style is all

In Shakespeare’s later works character has grown unindividual and unreal; drama has become conventional or operatic; the words remain more tremendously, more exquisitely, more thrillingly alive than ever—the excuse and the explanation of the rest.

[...]

At last, it was simply for style that Shakespeare lived; everything else had vanished. He began as a poet, and as a poet he ended.

—Lytton Strachey, introduction to Words and Poetry (The Hogarth Press, 1928) by G H W Rylands

no kink

I hung about town the whole month of June because of the introduction I was writing to my Shakespeare translations. I was terribly afraid to get stuck in the muddle of pseudo-scholarly verbosity which every great centuries-old theme gathers round it and of only adding to this tangled skein a kind of modified kink. Imagine, it did not happen! I succeeded in saying in very simple and comprehensible words a great deal about Shakespeare that I learned when I was translating him, and all this on one printer’s sheet!

—Boris Pasternak, in a letter to S. I Chikovani, 15 March 1946
Letters to Georgian Friends, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seckler & Warburg, 1967)

author of itself

A poem should have the virulent integrity of Coriolanus.

muse of fire

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
   The brightest heaven of invention...

—William Shakespeare, Henry V, "Prologue"

[I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC yesterday.]

lowering the canon

A common ploy of weak critics who are unable to prevail by the force of their arguments: They’ll close their essays by lowering a big gun from the canon, firing off the name of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton,…

more apes

They say if you have an infinite number of chimpanzees with keyboards, one of them will randomly type one of Shakespeare’s poems. For my next poem, it’s that good,
trust me, you’re gonna need a few more apes.

two kinds of poetry

Great writers must find their distinctive voice, and you can hear Robinson's in "Reuben Bright" (1897). He uses simple rhetoric, the emotion compressed in spare language. As the poet Winfield Townley Scott observed in his notebooks, there are basically two kinds of poetry. One is represented by Hart Crane's line "The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise," the other by Robinson's "And he was all alone there when he died." One is a magic gesture of language, the other "a commentary on human life so concentrated as to give off considerable pressure." The greatest poets combine the two, Scott believed: Shakespeare often, Robinson himself now and then.

—Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet's Life (Columbia University Press. © 2007)

cheap gunsel

Certain critics are like cheap gunsels: A guy who when he can’t talk his way out of a sticky situation, reaches too quickly for his 'canon', and just starts blasting away with ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Milton’.