The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History

By John Hollander and Kenneth Gross

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century.

Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self.

An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226354309

Book preview

The Substance of Shadow

The 1999 Clark Lectures

Trinity College

University of Cambridge

The Substance of Shadow

A Darkening Trope in Poetic History

John Hollander

Edited by Kenneth Gross

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

John Hollander (1929–2013) was the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.

Kenneth Gross is the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–35427-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978–0-226–35430-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226354309.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Hollander, John, author. | Gross, Kenneth, editor.

Title: The substance of shadow : a darkening trope in poetic history / John Hollander ; edited by Kenneth Gross.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015047973 | ISBN 9780226354279 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780226354309 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Shades and shadows in literature. | English poetry—History and criticism. | American poetry—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PR508.S53 H65 2016 | DDC 821/.00935—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047973

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Natalie Charkow Hollander

Contents

Preface

1. A Lecture upon the Shadow

2. Shadows and Shades

3. Shadowes Light

4. A Shadow Different from Either

5. Fragments of Shadow: Manuscript Extracts

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Footnotes

Preface

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

—Hart Crane

The poet and scholar John Hollander writes in this book of the lives and afterlives of shadow, of the vivid substance, power, and even radiance that shadows can assume in works of the imagination. Focusing on British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century—though reaching back to more ancient sources—he explores shadow’s place as metaphor, as enigma, as matter for fable and parable, as a form of knowledge and a mode of vision. He shows us what love of shadow amounts to. He tracks the kind of thinking that is done with shadow, and in shadow, how we put shadows to use. Within these pages we find shadow as companion, comforter, creator, questioner, stalker, playmate, spy, king, ghost, dancer, demon, and destroyer. Shadow measures loss and gain, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible. Shiftingly it falls upon and gives us the ground, or a landscape; it maps in its motions an environment, inner and outer, natural and supernatural. Shadow also becomes a shape of time, a witness of past, present, and future things, contracting and lengthening with the course of our days, binding us together. It names the myriad forms of our human fate. The book can suggest an anatomy of melancholy, a darkening trope or turn, but shadow here is also an occasion of continuous wonder and opening to the gifts of time.

Different, often conflicting ideas and genealogies of shadow are at work in the poems studied here, and one of Hollander’s tasks is that of finely discriminating among them, in the process finding his way through changing words for shadow: tsal, skia, eidolôn, umbra, imago, shade. One legacy in Western thought of Plato’s myth of the cave—with its image of chained watchers taking for real the shadows of mere statues cast on a wall by flames burning behind them—is to make of shadows the archetypal metaphor for the illusory world of matter and bodily perception, of mere opinion, imperfect images set against the perfect, foundational realm of ideas, the sun outside. Part of what this book does is to trace a counterhistory to the Platonic tradition, one in which shadows acquire a mysterious truth, a personality, a creaturely life, what Hollander calls causative rights. He shows us the paradoxical means through which a thing by nature secondary and passing grabs at something like authority, even a kind of originality, and becomes itself a source of life, an inward principle rather than an outward accident, surviving its own fragility. Shadow indeed reveals itself here as a kind of light; it clarifies things as much as it darkens them, even as it becomes a name for doubt, for the unnamable, for the life of lost or ruined things, or the deathliness of the literal. Shadow offers a name for the substance of poetry itself.

This volume originates in the four unpublished Clark Lectures that Hollander delivered in 1999 at Trinity College, Cambridge. These lectures were planned to provide the core of a long-meditated book, though he never completed his revisions for this before he died in 2013. I will say more below about the surviving manuscript of the lectures and my editing of them, but for now a brief account of their overall shape may be useful. The first lecture looks closely at the play of literal and figurative shadows in English Renaissance poetry, beginning with a love lyric by John Donne and proceeding to a group of Shakespeare sonnets—with their eerie self-reflections and increasing darkness of desire—taking up as well poetry by Edmund Spenser, Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Dowland. Shadows in this poetry offer complex images or maps of our wishes, dreams, cares, and fears; they are our own and not our own, both illuminating and alienating, always undergoing metamorphosis. They are things we make, models for the substance of our thought, but also figures of its emptiness or passivity, its power to be infected by illusion and disguise. This is a poetry that often plays against Plato’s dualism by aligning earthly shadows more closely with their supposed opposite, the realm of things ideal.

The second lecture starts by probing backwards into the earlier history of poetic shadow, its biblical and classical, especially Virgilian, roots. Here we find shadow as a figure of protection—the covering shadow of divine wings, Isaiah’s the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, or the restful shade of a pastoral tree—but also, in many forms, as a figure of death and loss, defining a realm that Psalm 23 calls the valley of the shadow. Shade and shadow here lend form to ghosts. They shape environments at once lovely and transient, places of exile, of torment, and of mental darkness, yet also of strange continuity, sustenance, and truth. The diverse ombre of Dante’s Divina Commedia become important here, but even more so those of Milton in Paradise Lost, including the darkness visible of Hell, the shadows of (shadowless) Heaven, and those corporeal and incorporeal shadows that populate Eden before and after the fall.

Moving into the poetry of Romanticism, lecture three (Shadowes Light) examines the ways in which the shadow comes to be seen as an image or expression of an unseen self, material for ever more acute psychological maps. The shadow here evokes a hidden, unknown, or alien selfhood, something that can be linked to memories of childhood (Wordsworth’s shadowy recollections which are yet the fountain light of all our day) as well as to more dangerous, even self-destructive impulses, or to the internalized shadows of social repression. Hollander dwells here on the frighteningly personified shadows—brooding, mournful, jealous, usurping, wandering—that emerge in the mythic poems of William Blake, his stories of how we both make and reduce ourselves to shadows. He tracks the myriad forms of shadow in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry, shadows of volatile and unseen powers, charming, transformative, and devouring things which the poet urgently wants to know and name. Poems by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson figure here as well. This lecture looks also at tales of a shadow that takes on a life of its own, becoming a double or treacherous doppelgänger—most prominently works by Adelbert von Chamisso and Hans Christian Andersen. These are texts in which the shadow shows us the lost as much as the hidden self, its damaged and even unlived life. Shadows, if they offer us company, also measure our solitude.

Gathering up the threads of this complex history, the final lecture studies the peculiarly fraught, crisis-laden, and densely allusive shadows of later romantic and modern poetry, focusing on texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Shadows in this poetry offer an acute witness of unknown realms of experience and existence. Speaks true who speaks shadow, wrote Paul Celan.

By the last pages of the book it becomes clear that, as Hollander writes, the substance of modern poetic shadow is in good part that of prior poetic shadow itself. There emerges here a sense that the shadow substance of past poetry can be a fearful thing, that it may become a blocking or devouring shadow, a version of what Harold Bloom, an important interlocutor for Hollander, describes as the Covering Cherub of poetic influence. But Hollander also lets us see, as does Bloom, the complex nourishment that houses in these shadows of prior poetry. The study of shadows becomes a locus for thinking about poetic survival, that power to renew itself, to gain continuing life, which poetry discovers in the most volatile things, the urgent presences that poetry finds in its own apprehensions of absence and need. The book’s moving map of past poetic shadows has indeed the ambition of something like prophecy, marking the weight of the present moment as much as of the future, and of a future not at all certain, but filled with the shadow of what is unknown and merely possible.

My summary can only hint at the richness and texture of this brief book. Hollander’s scope of attention in these pages is characteristically expansive. Along with those already mentioned, the poets who enter the argument include Homer, Pindar, Horace, Ovid, the Countess of Pembroke, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Edward Young, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Thomas Hood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dowson, Charlotte Mew, Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Guillaume Apollinaire, D. H. Lawrence, and Hart Crane. He can turn an acute eye on biblical typology, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and a 1930s radio show called The Shadow, whose opening tag line was: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! As a work of criticism, the book shows throughout Hollander’s uncanny skill at laying bare the complex workings of figural language, his attention to poetry’s way of tracking and transforming the literal, building metaphor upon metaphor, and the peculiar kind of knowledge this provides, even in its darkness. His writing elicits poetry’s relentless commitment to play, and how poetry reflects on its own work. This investigation of the life of shadows—their shifting outlines, their way of doubling and morphing the defining shape of the bodies that cast them—indeed resonates subtly with Hollander’s many critical studies of poetic form, of the shaping energies of meter, line, rhyme, and stanza, of the ways in which poets make parables of their own formal devices, turning dead scheme into living trope. Equally important here are Hollander’s mappings of poetic tradition, his account of how one poet’s shadows turn on or mirror another’s over time, a tradition that his subject invites him to redefine rather than take for granted. Shadows and echoes—visual doubles and acoustic doubles—indeed share an essential fascination for him as images of poetic work. So it happens that The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History forms a diptych with The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After, one of Hollander’s crucial books, a study of the intricate ways in which poems hear, remember, and transform earlier poems, how they excavate buried words and make new homes for them, even as they bear the burden of the prior poems’ darkening, their decaying into noise or silence.

As well as drawing together his concerns as a literary scholar, the lectures explore the backgrounds and sustaining questions of Hollander’s own poetry, itself a vast archive of poetic shadows, of varying shapes of darkness. It is a poetry preoccupied with the substantial force of things that, like shadows, may seem unreal, contingent, scattered, fading, and broken. All the tricks of light and all the richly varied shadows of the sensible world are given honor here, taken in with delight—long lamplit shadows falling on a wet street at evening, flickering shadows in a sunlit wood, shadows cast onto a bedroom wall or clinging to the curve of a face, the moving shadow of a cat on a carpet. But shadows in Hollander’s poetry also collaborate with the work of mind and memory. They are seen as gifts, profane sacraments; they are complex metaphors of making and knowing, matter for fables of longing, sorrow, joy, and fear, eliciting more occult radiances as well. Shadows become things with lives of their own, spectral emanations of the self, variously taunting, enigmatic, violent, and whimsical entities. These shadows grow and multiply, the dark / Opening into further / Dark, they weave themselves together with other, often elusive forms of sight and sound. It’s an old and sometimes fearful darkness that the poems explore and invite us to explore. They sound the dark as Hollander says of the owl in Owl. Darkness, or near darkness, is the domain in which the secret agent codenamed Cupcake, Hollander’s alter ego in his book-length poem Reflections on Espionage, sends his messages to a network of fellow poet-spies, friends of shadow.¹

A handful of further instances will have to suffice here. In The Night Mirror (1971), there is the child and future poet haunted by a dark shape . . . that moved / And saw and knew and mistook its reflection / In the tall panel on the closet door / For itself. In The Mad Potter (1988), shadow becomes both the stuff of our fallen lives and the living material of poems:

What are we like? A barrelfull of this

Oozy wet substance, shadow-crammed, whose smudges

Of darkness lurk within but rise to kiss

The fingers that disturb the gentle edges

Of their bland world of shapelessness and bliss.

I think here also of Hollander’s always surprising book of shaped poems, Types of Shape, originally published in 1969, in which the typed-out lines of each poem gloss and animate, or read metaphorically, the shaped silhouettes that the lines themselves give form to—a tree, a bottle, a heart—the last of these poems being Swan and Shadow, a poem of uncanny thresholds in which darkness mingles with Scattered bits of light. Shape and shade are often near doubles (I think here of how, on a day of intense sun, a small