Robin,

let alone your equally patronizing tone   - about which I personally have
nothing against - when I say the glorious ‘historical’ English of
Shakespeare it goes without saying and even disputing that I
mean  ‘historical’ in relation to contemporary English and within this
particular thread about its 'supposed' (because I am not supposing it).


It is in relation to the ‘present’ phenomenon of globalization of your
idiom - that I am talking about Shakespeare's language as historical


...But, what is there to for you to complain about? This  globalization
was fully determined by  England at the onset of the industrial age (see
interest in diffusing  media products and sell best-sellers, to speak
about something very minimal of the otherwise  macroscopic effects of
postindustrialization and postcapitalism): you diffuse, for instance,
your best-sellers, you acquire global readers and with them their money
and then you want also to complain about the fact that in this way you
have taught people in foreign countries (or colonized ones) how to read
and speak your language and also made those of them who are writers want
to try to enter the market through the medium of your idiom that you so
effusively dispersed - or else seeded, to be positive - around the
capitalist world . (Allow me to be provocative[pro-vo-kaptive]: one couple
of parents  keep their children - son - or daughter - in the house as
virgins, the other  let them go out in mini-skirts and on motor-bikes with
no admonition or help or safety policy or condom in the pocket: the
results of those two patriarcal attitudes are both wrong and both
potentially  negative)...


....languages are bogs, as Heaney rendered in North, bogs where seeds
sediment. No one can stop this process....


Now, the Triad: Heaney (63) , Paulin (51) and Muldoon (51)..we all agree
that they belong  to the same generation of living entities and that are
contemporaries - 10-11  years of difference between the three makes no
difference, in my eyes, I don’t know in yours.

As for Muldoon, born in 1951,  who happens to have just the same age as
Tom -  you say he belongs to another generation from that of Paulin: if
all depends of what your concept of a 'generation' is. They attend the
same conferences, they have worked for the same Oxford university in the
same decade, they go out to the same pub and attend each other poetry
readings, no one of them is senile in a wheel chair and no one is in a
pram....And when they go out with dearest Seamus - born in 1939 - I do not
think they are taking to the pub their old  grandfather....
erminia

(too many tutorials to do today to be able to allow myself the pleasures
of dispute...)

'There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens. '

S. Heaney, 'Song'.


(too many tutorials to do today to be able to allow myself the pleasures
of dispute...)


'The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser--
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm. '

(S. Heaney, last stanza from The Harvest bow')





Erminia