Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
McConnell, Frank
The perils of this kind of discontinuous interpretation are seen most clearly when Neuhaus deals with the pope's exhorta- tion to make important changes in estab- lished lifestyles. Since this...
...William A. Sadler, Jr., Christian Century 'X unique combination of historical reflection and social criticism...
...Suzanne Keen his fall, Ecco Press reissues one of the essential books of our time, The Collected Poems of 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz...
...Commonweal BEGINNING WITH MY STREETS Essays and Recollections Czeslaw Milosz translated by Madeline G. Levine Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30, 288 pp...
...Who shall I be for men many gen- erations later...
...Naturally one is more interested in what the condensation omit- ted than in what it chose to synthesize...
...PROVINCES: POEMS 1987-1991 Czeslaw Milosz translated by the poet and Robert Hass The Ecco Press, $19.95, 72 pp...
...The poet Robert Hass has frequently col- laborated with Milosz in translating him- self, most recently in Provinces: Poems 1987-1991...
...From that volume, the poem "The Thistle, the Nettle" demonstrates how superbly these poets make English poetry from Milosz's original: The thistle, the nettle, the burdock, and belladonna Have a future...
...For the Adonis myth, ending in the death and rebirth of the Male, Hughes as- sociates with the dying Catholicism of Shakespeare's England, and the Lucrece myth, ending in the suppression of the life- giving Goddess, he associates with the Protestantism that, a few years later, would end in regicide and Cromwell...
...In Illinois: 312-568-1550 The University of Chicago Press Commonweal 6 November 1992:31 Hughes, again--unlike most academ- ic critics--is a working writer, and the THE POET'S GEOGRAPHY toughness of that role also informs his reading...
...But it is a brilliant"Shakespeare," and it enters into a profligately generous dialogue with the Shakespeare you and I have to find for ourselves...
...The section on pover- ty is mixed...
...and served only by the creative misreadings they're right...
...Stephen Ainley, College of the Holy Cross $12.95 paper At bookstores, or, for MC/VISA orders, call: 1-800-621-2736...
...It's why students, shaking argument of my old mentor and sensei their heads in stunned disbelief, are walk- Harold Bloom, that a"strong" poet is best ing out of English classes in droves...
...Theirs are wastelands And rusty railroad tracks, the sky, silence...
...Milosz's poetry draws our attention to the amnesia of recent history regarding Central Eastern Europe, although most of the poems are invested with a piercing per6 November 1992:33...
...I think here of Maritain' s great descrip- tion of Dante's genius: "innocence and luck...
...Hughes's Shakespeare is finally not yours or mine, nor should it be...
...Given Father Neuhaus' s background, I had also expected more of the biblical section...
...It is in- deed a noble attempt...
...The solution is indeed par- ticipation, but the vastness of the problem on a national and international scale seems to escape the author, because it demands more of capitalism than any form of it, even the "new capitalism," is able to deliver...
...I was not surprised to find that the sentence of John Paul II in #52 on changing the es- tablished lifestyles was omitted...
...James R. Kelly, America THE CII X T A BROKEN _.,,, t American Civil Religion in Time of Trial Second Edition ROBERT N. BELLAI-I In this second edition of his acclaimed book, Bellah presents the summation of his views on the integrity of the religious dimension of American society as distinct from its churches...
...And that because Shakespeare's moment, the mo- ment of the emerging modem conscious- ness, was the perfect moment for the poet's private concerns to coincide with the public obsessions of his and our day...
...Writing of his own translations of Robinson Jeffers in an essay collected in the new volume, Beginning with My Streets, Milosz concludes that "the trans- lator sees a sort of 'empty space' in his own home, in his home of sounds and in- tonations that he has known since child- hood, and desires that it not remain empty...
...As an appendix to the book Father Neuhaus has printed a "condensation" (his word) of Centesimus annus that first appeared in First Things, August-Septem-ber 1991...
...For an interpretation of the treatment of capitalism in Centesimus annus that is more continuous with previous papal teaching and probably more "authoritative," I refer the reader to "//Capitalismo nell'encicli-ca Centesimus annus" in La Civiltgt Cat- tolica (1991, 11,417-430...
...The Shakespearean primal scene, he writes, is "the Tragedy of Divine Love in the fall- en world of the 'Puritan' ego...
...Since this sentence contradicts the thesis of the ever-expand- ing and limitless market that will solve all poverty problems and thus that there is no need for the rich to divest themselves of any of their wealth, Neuhaus states: "As much as we are inclined to be generous, however, honesty requires our saying that the sentence about changing 'established lifestyles' is most likely a vestigial rhetor- ical fragment that somehow wandered into the text and is notable chiefly for its incongruity with the argument that the pope is otherwise making...
...And from Lear to The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, our lad graphed a hopeful (and still unrealized) way of reasserting the van- ishing redemptivism and generosity of the earlier world--a world we are still trying to reenter...
...It is unfortunate, however, that there is no clear exposition of the com- mon good, or of such typically John Paul terms as solidarity...
...The desolate music of the lines defies the "earth without grammar" that the aging poet faces...
...When, after the clamor of tongues, the award goes to silence...
...A collection of essays, interviews, reviews, and address- es, Beginning with My Streets makes a fas- cinating companion to The Collected Poems and to Provinces...
...Born in Lithuania in 1911, educated in Wilno (Vilnius), a city with overlapping Polish and Lithuanian identities, Milosz has writ- ten in Polish while living in France, Poland, and, since 1961, California...
...My own experience of vacant lots and the accidental meadows of the postindustrial landscape, not to mention the prospect of the end of the poet's vocation, is whipped into shape by this rigorous lyric...
...Excellent sections of the book deal with participation and especially with sub- sidiarity...
...THE COLLECTED POEMS 1931-1987 Czeslaw Milosz The Ecco Press, $14.95,511 pp...
...To believe that Pope John Paul II was guilty of throwaway lines that are "vestigial rhetorical frag- ments" takes faith, indeed...
...The first is the the creator...
...THE BARD'S PRIMAL SCENE SHAKESPEAREAND THE GODDESSOFCOM- of a strong critic...
...I was to be redeemed by the gift of arranging words But must be prepared for an earth without a grammar, For the thistle, the nettle, the bur- dock, the belladonna, And a small wind above them, a sleepy cloud, silence...
...The "tragic equation"--a phrase he uses maybe a little too often--may seem too recondite and mystical...
...It is our good fortune to have not only the works that reveal and occupy this space in excellent English versions, but also Milosz's own guide to his personal and intellectual geography...
...The poet reanimates his cousin Oscar Milosz's catalog of weeds, quoted in the epigraph to the poem, making con- tinuity out of arranged words even as he disbelieves in the efficacy of poetry's claim on the future...
...He calls this sen- tence "a throwaway line...
...But Hughes also understands the central paradox and scandal of Shakespeare: that he was the most sublime of poets, and that he was also a popular entertainer with all the canni- ness of Fred Silverman or Don King...
...So the arcane Equation, Hughes keeps in- sisting, is not just the key to the visionary poet's inner search, but also a hell of an effective gimmick for keeping the plots boiling and the customers paying...
...I can't see how anyone, read- ing this book, can read our most un-avoidable poet the same way ever again...
...One of the important reflections on the meaning of the American experience...
...I admire the attempt to put such difficult prose into simple declarative sen- tences without losing the sense...
...He does not regret the decision to write in the language in which he is the best poet, nor should he, for his translators convey his vivid par- ticularity and his range of tones with such success that I must remind myself to think of what I'm missing...
...Frank McConnell Fighting words, those, especially in the current climate--chilly and overcast--of academic criticism, deconstructionist ~l eading Ted Hughes's and/or new historicist, where the aim of D grand, maddening, and reading great stuff (these guys, of course, finally un-put-downable would even blush to use the word "great") book on Shakespeare, I seems to be, mainly, to reduce the great__ kept thinking about two ness to a series of tics and evasions in the propositions that have echoed in my mind service of a Eurocentric, logocentric for years--and feeling that in a funny power structure--and, coincidentally, to way I had to wait for this book to give them exalt the function of the critic over that of their final, radiant sense...
...sation: "There are two kinds of criticism-right and interesting...
...The second is something PLETEBEING one of my first graduate students, all those Ted Hughes years ago at Corneil, dropped in conver- Farrar, Straus & Girou• pp...
...As George Steiner hauntingly said of this most re- markable man, the very words with which we seek to do him honor are his...
...Despite the loss of the Polish sounds, rhythms, formal struc- tures, and idiomatic and cultural reso-nances, Milosz's poetry in translation is the real thing...
...Bellah's argument is thoughtful, personal and lucidly presented, and it comes to a provocative, challenging conclusion...
...And if that is not, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, the function of criticism at the present or indeed any time--well, then, I can't use it...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 19
