CHAPTER 26.
Decades before Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence,
which perhaps popularized the idea more
effectively than any other book, T.S. Eliot insisted on "the importance of the relation of the poem to other
poems by other authors” (7). The poet, claimed Eliot, was a vector of creative energies, an embodiment
and concentrator of poetic truth, not an identity sui generis
creating himself anew out of whole cloth.
Eliot's poet must live "not merely in the present, but the present moment of the past,” being conscious
"not of what is dead, but what is already living” (11: emphasis added).
Eliot's dictum has no more
obvious application than in the case of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the 1609 collection of poems steeped in the
"already living" tradition of classical and Renaissance lyric and epic poetry. Indeed, the drama revealed
in the Sonnets emerges in bas relief against the contextual background of literary history.
The most profound conflict in the drama of the Sonnets is not, strictly speaking, of a biographical or
psychological nature. Instead, it is a conflict of principles embodied in the diverse and sometimes
contradictory cultural traditions to which the "myriad-minded" author was exposed during a lifetime
dedicated to the study of history, religion and literature. In the Latin poets, particularly Ovid (43 B.C.-14
A.D.) and Horace (65-8 B.C.), he discovered the proud tradition of the writer as immortalizing agent of
his own name. The concluding lines of the Metamorphoses,
in which Ovid celebrates his own
achievement and prophesies his own literary immortality, are echoed in myriad ways in the Sonnets:
Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis
Nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vestutas.
Cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
Ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi;
Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
Astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.
Quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
Ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
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