War & Peace Quote by Jones Very

Hamlet doesn’t come from clever plotting or Elizabethan cosplay; it comes from a writer who’s been in a fight with himself and can’t pretend otherwise. Jones Very’s line reads like a diagnosis of artistic power: Shakespeare’s “depth and mystery” aren’t aesthetic flourishes but the residue of interior combat, “the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy.” That enemy is left provocatively unnamed, which is the point. It could be sin, despair, mortality, pride, doubt - the whole Protestant catalog of spiritual dread. By refusing to specify, Very lets “enemy” function as a pressure point every reader can feel.

Very, a 19th-century poet with a distinctly religious cast of mind, is also smuggling in a theory of authorship that pushes against the tidy Romantic idea of effortless genius. Great art, he implies, is not inspiration descending; it’s conscience grinding. Hamlet startles us because its uncertainty is earned. The play’s signature hesitations, moral nausea, and sudden lucidity don’t look like an author showing off; they look like someone who has stood too close to the abyss and brought back accurate notes.

There’s a secondary barb here: if Hamlet’s darkness is born of spiritual struggle, then the audience’s fascination is not just entertainment. We’re drawn to the play because it stages the very conflict polite society tries to outsource to sermons, therapy, or small talk. Very frames Shakespeare’s achievement as a kind of public disclosure: private warfare transmuted into a drama that makes our own evasions harder to maintain.