“Every Life is Poetic”
Artwork by John Diamond, M.D.
As Edith Hamilton stated, Ibsen is not a great tragedian in the spirit of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare because his characters are of human size, whereas there’s nothing merely human of Oedipus or Lear. (And it was just for this not-real quality that Tolstoy criticized Shakespeare.)
However, when we see into Hedda or Borkman we realize that their lives, their fates, are exactly Meant. All the Karmic Plan – as it was for Henrietta.
Every life, we can learn from the Ancient Greeks and Shakespeare and Ibsen – and ourselves, is Poetic. Is writ large, beyond the merely real – a glimpse of Reality.
