SHAKESPEARE AND THE HORSE WITH WINGS
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thaumaturgical gesture by which almost anything, no matter how
seemingly insignificant or inappropriate, can be transfigured into
poetry. He taught me the absolute power of the poetic imagination.
He was the first man I ever saw turn a sow's ear into a singing robe.
No poet writing after him could reasonably evaluate his debt
to William Shakespeare any more than anyone really knows what he
owes to his father. You can draw up lists and enumerate specifica–
tions but the real figure can never be estimated. There is a Japanese
proverb that says: The one that goes first is the master. I am not
going to propose that Shakespeare was the first poet, but there is
no question that he was the first truly great poet in English. You
can say of him what was said of the Emperor Augustus: he found
the English language built of brick and left it built of marble. But
it would be even truer to say that he found the English tongue a
virgin and left her the mother of half the living. So that almost all
that any of his successors could truly say of him is, he was my fore–
bear.
How deeply destiny was in love with him is very clear when you
compare his life and work with the life and work of his irresistible
contemporary Marlowe. To Marlowe have been accorded pretty
nearly all the appurtenances and accolades of the perfect poet: he
was brilliant, vain, dangerous, revolutionary, and he died violently
and soon. He seems, indeed, to look like the prototypical poet him–
self. It is from someone like Marlowe, rather than someone like
Shakespeare, that the traditional conception of the English poet
arises. But what was wanted at this time was the Emperor and not
the Prince.
It
has been impossible for English poetry to be irrespon–
sible since Shakespeare, because he got it once and for all thoroughly
and inextricably involved in the business of human life. He took the
poem down from the bookshelf and out of the study and away from
the dilettantes, and made it look long and hard at people living
their everyday lives. So that it is to him first that we owe the rigorous
luxury of being able to put anything-anything at all-into a poem:
for he put in almost everything himself.
It
has been absurd to speak
of "poetic subjects" since 1616: for by then it was apparent that
all subjects,
in
the hands of the poet proper, were poetic subjects.
Ostensibly, who could have chosen a less poetic subject than that
of a man unable to get rid of his uncle? But this is the subject of
Hamlet.
