Why Actors Stink

Commenting on my post on Paradise Lost below, Bill Knott wrote
"…I used to listen via a walkperson to a tape of the
first couple books of PL as read by the British actor Anthony
Quayle,
but irritatingly he didn’t read the linebreaks which
made me usually snatch the earphones out in exasp."
Yes, why are actors so often lousy readers of poetry?

I think it’s because they automatically make a character out of the speaker, and ignore other aspects of the poem. Even in the most dramatic of dramatic monologues, the most narrative of narrative poems, there’s always a tension between character and speaker—some negotiation between the poet and her mask, even if she’s writing in the persona of herself. A poem is not its plot; a good poem insists on its reality as a bunch of words and sounds. The best readers of poetry have an understanding of the abstract, or stylistic, elements of poems. Actors tend to ignore that stuff for the sake of drama, and that’s a disservice to poetry as a form. That’s not to say poems should be read boringly, or undramatically if the poem is dramatic, but it is to say actors tend to get in the way of the poem.
Of course this is not true of all poetry. Certainly Shakespeare’s plays, which contain some of the greatest poetry ever written, are best recited by actors. That’s because they contain ambiguities of character/motive set up to be chosen among by an actor. But a good Shakespearian actor calls attention to the stylization of the language even as she fits it into character and plot. Also, the ambiguities in a Shakespeare play exist between characters, so actors’ choices about character don’t erase the play’s ambiguities. With poem-poems, as opposed to plays made of poetry, the story and its teller—if there is a story—is in the service of something other than itself. The ambiguities are not meant to be resolved—but actors reading poems tend to resolve them.
If you ignore PL’s line breaks, you ignore the fact that Milton’s lines are load-bearing walls, and part of the visceral excitement of the language is feeling all that mass strain to hold as it also shoves you forward down the page. It’s like reading an ocean tide.
And actors stink at reading Shakespeare sonnets.