ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare is the greatest of all dramatists of anger and hate. Everyone speaks of Shakespeare as the exemplary poet of love, but as a young man, the author was transfixed by his hatreds. The meaning of "hatred" has been transformed in our minds to be synonymous with prejudice. Despite the fact that Brother Lawrence's activities seem comically incongruous with the speaker's rage, all the thrill and power of this poetry comes from the enlivening power of the speaker's hate. William Butler Yeats and Robert Browning place themselves in a literary tradition that links the pleasure of art with hate, and finds its creative impulses in the capacity for hatred and rage. The feelings of literary power can connect us to fighting emotions. Emotions are those things about which people differ with respect to their judgments. Concerning enmity and hatred one can understand them on the basis of their opposites. Anger, spite, and slander are productive of enmity.
