SHAKESPEARE AND THE HORSE WITH WINGS
415
all things, even all unlovable things, because he cannot exist
in
the
abstract: he is bound to and by all objects and subjects. This is that
"universality" of Shakespeare's, a love of all created things which,
exercising its force in all directions, cancels itself out and thus leaves
the poet laboring, as I say, in a supreme neutrality. It resembles the
impartiality of those heavenly bodies that turn their faces in all
directions at once. When the poet, aspiring to the superior love of
the mystic, divests himself of his devotion to all created things, then
you get the Prophetic Books of William Blake. They are magnificent,
but they are not poetry. For a metaphysical poem-if the word is used
exactly-is a contradiction in terms. Poems are as thoroughly caught
up in physical things as a junk merchant.
I learned, therefore, from the great Shakespearean poems that
the poet is a mystic who operates downward. He operates downward
upon the world through the agency of the word, perceiving that every
object, enshrining a divine idea, is therefore equally to be loved. And
such love does not need the dogma of the Church : it only needs
victims. All this is heavy going because it is not easy to speak about
poetry and religion without becoming obscure or pretentious, and I
fear I am being both. But, as I have said, it is sometimes necessary,
in
the pursuit of the truth, to go through obscurities and pomposities:
this is another of the things I have learned from him.
Much of Shakespeare is, to me, unsound, turgid and incom–
plete. I have that feeling one gets upon entering a room in which
someone has been searching for a thing they have lost-all kinds of
private possessions lie around in indecent disorder, secrets hang out
of closets, objects of unquestionable value have been thrown aside
in haste and carelessness, and one is overcome with the conviction
that the place has been despoiled of its principal possession-that is,
whatever was being looked for. It was the poetry. He found that.
But when Ben Jonson accused
him
of never blotting a line, he was
talking about more than the ink on the paper. An almost haphazard–
ness prevails over much of his poetry, and it could only have come,
it seems to me, from the hurry to get even more done. But the hap–
hazardness is, really, superficial: it has to do with construction, ex–
pressions, bombast, and so on. This haphazard appearance is not
present if you look at the great overall pattern cif the thirty-nine
plays. For then the design, the natural and providential design, be-
