropriating Shakespeare in an act of repay-

opportunistic use he makes of Shakespeare as a model for the creation of anIrish national theatre, Philip Edwards says that Yeats makes Shakespeare

after he had co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre, making it clear howexcited he was about his forthcoming trip to Stratford for the Spring festivalwhich had been held there annually by Frank Benson’s company The visitwould provide the opportunity for an essay on Shakespeare which he hadbeen meditating for a while In Stratford, the essay tells us, he spent his daysreading Shakespeare criticism in the library of the Shakespeare Institute and

Stratford itself, its secluded (and quasi-Catholic) medievalism contrastingfavourably with what he considered the vapid theatre world of metropolitan

3 Ibid., p 519.

4 See Nationalist Theatres: Shakespeare and Yeats (Liverpool University Press, 1976), p 16.

London with its‘evil prestige’, that London ‘where’, he had already written

I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore, when a faint misthas hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as if the world mightsuddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a little dust underone’s feet.’ This dreamlike state, conveyed by those almost narcotic repeti-tions of the adjective, is virtually an abstraction of the actual Stratford-upon-Avon and of Shakespeare’s own work into the ‘grey’ world of theCeltic Twilight, particularly since the passage crosses its evocation ofGalway with a faint echo of Prospero’s ‘Our revels now are ended’ speech

manifestly much closer in its imaginative and, as it were, spiritual

mytholo-gising, than it is to modern metropolitan London; which does not, however,prevent his shrewd appreciation elsewhere in the essay of the touristicopportunism of the Stratford burghers

Although dutiful in the library, Yeats is also unhappy there, telling Lady

become And Dowden is about the climax of it I[t] came out of the middle

professor of English at Trinity College Dublin and author of the widely read

cited in the essay too; and the opportunity for which Yeats has been waiting,

on Dowden’s view of Shakespeare and the proposal of his own radicalalternative An essay which begins in an almost sentimentally nostalgicview of a medievalising Stratford sharpens abruptly, as a consequence,into polemic; and Yeats’s Shakespeare is moulded in the image of hiscontemporary romantically nationalist cultural politics

Yeats castigates Dowden’s criticism as a kind in which characters such asCoriolanus, Hamlet, Timon and Richard II are reproved for their behav-iour, so that the plays become exercises in self-correction for audiences and

5 Essays and Introductions, p 171.

6 The Collected Letters of W B Yeats, ed John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol III, p 61.

readers If we suspect that Yeats is unjust to Dowden, the suspicion will notsurvive a reading of his Shakspere, where Shakespeare is indeed characterised

history Shakspere should have built up his moral nature, and have fortified

and not reformation’ Dowden’s kind of criticism is for Yeats the

‘Accusation of Sin’, the capitalisation strongly suggesting that he derivesthe concept as a literary-critical one from the opening of Blake’s ‘The

species of charity, Yeats is here evolving one of the most sympatheticformulations in a body of critical and polemical work which containsnotably, sometimes offensively, unsympathetic ones too

His critique takes on a specifically nationalist colouring when he says that

has failed’; and he scores a palpable hit when, with a glint of malice, heobserves that the mode of Accusation would have stymied not only thecreation of great art but the English imperial project itself, which demands

‘wildness and imagination and eccentricity’ No doubt it is the Hazlitt-likeintimacy of Yeats’s own knowledge of the collusion between poetry andpower, a knowledge frequently apparent in his work of the next thirty years,which here suddenly startles a venomous hauteur into vivid life:

The Accusation of Sin produced its necessary fruit, hatred of all that was abundant, extravagant, exuberant, of all that sets a sail for shipwreck, and flattery of the commonplace emotions and conventional ideals of the mob, the chief Paymaster of accusation.8

a n i r i s h r i c h a r d

In his chapter on the Histories Dowden regards Richard II as a boyishly

7 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: His Mind and Art ( 2nd edn, London: Henry S King and Son, 1876),

p 163 Terence Brown, in Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: Lilliput, 1988), makes some corrective judgements but broadly finds Yeats’s view accurate.

8 Essays and Introductions, p 105 9 Shakespere: His Mind and Art, p 194.

Stratford essay Yeats, with Dowden implicitly in mind, makes Richard, ifnot heroic exactly, nevertheless central to his whole conception of the cycle.

Henry’s ‘vessel of clay’ – possesses a strain of ‘lyrical fantasy’ opposed toHenry’s ‘resounding rhetoric’ This is virtually the opposition which alsoinforms one of Yeats’s best-known subsequent aesthetic formulations: thatout of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel withourselves poetry Out of Yeats’s own quarrel with both Henry and Dowden

he makes a Richard according to his own need and desire; even if, sarily, by means of a highly selective editorial process

responsively brilliant one which reverberates for readers of Yeats’s own

‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ in The Tower (1928):

Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains;

And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains

As though to choose whatever shape it wills And never stoop to a mechanical

Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call 10

commit-ment to a political order very different from that of his early romantic

the self-delightingly self-renewing fountain emblematises for Yeats, as animaginative constant, the principle of extravagance to which his own art ispermanently committed, for all his changes of style, material, address andpolitical belief

Literature’, written in 1902 and collected along with ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’

in Ideas of Good and Evil There he approvingly quotes the extravagantly

10 All quotations from Yeats ’s poems are from The Poems, ed Daniel Albright (1990; Dent: Everyman’s Library, 1992).

pleonastic Samuel Palmer (not otherwise, of course, known as a ‘Celt’):

‘excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to

with Matthew Arnold’s view of the ‘Celtic’ in On the Study of CelticLiterature (1866), insisting that what Arnold calls the ‘Celtic’ is in fact betterconsidered as a more generally diffused persistence of the folkloric inliterature Yeats does so at least in part, presumably, because he well under-stands the recuperative design of Arnold’s appreciativeness, which is devel-oped from racial stereotypes which would keep the Celt, even when

Arnold defines it as ‘expansive, adventurous and gay’ in a way harmonisingcompletely with Yeats’s views in this essay and also illuminating about his

assumes high significance in Yeats’s later poetry and theory, in ways I discussbelow The Yeatsian Richard II set over against the Yeatsian Henry V mightequally well be comprehended by Arnold’s valuing of the ‘Celtic genius,with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining aftermere emotion’ and what he judges to be ‘just the opposite’, ‘the Anglo-

but by whom he is in fact profoundly influenced gives Yeats national(ist)sanction, in his definition of the ‘Celtic’, for both the central opposition of

‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ and the libertarian view of art which he opposes tothe moralism of Dowden

When Yeats says in his letter to Lady Gregory that Dowden’s criticism

‘came out of the middle class movement’, what he means by the phrase atthat stage of his life is the bourgeois unionism of Trinity College, which he

Parnell’ section of his Autobiographies he makes Dowden the representative

with the knowledge that Dowden was, inevitably, hostile to the whole idea

effect, an alternative Arnoldian Celtic, or Irish, Richard II; which has its

11 Essays and Introductions, p 184.

12 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1866; Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1970),

pp 86, 91.

13 W B Yeats, Autobiographies (1955; London: Macmillan, 1980), p 235.

potentially undermining ironies, since in Shakespeare it is Richard’s absence

something that the Yeatsian editorial process simply ignores To say, theless, that for Yeats Henry V is an Irish unionist and Richard II a romanticIrish nationalist would be to caricature an opposition which Yeats’s essayfinesses and complicates: but it would not be an inherent injustice to whatmay be extracted from the essay as its intrinsic ideological opposition.This form of subversive critique has led recent postcolonial criticism totreat Yeats’s reading of the play as precursory of Third World ‘transvalua-tions’ of Shakespeare Jahan Ramazani says that Yeats’s valorising of the

antici-pation of the frequent recuperation of Caliban at the expense of Prospero inAfrican and Caribbean writing (in Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, for

of failure’ in Richard – this is Kiberd’s phrase, however, not Yeats’s – he is

Not completely fanciful, maybe, even if still pretty fanciful That such a linecan be maintained at all, however, draws attention to something that doesgenuinely inhere in Yeats’s revisionism: its early, energetically pursuedproject of cultural decolonisation In addition, the literary nature of the

the Echo’, thinking of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), ‘Did that play of minesend out / Certain men the English shot?’ The question is, in my view,asked with good reason, despite its sceptical treatment in another, morerecent, Irish poem, Paul Muldoon’s ‘7 Middagh St’ Muldoon’s ‘Wystan’ inthat poem quotes Yeats and then offers his brusquely impudent andinsidiously memorable dismissal, as Muldoon quibbles on the antithetical

‘Did that play of mine send out certain men (certain men?)

14 Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (University of Chicago Press, 2001),