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Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays cover

Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays

Chapter 27: SUMMARY
By C. H. Herford
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About This Book

A collection of critical essays examines how a poet’s imaginative work is affected by concurrent spiritual and ideological energies—philosophy, religion, patriotism, politics, and love—and how those forces compel compromises that reshape poetic form and ambition. The author probes a major dramatist’s characteristic preference for normality in portrayals of love and marriage, traces the effects of grand intellectual experiences on other poets’ scale and outlook, considers didactic impulses in philosophical verse, and asks how poetic creation in turn modifies belief and conviction.

V
IS THERE A POETIC VIEW OF THE WORLD?

SUMMARY

View of the World, or ‘World-view,’ defined. Distinction of religious and philosophical World-views. The present essay attempts to define and describe a poetic World-view.—I. Character of poetic experience. Types of belief about Man and Nature to which it predisposes. Though rarely detached from religious or philosophical presumptions, it habitually modifies them, and the method here proposed is to study, in some salient examples, the character and direction of these modifications (p. 150).—II. (i) Modifications of religious World-views by the poetic inspirations of Personality and Love. Homer. Æschylus. Dante (p. 156).—III. (ii) Modifications of philosophical World-views: (a) Materialistic schools. Epicureanism and Lucretius. Poets of Pessimism: Leopardi (p. 169).—IV. (b) ‘Objective idealisms.’ Stoic pantheism and Vergil. Wordsworth. Shelley. Philosophic doctrine of ‘Nature’ in Wordsworth, and in Goethe. Spinoza and Goethe (p. 184).—V. (c) ‘Subjective idealisms.’ ‘Mind’ in the philosophers and in the poets of the age of Wordsworth. The poets subordinate (1) the rational to the emotional and imaginative factors of soul: Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, and (2) moral categories to a good ‘beyond good and evil.’ Of this poetic ethic the most vital constituent is Love; and Love, comprehensively understood, will be an intrinsic element of every World-view won through poetic experience (p. 198).