I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
— from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W. E. B. Du Bois.
The power of “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not” may be related in part to its form. Although it begins a prose paragraph, Du Bois’ sentence is a perfect line of blank verse: the measure of Shakespeare’s plays. … The unusual order of the words, placing the negative at the end, gives Du Bois’ sentence a vocal emphasis. As in the slang habit of a few years ago, but with a different order of meaning, the delayed “not” has emotional color. The somewhat contorted syntax creates meaning: defying the idiomatic arrangements of English yet also refreshing them with a douse of Latin’s relatively free word order.
The writer of blank verse in English who exploited that way of writing, influencing countless generations of poets and changing the language itself forever, is John Milton, born 400 years ago. His writing permanently saturated American culture and discourse. Du Bois in this passage refers to Shakespeare explicitly. Implicitly, he also echoes Milton, as have many American writers and public speakers.
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