Where Milton marches steadily forward, Shakespeare behaves rather like a swallow. He darts at the subject and glances away; and then he is back again before your eyes can follow him. It is as if he kept on having tries at it, and being dissatisfied. He darts image after image at you and still seems to think that he has not done enough. He brings up a whole light artillery of mythology, and gets tired of each piece almost before he has fired it. He wants to see the object from a dozen different angles; if the undignified word is pardonable, he nibbles, like a man trying a tough biscuit now from this side and now from that. You can find the same sort of contrast almost anywhere between these two poets.
Selected Literary Essays
(from “Variation in Shakespeare and Others”)