SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Poem," in The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare's Sonnets and The Phoenix and the Turtle, Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1955, pp. 193-204.

In the following essay, Knight relates the imagery and the paradoxically tragic regeneration of the Phoenix to the creative process, but rejects a narrow biographical interpretation of the poem.

This, then, is the context in which we must study Shakespeare's contribution. The Phoenix and the Turtle has received a sensitive handling. John Masefield accorded it high praise in his William Shakespeare (1911). In Discoveries (1924) J. Middleton Murry wrote that 'it gives us the highest experience which it is possible for poetry to give, and it gives it without intermission'. It was the subject of an interesting monograph by 'Ranjee' (Ranjee G. Shahani) in Towards the Stars (which I reviewed in The Criterion, April, 1931). I have myself written of it in The Shakespearian Tempest (1932; App. A, 320-5) and...