Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle. A Carlyle Reader. Ed. G.B. Tennyson. Copley, 1999. Print.

“The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakespeare”

• from On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841)
• poet and/or man of letters as seer and prophet in contact with overarching moral law
• building on romantic cult of poetry
• 323 immediately distinguishing the "new age" from the old (and thus the heroes of both) but looking for transhistorical types (like the poet)
• 324 [contrasting with Divinity and Prophet, who are past] We are now to see our Hero in the less ambitious, but also less questionable, character of Poet; a character which does not pass.
• not poet as mere stanza-writer but as legislator and philosopher (invoking Shelley perhaps)
• "The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye: there it lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without these."
• 325 synonymy in some languages of "poet" and "prophet"
• the "open secret" of the universe, that few can see but poets (and prophets) participate in
• 327 "We are all poets when we read a poem well"
• poetry vs speech in German theory
  • poetry should be musical (metrical in strict sense): "musical thought" (328)
• "skeptical dilettantism, the curse of these ages"
• 329 "Shakespeare and Dante are Saints of Poetry"—> canonized "so that it is impiety to meddle with them"
  • "They are canonized, though no Pope or Cardinals took hand in doing it! Such, in spite of every perverting influence, in the most unheroic times, is still our indestructible reverence for heroism."
• ...Shakespeare, so we may say, embodies for ya the Outer Life of our [330] Europe as developed then, its chivalries [etc.]
• interesting "Tree Igdrasil" metaphor for interconnection of society/an age
• 331 "Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament. ...Priceless Shakespeare was the free gift of nature"
  • a decontextualized longue duree history with tinges of natural theology
• "On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man."
• 331-2 disconnect between perfection of product and the disorder that produced it: "The very perfection of the house, [332] as if Nature herself had made it, hides the builder’s merit. Perfect, more perfect than any other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by instinct, what conditions he works under, what his materials are, what his own force and its relation to them is.”
  • is not a completely idealist vision (but about transcending the material)
• 334 "We ought to know withal, and to keep for ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them.”
  • a different taxonomic vision than Charles Darwin for example
• 335 following on above: "If I say therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I have said all concerning him."
• 336 "Had we, for instance, all his plays reviewed as Hamlet, in Wilhelm Meister, is!"
  • inseperable from print culture of reviewing, which Habermas 1962 shows became inseparable from art in the c18 public sphere
• 337 "All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; given only here and there a note of the full utterance of the man."
• "Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould. It was with him then, as it is with us all. No man works save under conditions."
• "May we not call Shakespeare the still more melodious [than Dante] priest of a true Catholicism, the ‘Universal Church’ of the Future and of all times? No narrow superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousand-fold hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men worship as they can!"
• 338-9 post higher criticism: not believing the Koran for ex was directly divinely inspired (what about the Bible though?)
• 339 "Indian Empire will go, at any rate. some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give-up our Shakespeare!"
• 339-40 "Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real, marketable, tangibly-useful possession": Shakespeare’s utility for uniting the anglophone world politically: "Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak-forth melodiously what the heart of it means!"
  • so tied to nationhood: Anderson 1983