Aging & Wisdom Quote by Rita Dove

There is a quiet rebuke in Rita Dove framing Shakespeare not as a monument but as a maker of people. Calling those characters "utter strangers" strips away the curriculum varnish and restores the original shock of drama: you open a book and a voice you have never met starts insisting on its own interior life. For a poet, that is the first real lesson in craft and ethics at once. Technique matters, but what matters more is the conjuring trick: language as a delivery system for personhood.

Dove’s intent is personal, but the subtext is cultural. Shakespeare is often invoked to police taste, to separate the "educated" from everyone else. Dove flips the power dynamic. The value isn’t prestige; it’s animation. She’s describing an early apprenticeship in empathy that isn’t sentimental. Shakespeare’s strangers are vivid because they are contradictory, funny, selfish, lyrical, panicked - not moral examples but living problems. That complexity gives a young reader permission to recognize herself in people she’s been taught are distant: nobles, clowns, villains, women cornered by patriarchy, men intoxicated by their own stories.

Context matters here: Dove came of age in an America renegotiating whose lives count as literature. Her line quietly argues that the canon can be used as a tool, not a gate. The “importance” of Shakespeare, for her, is less about inherited authority and more about learning how a voice crosses time, class, and circumstance - and makes a stranger unignorable.