Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (review)

This is a superbly written, immensely informative, and engaging study of the relationship of four modern poets—Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Hughes—to Shakespeare, about whom all wrote extensively. Although it begins with a genealogy of the theory of influence, tracked from Ellman to Bloom to Kristeva and beyond, it quickly exceeds that parameter, as well as the expanded template proposed by Corcoran himself of corroboration, competition, appropriation, negotiation, and collaboration. It might be more accurate to describe the book as a rendering of four increasingly intense and consuming phases of courtship.

The organization of the book is dryly schematic—Yeats the critic, Yeats the poet, Eliot the critic, and so on, in chronological order—but the combustion of perspectives almost immediately breaks through this neat partitioning. Corcoran provides a thorough archaeology of Shakespearean characters and themes in his subjects’ work: Yeats’s Crazy Jane poems, Eliot’s “Coriolan,” Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror,” and Hughes’s Crow, to name a few. His focus is eclectic and far reaching; given the sheer range of observations, it would be tempting to do no more here than simply list a dozen or two. His citation early on of Empson’s fantastic description of the working of Sonnet 129—“a furiously dynamic crossword puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others” (4)—could almost apply to his own approach.

In the introduction, which includes a brief and incisive examination of modern poets in the United States and Eastern Europe, including Robert Lowell, Edward Thomas, Zbigniew Herbert, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Nabokov, Corcoran displays both a merciful disinclination to codify and systematize and an openness to elusive frequencies of literary transmission. Addressing why John Berryman, a lifelong reader and scholar of Shakespeare, seemingly had so little of him in his poetry, Corcoran points to the “distinctive idiolect, its electric instabilities, edgy approximations, and accommodations of diction, register, and tone, its headlong verbal opportunism” (12) of Berryman’s later works. This flair at describing the operation of language is a vital strength of the book.

One of Corcoran’s central findings is that the four poets, all witnesses to a twentieth century of colossal upheaval, destruction, and discovery, found in Shakespeare a pole star of the avant-garde and enlisted him as a force of liberation from cultural, political, or linguistic constraints—what Corcoran calls an “imaginative constant” (31). In Hughes’s words, “‘Shakespeare’s language is not obsolete so much as futuristic: it enjoys a condition of total and yet immediate expressiveness that we hope sooner or later to get back to, or forward to’” (196). Similarly, Corcoran writes that Yeats “cannily establish[es] Shakespeare as a precursor of his own modern, or modernist, experiments in self-revelation and self-concealment” (40). The term Eliot uses is “‘integrity of exploration’” (76). In effect, what the four poets are working toward, through, or with Shakespeare— Auden somewhat less so—is the restoration of a state of linguistic revolution. Ultimately, this is Corcoran’s response to the question of Shakespeare’s “exceptionalism” (66, passim). Much to his credit, he feels no need to advance a definitive answer.

Yeats’s use of Shakespeare may be the most personal and the most contradictory. He treated Shakespeare both as an emissary from the period in which, Yeats thought, “human personality achieved its supreme expression,” and as an ally against a base modernity that he loathed and a London he derided as the place where “‘all the intellectual traditions gather to die’” (37, 29). He made Shakespeare an honorary Celt in an “early, energetically pursued project of literary decolonisation” (33).

Although the book’s subject is Shakespeare and modern poets, the question arises repeatedly whether his legacy might be found more in poetry than in the theater that was arguably its primary vessel and forge. Corcoran does not take this matter on directly and mentions, curiously, that while all four of his...