The Substance of Shadow

John Hollander (1929-2013), Sterling Professor of English; edited by Kenneth Gross, the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester


(University of Chicago Press)

This book is based on the unpublished Clark Lectures that John Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University. In “The Substance of Shadow” he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the 20th 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 ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Hollander also 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.