WRB—Jan. 25, 2025

“DO NOT PUT IN COMMAS”

Opened emails from the WRB are sweet, but those unopened are sweeter.

Links:

Reviews:

• In The New Criterion, Paul Dean reviews a book about Shakespeare’s tragedies (Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, by Rhodri Lewis, 2024) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 5, 2024.]:

  If Shakespeare had no moral code to recommend, neither was he endorsing a specific philosophical or religious position. Writing (we tend to assume) as a Christian, in a Christian country, he makes use of Christianity for dramatic purposes, but he is not a proselytizer. Nor, again, does he have an all-encompassing theory of tragedy; the sheer variety of his tragedies is enough to prove that. Lewis labels him a skeptic rather than a relativist, “one who inclines to the view that all beliefs are equally false, not equally true.” I would prefer to say he believed that all beliefs are equally open to question. Lewis further says, “tragedy as he sees it is not a conduit for another order of truth, but an emancipation from the dead hands of philosophy and theology.” But the condition in which Lewis insists the tragic characters find themselves is hardly an “emancipation,” only a new kind of error. There is no room for Aristotelian anagnorisis in Lewis’ reading: Shakespeare’s protagonists die as baffled and ignorant as they have lived. It is not just that they have failed to make sense of the world; it is that the world has no sense to be made of it. At times, Lewis’ Shakespeare almost sounds like an existentialist. Somewhat incongruously, he adds, “Shakespeare makes the case . . . for tragedy as the best and perhaps the only medium through which one might discern what it is to be human.” “The only medium”? What of the comedies and late romances, which offer a very different picture of “what it is to be human”?

  [There’s a similar bafflement motivated by an ignorance of the world in the conclusion of some of Shakespeare’s late romances, as in The Tempest:

  . . . I perceive these lords

  At this encounter do so much admire

  That they devour their reason, and scarce think

  Their eyes do offices of truth, their words

  Are natural breath.—But howsoe’er you have

  Been justled from your senses, know for certain

  That I am Prospero . . .

  Or Leontes in The Winter’s Tale:

  Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent,

  As I by thine a wife. This is a match,

  And made between ’s by vows. Thou hast found mine—

  But how is to be questioned, for I saw her,

  As I thought, dead, and have in vain said many

  A prayer upon her grave. . . .

  But in these cases the world makes no sense because it is better than the characters expected. —Steve]

• In the TLS, Stephen Romer reviews a new collection of T. S. Eliot’s prose (T. S. Eliot: The Collected Prose, in four volumes, 2024):

  Taking the critical prose as a whole, if we seek for constants in his thought, or for things of permanent value, to use a favourite phrase, what might we find? Brilliant insights, to be sure; a genius for the apt quotation; forensic analysis of particular examples. In short, Eliot demonstrates literary discrimination of the first order, carried out over an immense range. But there is another vital and engaging constant: unlike other minds, Eliot never in fact lays down exclusive prescriptions about what poetry is or ought to be. What he does, mostly, is apophatic, so when speaking generally he tends to define the art by what is it not. Beyond the celebrated formulations of the early essays (“objective correlative,” “to form a new compound,” “a continual extinction of personality,” “the historical sense”), he insists until the end on poetry’s rarity, its mysteriousness, on its beginnings as rhythm, or as an inchoate mass, containing a “great number and variety of elements which can be combined into new and important compounds” and of which, taken together, “there is something to be said.” Vitally, he foregrounds, when discussing the genesis of a poem, the difficulty of expressing, combined with the absolute necessity of doing so, and the pressure brought to bear upon language thereby.

  [We linked to an earlier review in WRB—Nov. 2, 2024. Cf. my notes on Eliot’s introduction to Valéry’s The Art of Poetry in WRB—Dec. 14, 2024. —Steve]

• In Commonweal, Sharon Mesmer reviews the first translation by a woman of St. Teresa of Ávila’s poetry (Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, translated by Dana Delibovi, 2024):

  There is an amusing hagiographic account of the saint getting caught in a downpour—or a muddy river, depending on the teller—and complaining to God about her misfortune. God answers, “But this is how I treat all my friends,” to which his faithful but exasperated interlocutor claps back, “That’s why you have so few.”

  I asked Delibovi if that sprightly, no-nonsense quality might be the correct prism through which to read and understand Teresa’s poetry, rather than the moonlit mists of transcendent sensuality. “I cautiously suggest that Teresa has something to teach us about how our sexuality sublimates into our spirituality,” she answered. “Not in a reductionist analysis that spirituality is ‘really just’ sexuality, but in the sense that, as life goes on, the impulse of love (eros) may turn more and more toward love of the divine.”

  [Ignore for a moment whether a misty night with only the illumination of the moon is an ideal environment for looking at anything—although I suppose words may fail in the face of transcendent sensuality—and admire the fact that, just like every generation thinks it invented sex, every generation thinks it invented the Symposium. —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• My thoughts on a book about readers of Paradise Lost through history

• I recommend George Sale’s 1734 translation of the Qur’an

• Hannah on teenage angst in the natural world of Emily Dickinson

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below. And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you; I appreciate it. —Steve]