Free Creators by Paul M. Johnson

with words and phrases which he has sewn into them from the great caskets of his verbal inventions. They become part of our language, sometimes of our daily speech; often when we search our minds for something special to say or write, Shakespeare comes to our aid—nowhere more so, or more frequently, than in Hamlet . It is his jeweler’s shop, not so much of conscious quotation as of instinctive ownership of memorable phrases, which are part of our heritage, so that when we use them we are almost—even quite—unaware of speaking Hamlet ’s lines. Shakespeare has scattered a basketful of verbal confetti over our common speech. “Hoist with his own petard.” “Such divinity doth hedge a King.” “Sweets to the sweet,farewell.” “The readiness is all.” “A hit, a palpable hit.” “The dead vast and middle of the night.” “I know a hawk from a handsaw.” “Caviare to the general.” “Rich not gaudy.” “A king of shreds and patches.” “How all occasions do inform against me.” “Shuffled off this mortal coil.” “The time is out of joint.” “Leave her to heaven!” “I must be cruel only to be kind.” “To hold the mirror up to nature.” “More in sorrow than in anger.” “Wild and whirring words.” “Abstract and brief chronicles of time.” “This fell sergent, death, is strict in his arrest.” “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” “Absent thee from felicity a while.” “Good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies.” “It smells to Heaven.” “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” “You must wear your rue with a difference.” “A fellow of infinite jest.” “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” “Oh, my prophetic soul!” “A nipping and an eager air.” “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” “Her privates we.” “Hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.” “The play’s the thing.” And so on. We quote Hamlet almost as we breathe.
    Shakespeare creates so fast, so often, so surely, so ubiquitously, not least so imperceptibly, that his creativity is woven into our national life as well as our literature, indeed the literature of the world. He reverberates in us. What more is there to say? We never hear of Shakespeare boasting—though the Elizabethans were, by and large, great boasters, vainglorious creatures. There is nothing in the records he left, his dispositions in law or fact, the things men said about him in his day or after his death, the traditions that surrounded his name, to indicate he had any awareness of his astonishing powers and the magnitude of his achievement. Yet must he not have known he was a great, an extraordinary man? If so, that is one topic on which this man of so many, and so potent, words chose to remain silent.

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T. S. Eliot: The Last Poet to Wear Spats
    T HE CASE OF T. S. E LIOT ( 1888–1965 ), the Anglo-American magus, who launched modern poetry in the English-speaking world in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land , is a strange one, perhaps unique in world literature. As a rule, the great creative innovators in the arts, those who effect revolutionary changes in the way we see, feel, and express ourselves, are also radical human personalities, at any rate at the time when they overthrow the existing creative order. Thus Wordsworth and Coleridge, the creators of romantic poetry, who achieved a similar revolution with their publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, were then doctrinaire utopians, who had applauded the extinction of legitimacy in France; Coleridge planned to establish an egalitarian community in America. T. S. Eliot, however, both at the time he wrote The Waste Land and before it—and after it, and throughout his life—was a conservative, a traditionalist, a legitimist, and, in many respects, a reactionary. He came from a deeply conventional, sober, stable background; received a long, thorough, exhaustive education