Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare's poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare's abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense. The densities- of his harmonies - phonic and ideational both - are beyond comfortable calculation, are so great that the act of analysing them is self-defeating, uncovers nests of coherence that make the physics of analysed lines less rather than more comprehensible.

The reason it is necessary to point out Shakespeare's poetic superiority to competing poets is, I think, that we have so long, so industriously ignored the qualities in literature that drew us to it in the first place. As a result, we - or, at any rate, the scholarly books and essays we write and read - and our students treat a Shakespeare play or Paradise Lost or Huckleberry Finn or even 'Kubla Khan' as if we valued it for its paraphrasable content or as a source of information about the time and society that spawned it or about its author. When I talk about what 'we' do, I speak not just of the 'us' of the last several years of sociology, sentimental anthropology, and crusading sanctimony in literary criticism but of the cultural residue of a trend that goes back in Western culture at least to Horace and Philip Sidney and their intellectually casual conclusion that value in literature resides in its supposed, rarely witnessed capacity as an agent of moral improvement.