Shakespeare predicted his verse would be outclassed, and asked to be kept anyway
In Sonnet 32 the most celebrated writer in English calls his own lines poor and rude, and expects every future pen to beat them. He asks only one favour of the friend who outlives him: keep the poems for their love, not their style. History did not take him at his word.
The sonnet imagines a future after the speaker's death, when churlish Death has covered his bones with dust and the friend happens to reread these verses. By then, he assumes, poetry will have improved. Measured against the better writing of that later age, his own lines will look outstripped, left behind by happier and more gifted men.
So he makes a modest request. Keep them, he says, for my love rather than for their rhyme. The sestet even scripts what the friend should think: had my friend's Muse grown along with this growing age, he would have produced something finer, marching in better equipment among the ranks of poets. The military image of ranks and equipage treats literary fashion like an army being re-equipped, with the dead poet stuck in outdated gear.
The couplet closes the bargain neatly, "Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love". It separates two reasons for valuing a poem, technical polish and the feeling behind it, and asks to be judged only on the second. The humility is partly a courtship move, a way of saying the love is more lasting than the art.
Posterity reversed the prediction. Seven years after Shakespeare's death, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published the First Folio, a collected edition gathering 36 of his plays. Its preface carried a poem by his rival Ben Jonson, who called him not of an age, but for all time. Today no playwright is performed more often, and his plays exist in every major tongue still spoken, hardly the fate of lines outstripped by every pen.
Source: Sonnet 32: If thou survive my well-contented day
