The Art Itself Is Nature
On Shakespeare, Stevens, and the Sacred Work of Reading
Last week I wrote about Wallace Stevens and the ash of a life well lived—Leonard Cohen’s image of what remains when you’ve burned yourself in attention and love. Stevens claimed “it was not important that they survive,” these poems of his. What mattered was “some lineament or character,” some truthful thing made, regardless of whether anyone remembered it.
But here’s the tension I’ve been sitting with all week: Shakespeare has been dead for over four hundred years, and we’re still reading him. His art didn’t become ash. It’s still burning. His scrupulously crafted lines—”so richly spun, and woven so fit,” as Ben Jonson wrote—continue singing nature into pure being, and by any reasonable estimate will be read for centuries more.
So which is it? Does the work matter or doesn’t it? Is art supposed to become ash, or is it supposed to endure?
Nature and Art in Shakespeare
I’ve been reading Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, and she opens her second chapter with this exact question—the relationship between natural genius and technical mastery, between what’s received and what’s made.
She quotes Ben Jonson’s prefatory poem to the 1623 folio, where Jonson praises his dead friend:
Nature her selfe was proud of his designes,
And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines!
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
as, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit.
High praise. But Jonson immediately qualifies it:
Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the Poets matter, Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion. . . .
For a good Poet’s made, as well as borne.
And such wert thou.
This is the perennial debate about Shakespeare: Was he a natural genius—Milton’s “sweetest Shakespeare, fancies childe” warbling his “native Wood-notes wilde”—or was he a master craftsman who studied rhetoric, grammar, the trivium and quadrivium, all the “arts of language”?
Sister Miriam Joseph’s answer: both. And she lets Shakespeare himself resolve it.
In The Winter’s Tale, Polixenes discourses on the relationship between nature and art. He’s talking about gardening, but the principle applies to poetry, to any making:
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. . . .
This is an art
Which does mend nature—change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
Read that last line again: “The art itself is nature.”
Not nature versus art. Not natural genius opposed to technical mastery. The art is nature—nature perfecting itself through human craft.
What Stevens and Shakespeare Share
This resolves the apparent contradiction between Stevens’ humility and Shakespeare’s endurance.
The work that lasts isn’t made in order to last. It’s made in service to what’s true, what’s real, “some lineament or character” worth capturing regardless of survival. Stevens’ “It was not important that they survive” is the necessary humility—you can’t grasp at immortality and make anything worth preserving.
But when the work is scrupulously crafted, when technique serves truth rather than ego, when “the art itself is nature”—then it might endure. Not because you wanted it to, but because you got out of the way enough to let nature speak.
Shakespeare’s genius wasn’t either natural gift or technical mastery. It was natural gift through technical mastery. The matter was nature, but art gave the fashion. Both necessary. Neither sufficient alone.
“Only one gifted by nature can use art supremely,” Sister Miriam Joseph concludes. You need the gift—that’s received, given, the humility of acknowledging you didn’t create from nothing. And you need the work—the scrupulous craft, the “arts of language,” the co-creative shaping of what’s given into what endures.
Stevens had both. Whether his work survives the way Shakespeare’s has—that remains to be seen. We’re only seventy years out from his death. Ask again in 2300.
But It Depends on Readers
Here’s what makes this urgent: Stevens’ survival isn’t automatic. Shakespeare’s wasn’t either.
Most people don’t know this, but Shakespeare fell out of fashion after his death. By the eighteenth century, he was considered crude, unpolished, embarrassing. The plays were “improved” by editors who thought they could smooth out his roughness.
What saved Shakespeare? Not least Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lectures in the 1810s.
One man—reading carefully, thinking deeply, speaking publicly about what he found in Shakespeare—reignited interest in the plays. Coleridge’s work gave us Keats, who devoured Shakespeare. It gave us Matthew Arnold, who canonized him. And then public education followed, teaching what individuals had already preserved.
The institutions didn’t save Shakespeare. Coleridge and other readers did. Individual work, not collective consensus.
And here’s the thing: that work is as natural as bees pollinating flowers.
Bees don’t pollinate “on purpose” in some ego-driven sense. They’re not trying to “preserve flowers for posterity.” They’re doing their work—gathering nectar, serving the hive. Pollination happens as the natural byproduct of attention and labor.
Coleridge wasn’t “trying to save Shakespeare” as some heroic act of cultural preservation. He was doing his work—making sense of the plays for himself, earning a living through public lectures. But his individual attention mattered immensely. No Coleridge reading carefully? Maybe no Shakespeare as we know him.
The work of reading—sustained attention, close reading as spiritual practice—is how culture preserves what deserves preservation. It’s natural work, but it still must be done. No one can pollinate for you. No one can read Stevens carefully for you.
The Three Participants
So the complete picture requires three participants:
Nature provides the matter—the raw gift, the world as it is, the “lineament or character” worth capturing.
The Poet provides the art—the scrupulous craft, the “fashioning,” the technique that lets nature speak more clearly than it could without form.
The Reader provides the continuing life—the work of attention that keeps the flame burning, generation after generation.
All three necessary. None sufficient alone.
Shakespeare’s genius plus nature’s matter equals nothing without readers across four centuries tending the work.
Stevens’ genius plus nature’s matter equals—we don’t know yet. That depends on whether readers like us, like you, keep reading carefully.
The Sacred Responsibility
This is why close reading matters. Not as academic exercise, not as showing off your interpretive skills, but as keeping the work alive.
When you read Stevens attentively, letting the poem do its work on you, you’re not just “analyzing” a dead text. You’re participating in its continued existence. You’re determining whether his “lineament or character” survives into the next century.
The poem isn’t a static object on a shelf. It’s a flame that dies without oxygen. You provide the oxygen.
This is the reader’s dual movement—humility and co-creation:
Humility: You receive the work. You didn’t make it. Someone else’s genius, nature’s matter, handed to you as gift.
Co-creation: Your attention matters. Your careful reading, your willingness to sit with difficulty, your labor of interpretation—these actively shape whether the work endures.
“The art itself is nature”—and that includes the art of reading.
What Endures
The work that becomes ash: ego-driven art made for survival, for fame, for grasping at immortality.
The work that remains flame: art made in humble service to nature, crafted with scrupulous attention, tended by faithful readers across time.
Stevens knew this: “It was not important that they survive.” He couldn’t control whether readers would keep reading. He could only do the work well.
We’re the ones who determine survival now. Not through voting or institutional decree, but through individual work—the same natural work that saved Shakespeare when Coleridge decided to read carefully and speak publicly about what he found.
You’re deciding right now, reading this, whether Stevens endures. Whether the “affluence” he captured, the “planetarium” of his mind’s attention to the world, continues speaking to human experience centuries out.
The work is natural—we attend to what’s alive because that’s our nature, like bees to flowers.
But the work must still be done.
Close reading isn’t optional if culture is to preserve what deserves preservation. It’s the sacred work of keeping flame alive across generations.
“The art itself is nature.” Which means: your reading is part of nature too. The question is whether you’ll do your work as carefully as Shakespeare did his, as Stevens did his, as Coleridge did his.
The ash or the flame—that’s being decided right now, in your attention or its absence.
What are you reading this week? And more importantly—are you reading it carefully enough to keep it alive?