SOURCE: “The Sense of Poetry: Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle,” in American Critical Essays: Twentieth Century, edited by Harold Beaver, Oxford University Press, 1959, pp. 40-51.

In the following essay, originally published in 1958, Richards closely examines the structure and meaning of The Phoenix and Turtle.

Is it not fitting that the greatest English poet should have written the most mysterious poem in English? ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ is so strange a poem—even so unlike anything else in Shakespeare, as to have caused doubts that he wrote it. And yet, no one else seems in the least likely as author.

One of the odd things about the poem is that it has engendered curiosity and praise only in relatively recent times. Emerson was among the first: ‘To unassisted readers’, he says, ‘it would appear to be a lament on the death of a poet, and of his...