SHAKESPEARE AND THE HORSE WITH WINGS
419
having a meal. But the Shakespearean canon, the law of excess, is
that same law that brought about all discoveries, all initiations, all
unprecedented events, all innovations. Somewhere a man was being
greedy for knowledge or understanding or accomplishment. The rodo–
montade of Shakespeare is in fact a tremendous greed for language,
and though this rodomontade often sounds like bad poetry-and often
is bad poetry-still, sometimes, it seizes upon things that were never
said before. It is this audacity, this passion for excess, that produces
such a line as:
Never, never, never, never, never.
Personally I have never been on the side of the angelic perfec–
tionists. I believe that perfect poetry is no more possible than per–
fect people. And I believe that if you have got to make mistakes you
might as well make great mistakes, because these will at least show
other people what not to do. But such a philosophy of error is not,
in
truth, entirely negative. From some great errors truths of a mag–
nificent magnitude have emerged. When Christopher Columbus made
his mistake, and found America instead of India, it was an error of
Shakespearean proportions. When Shakespeare put down the pen
and died he had committed a hundred and one mistakes of excess
and commission, but he had also discovered the English language.
This could only have been done by a man who was not afraid to
make gigantic experiments and therefore gigantic mistakes. I have
no sympathy with those critics who explain that he could not have
written this play or that, they are so bad. This is as absurd as to
complain that Columbus did not discover America on each of his
voyages.
And in so far as the English language, like any other living
organism, evolves and changes, so the duty devolves upon the poet
to explore, to investigate, to colonize these developments. For in the
hands of the poet rests the responsibility of preserving the mysterious
communication between human beings. We should all find it a lot
harder to do so if William Shakespeare had never been. And I
would wish to make it clear that I mean a
communication
between
human beings, not principally an understanding. It was Eliot who
wrote that a poem can communicate before it is understood. For all
poems, finally, are about the same thing: they glorify the com–
munion of creatures. In the democracy of the poem the cat can
