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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and the Modern Poet
  • Robin G. Schulze
Shakespeare and the Modern Poet. Neil Corcoran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. iv + 248. $85.00 (cloth).

In Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, Neil Corcoran sets out to analyze the the ways in which four of the most important poets of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Ted Hughes, made use of the works of William Shakespeare. Throughout each of the book's nine chapters, Corcoran makes acute observations about these poets' various approaches to Shakespeare and his oeuvre. But, ultimately, the organization of this volume makes it extremely difficult to say how Corcoran's litany of modernist encounters with Shakespeare speaks beyond the level of a series of compelling insights. Shakespeare and the Modern Poet lacks a central driving thesis, either at the level of the volume or at the level of each of its chapters, and Corcoran's work here often proves frustratingly descriptive as a result.

The chapter on Eliot's critical approach to Shakespeare provides a case in point. The chapter revolves around the idea that while Eliot's written accounts of Shakespeare's work suggest that he feared the Bard's inevitable influence, he nonetheless found ways to transmute this work into a usable model at various points in his career. The chapter follows the trajectory of Eliot's growing, if grudging, willingness to employ Shakespeare as a tool, as Corcoran puts it, in his own poetic "workshop" (68). Given the way this chapter is organized, however, the development of Eliot's critical vision of Shakespeare is almost impossible to absorb. Corcoran insists on working thematically rather than chronologically and, as a result, his work often seems to devolve into a set of keen observations about Eliot's various comments on Shakespeare rather than an effort to make sense of them. Describing Eliot's criticism of Shakespeare as "sporadic" (64) and "fragmentary" (66), Corcoran hops from a brief account of Eliot's "anthropological" criticism of Shakespeare—in which Eliot tags Shakespeare as a dramatist of ritual who understands, like the savage and the primitive, that tragedy and comedy issue from "a common form" (69)—to Eliot's attempts to approach Shakespeare through an account of his characters and their efforts to dramatize themselves. He then moves on to Eliot's efforts to see Shakespeare's work as a collection of patterns of mood and theme, to Eliot's desire to see Shakespeare's plays as a unified oeuvre that can only be understood as a whole, to Eliot's fascination with Shakespeare's ability to write verse poetry that can carry the subtleties and complexities of prose, and finally to Eliot's obsessive comparisons between Shakespeare and Dante. This vertiginous array concludes with a section that Corcoran simply titles "Three Moments," in which he catalogs what he considers to be the three most "memorable things" that Eliot had to say about Shakespeare. These three moments seem utterly unrelated to all that has come before.

Corcoran's sections do, indeed, add up to an argument of sorts about the development of Eliot's view of Shakespeare but readers need to work very hard to put it together. Ultimately, as I understand it, Corcoran contends that Eliot begins his career in fear of Shakespeare because he is leery of imitating the master of the English language whose expression seems too profoundly personal to handle. The early Eliot, through all his various approaches, reads Shakespeare as violent and disordered—too close to the buried life of the primitive to be of poetic use. As Eliot matures, however, he returns to Shakespeare as a model of pattern and planning. Shakespeare [End Page 484] ultimately becomes for Eliot a master of versification who achieves artistic universality through impersonality. Shakespeare is not present in his characters but they bear his mark unmistakably; only he could have created them. A redaction such as mine is nowhere clearly stated in Shakespeare and the Modern Poet and the lack of argumentative signposts in this chapter is a hallmark of the book as a whole.

Which is not to say that the book is not filled with...

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