Philosophy Now Forum

Well Mahler would know...

I can't remember if Tolstoy had a taste for poetry. I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote an excellent essay entitled something like "Hamlet: Play or Poem". I don't know how well Tolstoy could read English -- but maybe English poetry was rough for him and he disapproved of the drama. I think that's the G.B. Shaw criticism of Shakespeare, too: Great poet, but the plays are flawed.

I'm pretty sure I remember Tolstoy disliking some French poets: Baudelaire and Verlaine. I knew a native German speaker once who was quite fluid in English and claimed he was disappointed in Shakespeare in the original. "The Schiller translations are better," he said.

Tolstoy may have been a curmudgeon, but he loved Chekov (everyone loved Chekov) and Chekov loved him. They wrote alike, too.

Poetry, I suppose, is the essential literary art -- the most "concentrated", boiled down to the essence. Drama is older than fiction; history, biography and philosophy are also forms of literature. I like novels a lot, though. And especially Tolstoy novels.