00001.tif

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content CRITICISM AS SCRIPTURE:
THE "BELATED" ROMANTICISM OF HAROLD BLOOM
by
David Joseph Fite
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May, 1982
UMI Number: D P23085
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL U SER S
T he quality of this reproduction is d ep en d en t upon the quality of the copy subm itted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not se n d a com plete m anuscript
and th ere are m issing p ag es, th e se will be noted. Also, if m aterial had to be rem oved,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Di&siwtaliofi PWblisNftg
UMI D P23085
Published by P roQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in th e D issertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © P roQ uest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United S ta te s C ode
ProQ uest LLC.
789 E ast E isenhow er Parkw ay
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346
UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE SCHOO L
UN IV ER SITY PARK
LOS A N G ELES. C A LIFO R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
DAVID JOSEPH FITE
under the direction of hi.s.... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
D ate^ M 6dL 3J...tj l M rr'
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: 1
Chapter One: The Visionary Company in Its Own Time ,23
Chapter Two: Yeats and the Spectre of Modernism 58
Chapter Three: Vision's Revision: The Anxiety of Influence 93
Chapter Four: Influence and the Map of American Poetic
History: The Emersonian Survival 152
Chapter Five: The Poems at the End of the Romantic Mind:
A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery 213
Chapter Six: Humanism in the Extreme: The Predicament
of Romantic Redemption 287
Bibliography: 342
ii
INTRODUCTION
In January 1959, a young scholar from Yale named Harold Bloom
published his first book, a brief, polemical study of Shelley’s
major poems entitled Shelley's Mythmaking. Blessed with the impri
matur of the prestigious Yale University Press, and armed with a
thesis derived from the Jewish theologian Martin Buber which not
only countered but roundly condemned almost every major previous
critic of Shelley for the "sin" of reading the poetry as philosophy
rather than poetic "mythmaking" (SM, p. 118),'*' Bloom's book guaran
teed itself considerably more attention than fledgling scholarly
efforts typically receive. Much of the attention was unfavorable.
The anonymous reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement of August 21,
1959, in a review entitled "Elephants and Shelley," is representative
of the scandalized:
From a point de depart of nth degree remoteness, namely
a distinction made by the theologian Buber between I-Thou
and I-It relationships, he [Bloom]) proceeds, through the
ritually prescribed cloud of witnesses, to offer, as his
general interpretation of Shelley, a "mythopoeia" that
involves the omission of "Adonais," and such other essen
tial poems as do not fit it, and leaves both the reader
and the truncated cadaver of the poetry at a point n .
degrees remote from any easily ascertainable point
d'arrivee.2
Closer to home, another brilliant scholar who had already made
1
his mark in Romantic studies, Earl Wasserman, joined the chorus of
detractors with his critique of Shelley’s Mythmaking in The Yale
Review, but offered at the same time a perspicacity that saw into the
life of things to come. Despite the fact that Bloom has "repeatedly
misread the poems," despite all the distortions he has forced upon
Shelley' by imposing "irrelevant or only partially relevant a . priori
assumptions," Bloom's critical approach, Wasserman concluded in 1959,
would prove to be more important and more influential than a safer,
saner perspective, because Bloom's vision of Shelley's work grants
3
"the modern reader a sense of kinship with that poetry." If "every
age takes from literature what it most wants," then Bloom, Wasserman
observes, "by creatively reinterpreting— that is, isolating, exag
gerating, and playing a novel light upon— the quasi-religious myth
making in Shelley's poems," has made those poems "potentially sig
nificant to the twentieth-century mind.”
In the twenty-two years since Wasserman wrote his review,
Harold Bloom has become perhaps the most important commentator on
Romantic and twentieth-century poetry in the English language. He
has assumed the status of being, quite likely, the most praised and
most reviled critic of our time, and unarguably the most prolific.
Bloom has now xvritten, from Shelley's Mythmaking in 1959 through
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate in 1977, eleven full-length
books, totaling some 3,600 pages, and has edited numerous others.
Through both his own reviews and those of scholars guided by the
light of the Bloomian lamp, his celebrated and notorious theory of
2
"the anxiety of influence" now looms as a formidable presence in
academic and intellectual journals ranging from Diacritics to The
New Republic to The Times Literary Supplement. As De Vane Professor
of Humanities at Yale, he has come to be regarded as a central rep
resentative of the most prestigious academy in American letters, an
academy currently featuring other distinguished— and controversial—
critics of Romantic and modern literature such as Geoffrey Hartman,
J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, John Hollander, and Jacques Derrida.
Bloom's books are avidly read and often fervidly reviewed. Commen
tators as luminous as Kenneth Burke, Edward Said, Helen Vendler, and
Bloom's colleagues de Man and Miller, have hailed his work as a
brilliant and important contribution to the intellectual history of
our time. Burke calls his thinking "exceptionally subtle and
complex"^; Said says Bloom's is "antithetical criticism at its
fiercest and most brilliant," and sees his readings to be "almost
unparalleled in skill and thematic nuance." Miller affirms that
Bloom "is perhaps the most dazzlingly creative and provocative of
critics writing in English today." Vendler finds in his work "a
repository of vivid engagement with poems" and a "real excellence
in . . . formulation of larger questions." De Man hazards the guess
that Bloom, "in his understanding of Romanticism" and the nature of
reading, "has been ahead of everybody else all along."
Still other scholars have declared themselves suspicious of
Bloom, with some even going so far as to denounce his writings as
solipsistic charlatanry of the highest order. Frank Kermode, while
3
acknowledging that Bloom "is a very remarkable critic" with "a
great, almost selfish passion for poetry," complains that his dense
and elliptical style puts "horrible and ugly obstacles in the xjay
of civilized non-coterie readers." Charles Altieri calls Bloom
"brilliant" but sees in his work "an incredible sloppiness and
arrogance towards logic and discursive reasoning which makes me
wonder how literary criticism maintains even the minimum level of
respectability it has among intellectual disciplines." Christopher
Ricks, Howard Nemerov, and David Hirsch see almost no redeeming
features in the Bloomian project. Ricks calls his theory of the
anxiety of influence a "lurid melodrama" and detects in it "the
revenge of an itchy critical intelligence against the larger, more
manifold, and more enduring creative intelligence of poets." Howard
Nemerov draws from Bloom's work the "melancholy" lesson that "the
effort to render English unintelligible is proceeding vigorously
at the highest levels of learning." Hirsch labels Bloom a "minor
critic" with a "narrow obsession" whose theories are "repugnant to
common sense." Even his detractors, however, are forced to concede
what one of them, Robert Towers, calls the "remarkable fact" of
Bloom's influence, an influence wielded not only by the "strength"
of his ideas, but also by his Yale associations, his amazing pro
ductivity, and his frequent appearances as poetry critic and cultural
pundit in a host of different journals. Romantic scholars such as
Stuart Ende and .Thomas Weiskel cite him in footnotes; poets long
desperately for inclusion in the Bloomian canon of crucial contem-
4
poraries; critics as eminent as Joseph Riddel and M.H. Abrams write
articles on his theories. Recently, even the feminist literary
historians Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have employed Bloom's
predominantly patriarchal theories as part of an impressive study
of the woman writer in the nineteenth-century, The Madwoman in the
Attic.
Throughout his twenty-year odyssey to the position of near-
oracular pre-eminence that his adversaries suggest he is all too
happy to accept, Bloom's fundamental subject has never changed. From
Shelley's Mythmaking to Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate
to his latest review in The New Republic, he has eloquently, relent
lessly, and combatively explored one terrain and one terrain alone:
the possibilities and the peril implicit in what the Prologue to
The Visionary Company calls the "faithless faith" of the great
Romantic poets (VC, p. 1), that faith in the redemptive "autonomy"
of the poet's imagination which for Bloom represents the heart of all
"strong" and central poetic vision from Milton through A.R. Ammons
and John Ashbery. That Bloom as a critic has now achieved such a
"strength" and centrality of his own, however embattled, confirms
the acuteness of Wasserman's remarks apropos of Shelley's Mythmaking,
and suggests that we would do well to examine the relationship between
Bloomian critical vision and the spirit of our age. The story of
Romantic poetry and its continuing "influence" that Bloom has offered
over the last two decades, at times with almost intimidating prophetic
intensity, clearly has been, for some readers, the vision that our
5
age demands, just as for others it has come to serve as an exemplary
culmination of all the worst tendencies of contemporary criticism.
This dissertation will study the nature of Bloom's conception of
the Romantic imagination as he develops it in his early books on
the English Romantics, and then extends it through his theory of the
anxiety of influence to cover all poetry written in England and
America since Milton. The salience of the Bloomian critical canon
for our time, the ways in which the fully developed "map of mis
reading" either give or fail to give our age what it needs, will be
closely examined, and the appropriateness of Bloom's Romantic pre
cepts as guides to the evaluation of contemporary poetry, in particu
lar, will be carefully assessed. Bloom has strived, in his many
works since The Anxiety of Influence itself, to elucidate the power
ful "assumptions" about the nature of poetry, Romantic quest, and
the reading experience that have always controlled his criticism.
In so doing, he has elaborated a profound and unsettling rhetoric
of Romanticism based on the imaginative relations between poetic
fathers and poetic ephebes, or sons, that unpersuaded scholars
contend is both inaccurate and reductive when taken as a picture
either of Romanticism itself or of the modern and contemporary
poetry to which the rhetoric is also meant to apply. This disser
tation will examine the assumptions governing Bloom's enterprise,
and the methods, judgments, and values that his criticism displays
in working out those assumptions.
Bloom began as a brilliant, wayward son to his critical fathers
6
Northrop Frye, Frederick Pottle, and M.H. Abrams— the last two
Bloom's teachers and the dedicatees, respectively, of Shelley * s
Mythmaking and The Visionary Company. These two earliest books,
along with their companion volume of 1963, Blake's Apocalypse: A
Study in Poetic Argument, presented a portrait of the six great
English Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats, that was notable for its strong affinities to the work
of Frye on myth and romance, Abrams on the Romantic imagination
and the structure of the Romantic lyric, and Pottle on the "case
of Shelley.""* Chapter 1 of this dissertation will consider Harold
Bloom's early theory of the Romantic imagination, a theory very well
represented by the titles of his first three books. From the very
start, Bloom is drawn to Romantic poetry by the "moral heroism" of
its "agnostic faith in the mythopoeic mode," by the heroism, that
is, of its refusal "to be anything but poetry, anything but myth
making" (SM, p. 118). The greatest Romantic poets, the six of the
"visionary company," are allied, for all their many differences, by
their "common theme of imagination," and by their passionate
Stevensian knowledge "that the theory of poetry is the theory of
life" (VC, p. 3). A sensitive reading of such poetry, Bloom contends
here at the beginning of his career, will discard conventional source-
hunting and mining of extra-literary esoterica for the more serious
task of mapping the "poetic arguments" in the poet's works, arguments,
of course, that have to do solely with the various aspects of the
creative imagination.
7
With the publication of the Blake study, Bloom had already firmly
established himself as one of the most important critics of English
Romantic literature. The abiding presence of William Butler Yeats and
Wallace Stevens even in this early triad of books indicated, however,
that Bloom's own vision would not be content to rest on the "visionary
company" alone. From 1963 to 1970, Bloom published extensively in
journals and various collections on a wide range of topics. Many of
these occasional pieces were gathered in The Ringers in the Tower, a
1971 compilation whose essays on Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Stevens,
Emerson, Whitman, and A.R. Ammons dramatically revealed the capacious
ness and ambition of Bloom's developing critical project. Even more
dramatic, though, was the publication the previous year of Bloom's
massive, controversial, and inescapably brilliant study of the Irish
poet, William Butler Yeats. Entitled simply Yeats, this book broke
Bloom's seven-year absence from major publication with a resounding
blast at the authority of established critical tradition. "Yeats was
a poet very much in the line of vision," begins the Preface to this
new study, and the lines of literary tradition are already being re
drawn; "his ancestors in English poetic tradition were primarily Blake
and Shelley, and his achievement will at last be judged against
theirs." (Yeats, p. v).
For most of this century, of course, no poet had been more
lionized by the critical establishment than Yeats. With Eliot and
Joyce, he stood at the center of the Modernist canon promulgated by
the New Critics and their epigones. As such, he was widely regarded
8
as the greatest lyric poet of his time, perhaps even, the eminent
critic R.P. Blackmur, was moved once to observe, the greatest
lyricist since the seventeenth-century. The tale of Yeats's career
was fashioned to meet the needs of an age that conceived itself to be
in revolt against Romanticism, an age presided over by the severely
"classical" Eliotic theory of an imagination liberated from suspect
personality into the craftsman's adequacy of precise and sinewy
diction, meter, and form. The Modernist masters did not deny that
Yeats had begun as a Romantic, as a dreamy, feverish youth in the
appalling Shelleyan manner, but they saw the rest of his career pre
cisely as a triumph over such inauspicious poetic beginnings. As
Jbhn Hollander has put it, "the consensus of the modernist movement
praised Yeats as the heroic slayer of his own early Romanticism"^;
to the New Critics, Yeats attained greatness only when he discarded
Shelley for Donne, when he hardened his diction, toughened his
mythology and his use of personae, and sharpened his wit to produce
the outstanding body of work from _Ln the Seven Woods in 1904 to the
Last Poems in 1939.
Bloom's central response in Yeats to this Modernist reading was
to counter its assumptions about poetry, the imagination, and the
reading experience, and thereby to change the verdict on the poet by
altering the very grounds of admission into the literary canon.
Bloom does not deny that Yeat's poetry underwent a great trans
formation following The Wind among the Reeds in 1899; he simply
affirms that by and large, despite the frequent excellence of the
9
rhetoric of the middle and later Yeats, it changed for the worse.
The heavily praised Yeats poems central to the Modernist canon,
poems such as "Leda and the Swan," "The Second Coming," "Among School
Children," "The Circus Animals' Desertion," are seen by Bloom to dis
guise with the vigor of their rhetoric the essential emptiness,
incoherence, and occasional viciousness of their imaginative argu
ments. Yeats, for Bloom, all too often fails as a poet over the last
forty years of his life precisely because he forsakes the visionary
power of ,-the pure Romantic imagination that he had displayed in his
youth, because he.capitulates as. a poet to reductive and morally
bankrupt ways of seeing the world that have nothing to do with the
strength of real poetic vision. Yeats as Gnostic, Yeats as hunter
of "spooks" and Dublin theosophists (Yeats, p. 240), Yeats as wor
shipper of the "composite god" of historical process (Yeats, p. 470):
Bloom laments all these components of the Yeatsian vision as funda
mentally anti-poetic, as a going against the grain of Yeats's proper
Shelleyan and Blakean Romanticism. All the personae of the public
Yeats— the self-styled Anglo-Irish bard, the neo-Augustan satirist
of the foibles of political man, the lover of aristocracy and violent
heroism— are repugnant to Bloom as well. Yeats's main problems as a
poet, Bloom claims against most previous critical authority, are,
first, that he desires too frequently to be something other than a
poet— a philosopher, say, or a theosophist, or a statesman— and,
second, that he wants such disastrous things because, finally, he
does not believe strongly enough in the creative power of the Romantic
10
imagination. Chapter 2 of this dissertation will examine the logic
and the methods of Bloom's submission of an established Modernist
master to the tribunal of his "visionary company," and the indictment
of the latecomer on the grounds of a lapsed faith in the visionary
imagination that necessarily follows.
Of course, for many critics and poets in the past decade, the
central importance of Bloom's Yeats has not resided in its revision
ist reading of Yeats himself as a fallen and diminished Romantic,
but in the radically different conception of literary history and
the nature of poetic meaning upon which Bloom's treatment of Yeats
depends. In his Preface to Yeats, Bloom announced that the book was
but "a prolegomenon to a larger study of poetic influence" (p. vii).
When that study was delivered in a remarkable tetralogy of volumes
appearing in the three-year span from 1973 to 1976, the fierceness
of its polemics and the prodigious energy of its execution of an
uncompromising thesis quickly established Bloom as the one inescapable
critic of nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry writing today.
The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 presented the argument that all
"strong" poetry since Milton has been written under a grim and
increasingly oppressive psychology of belatedness which forces poetic
sons to wrestle with the mighty dead of blocking precursors "so as to
clear imaginative space for themselves" (p. 5). A Map of Misreading
in 1975 elaborated a complete theory of reading out of the former's
sketchy list of the six "revisionary ratios" which necessarily obtain
in the Romantic crisis-lyric and across the career of the poet as the
11
latecomer confronts his "melancholy at his lack of priority," and
makes his poems out of "the illusion of freedom, out of a sense of
priority being possible" (AI, p. 96). Kabbalah and Criticism in the
same year added to the roster of sources for Bloom's system, which
already included thinkers as varied as Freud, Vico, Nietzsche,
Kenneth Burke, William Blake, and the scholars Walter Jackson Bate
and Angus Fletcher, by revealing a crucial model for Bloom's map
of revisionary evasions to be the Kabbalistic rhetoric of the medieval
Zohar and its reinterpretation by the sixteenth-century commentators
Hoses Cordovero and Issac Luria. Poetry and Repression in 1976
rounded out the tetralogy with full-scale applications of the by-now
quite elaborate Bloomian theory to texts by Blake, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emerson, Whitman, and
Stevens. The appearance, also in 1976, of another collection of
miscellaneous pieces, Figures of Capable Imagination, and in 1977
of the magisterial study, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate,
marked the end of one of the most astounding periods of productivity
in the history of modern literary scholarship.
The general outline of Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence
is now common critical currency. Ever since Milton justified the
ways of Satan for imaginative man, all poets in the Western tradition
have had to battle with a sublimity, an imaginative achievement,
not their own, an achievement which, precisely by coming before them,
threatens their own claims to imaginative priority and thereby estab
lishes the conditions for meaning in their poems. Poets cannot
12
escape the imperatives of influence; those who attempt to "idealize"
about the bloody parricide of poetic relations will succeed only in
g
creating weak poetry, weak criticism. "Figures of capable imagina
tion," Bloom says, borrowing a phrase from Stevens, "appropriate for
themselves" (AI, p. 5) by strongly, even savagely, misreading the
poems of central precursors, and thus winning through to an achieve
ment of their own— an achievement which only exists, however, by
virtue of its desperate battle with what came before. Bloom's theory,
despite its Oedipal model, thus has "nothing in common with anything
now miscalled 'Freudian literary criticism'" (PR, p. 25), since to
say that a poem is an "achieved anxiety" (AI, p. 96) is precisely not
to say, as orthodox Freudians do, that the poem somehow represents a
sublimation, or an overcoming, of that anxiety. A poem is itself a
process of repression, Bloom contends, not a product of a completed
sublimation, and the stronger the poem— the stronger, that is, its
misinterpretation of a precursor— the more "poetry, revisionism, and
repression verge upon a melancholy identity" which it is the duty of
the critic to map (PR, p. 27).
This mapping of the anxieties of influence also has little to
do with the,conventional scholarly operation known as source study.
"By 'poetic influence' I do not mean the transmission of ideas and
images from earlier to later poets," Bloom cautions (AI, p. 71); in
fact, "what I mean by the study of poetic influence turns source-
study inside out" (FC, p. 9). Since "the meaning of a strong poem
is another strong poem," and since this meaning works on a much
deeper level than the mere mimicking of literary style or borrowing
of received ideas, then the "antithetical" critic’s responsibility
is to assess the ways in which the precursor poem "is being mis
interpreted, revised, corrected, evaded, twisted askew"— in short,
misread— by the latecomer (FC, p. 9). The map of revisions presented
by Bloom in his many books of the seventies attempts to chart the
characteristic evasions of the Romantic crisis-lyric by isolating
six "revisionary ratios," and dividing these into their imagistic and
rhetorical, as well as psychic, components. Clinamen, tessera,
kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades: the names for these
ratios are deliberately flamboyant, as is the "precariously assimila-
9
tive" and sometimes bewildering paradigmatic method behind them.
The motto for Bloom's recent enterprise might very well be Gide's
"Do not understand me too quickly"^— if only because, according to
the Bloomian theory of misreading, too quick an understanding is
likely to sacrifice strength for the chimera of a weak, idealizing,
and finally impossible interpretive accuracy. "There are no inter
pretations but only misinterpretations," Bloom announces in the most
urgent and polemical piece he has ever written, "A Manifesto for
Antithetical Criticism," in The Anxiety of Influence, "and so all
criticism is prose poetry"; it is, in fact, the,."discourse of the
deep tautology— of the solipsist who knows that what he means is
right, and yet that what he says is wrong" (AI, p. 96).
The final four chapters of this study will examine Harold
Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, probing its rhetoric and
the logic of its "deep" tautologies, assessing the nature of its
14
appeal to what Bloom continuously calls our "belated" age, and,
finally, determining the appropriateness of its vision of literary
history and critical canon-making. The development of the anxiety
of influence theory in Bloom's writings correlates directly with the
enlarging of his critical scope over the last fifteen years to
include the work of poets, especially American, who have labored
after the great age of English Romanticism. The theory is presented,
then, as not only a map, but quite consciously a story— a story of
Romanticism as a "vast visionary tragedy" (AI, p. 10) whose heroic
but self-defeating conception of the autonomous imagination, as it
is embodied in the poems of the "visionary company," has determined
the progressive diminishings of poetic creation ever since. Bloom
does not shrink from the dark implications of his story; he is,
as Geoffrey Hartman has observed, "totally a kaka-angelist, a bearer
of bad news."^ If reading, for Bloom, is "a belated and all-but-
impossible act" (MM, p. 3), then the misreading that is strong poetry
and strong criticism grows increasingly desperate, ever more pre
carious, as the shadows of literary history lengthen. "Romantic
tradition differs vitally from earlier forms of tradition," Bloom
says, in that it is "consciously late," and "canon-formation," which,
"for us, has become a part of Romantic tradition," must be performed
in just such a spirit of acutely self-conscious belatedness (MM,
p. 35). Thus, we have Bloom characteristically observing, in a 1975
year-end review of poetry for The New Republic, that "America is the
Evening Land, or the last phase of Mediterranean culture," and going
15
on to evaluate the year's offerings in terms of the melancholy
deduction that "this late in tradition all reading (and writing) is
12
heavily shadowed by the past." The winners in this process of
canon-making, defined as those who have struggled most nobly with the
inevitability of their own imaginative defeat before an overly rich
and now oppressive tradition, are Yeats, Hardy, Hart Crane, and,
above all, Stevens, among the moderns, and Ashbery, Ammons, Robert
Penn Warren, James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and
Seamus Heaney, among more recent poets. The losers are virtually
all those poets associated with the Modernist canon of our New
Critical heritage, especially Eliot, Pound, Auden, and Robert Lowell,
but also Williams, Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and, in our present time,
poets as different as John Berryman, Robert Creeley,, and Allen
Ginsberg.
What kind of authority does Bloom's theory of the anxiety of
influence possess? Is his canon of modern and contemporary poets
based upon fruitful assumptions about the nature of reading and of
poetic meaning, or is it, as detractors complain, an unproductive
exercise in barren and myopic Romantic nostalgia? Why is Bloom such
an important figure within our intellectual climate— at times as
important, it seems, to his opponents as to those who find in his
theories the suasions of true critical prophecy? Chapter 3 will
address the initial question by establishing the contours of the
theory of influence itself, not only in relation to Bloom's chosen
precursors but also, and even more importantly, in relation to his
16
own earlier readings of the "visionary company." Much of Bloom's
work in his latest phase represents a deep and subtle rereading of
his own earlier visionary Romanticism, with the key to the rereading
being his switch from the master trope of "vision" to that of
"influence" as a way of explaining the imaginative life of poetic
works. While Bloom's cunning borrowing from thinkers such as
Nietzsche, Freud, and Luria is important and will be duly considered,
his appropriation of_ himself, especially of his earlier "vision" of
Blake, is even more crucial to his enterprise and will receive most
of my attention. Chapters 4 and 5 follow Chapter 3's mapping of the
theory of influence with a detailed consideration of the logic of
canon-making behind that theory, and with a lengthy description of
the tale of American poetic history delivered by Bloom in his recent
work. Bloom's treatment of Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens is the
subject of Chapter 4, which continues in the expository mode of the
previous chapters as it delineates the methods by which Bloom assimi
lates American poetry into his paradigms for the "anxiety of influ
ence." In Chapter 5 I abandon exposition for an analysis of the costs
of Bloom's campaign to save Romanticism in modern poetry. Probing
the nature and the quality of the choices that Bloom as a canonizer
makes when he moves beyond the realm of the "visionary company," I
first examine his reading of the two contemporary poets whom he has
most frequently and most forcefully lauded, A.R. Ammons and John
Ashbery, and then offer a reading to counter his overly narrow
portrait of the two as heroically spent visionaries in the "central"
17
Emersonian line of American poetry.
Since the issues raised by Bloom's canonizing project for
Romanticism and modern poetry have to do finally with the uses of
poetry and the place of imagination within culture, I conclude this
study with an in-depth examination of Bloom's theories of influence
and reading in the context of other conceptions of poetry, rhetoric,
and Romanticism that have achieved pre-eminence in the critical
climate of the past decade. Both Bloom's method for "misreading”
and his Romantic canon for the modern find their polar opposite in
the postmodern Poundian poetics of Hugh Kenner; his theories of
rhetoric, language, and the nature of poetic meaning feature a
revealingly intimate quarrel with the self-reflexive linguistic
nihilism of his deconstructionist Yale colleague, Paul de Man;
his Romanticism in its final phase stands as a fully explicit
repudiation of the more moderate and more optimistic Wordsworthian
Romanticism of his former teacher, M.H. Abrams. Chapter 6 of this
study will attempt to assess the appeal of Bloom's determinedly
"belated" Romantic cosmogony by treating his theories as part of
a collective dialogue on the responsibilities of poetry and of
criticism in our time. Kenner, de Man, and Abrams serve as exemplary
figures in this discussion not only because they are themsleves
widely regarded as important theorists on the contemporary scene,
but because their work bears so profoundly on the issues raised by
Bloom's enterprise as a whole.
What ia the proper life of poetry? of language? of the imagina
18
tion within culture? What are the responsibilities of the critic to
the poem he reads? to literary history? to a modern culture that,
as many of our finest critics agree, seems to have lost any sense of
the continuing relevance of literature and the humanities? If
Harold Bloom's work is an important contribution to the intellectual
climate of our time, as his many followers so stoutly proclaim, it
is important not because it adds yet another "theory of Romanticism"
to an already crowded and impressive roster, nor because it furnishes
an abundance of fascinating, polemical readings of poetical works
in the Romantic tradition. Rather, Bloom's self-styled critical
prophecy on the fate of Romantic vision, influence, and reading
finally attains the embattled "centrality" it so strongly desires
because it endeavors to answer, with its own highly imaginative "map
of misreading" and its dramatic narrative of the bloody battles of
influence, those larger questions about poetry, imagination, and
culture that continue to trouble us in what Bloom would describe as
our time of most urgent need.
19
Notes for Introduction
^ The following abbreviations of Bloom's books will be used
throughout this dissertation:
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).
Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1963).
Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).
Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).
A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).
Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976).
The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971).
Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959; rpt.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969).
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
(1961; rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971).
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1977).
Yeats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).
Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Seabury Press, 1979).
2
"Elephants and Shelley," rev. of Shelley's Mythmaking,
Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement, 21 Aug. 1959, p. 482.
3
See Wasserman's review, "Shelley for the Present," in Yale
Review, 48 (1959), 609-612. The safer, saner study to which Wasserman
is comparing Shelley's Mythmaking here is Milton Wilson's Shelley's
Later Poetry: A Study of His Prophetic Imagination (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1959). Wilson's book is still highly regarded
by Romanticists today.
4
Here is the relevant publishing information of all the sources
cited in this and the next paragraph, following the order in which
the sources are mentioned:
Kenneth Burke, "Father and Son," rev. of A Map of Misreading,
New Republic, 12 Apr. 1975, pp. 23-24.
Edward Said, "The Poet as Oedipus," rev. of A Map of Misreading,
New York Times Book Review, 13 Apr.'^ 1975, pp. 23-25.
J. Hillis Miller, "J. Hillis Miller on Literary Criticism,"
New Republic, 29 Nov. 1975, pp. 30-33.
AI
BA
FC
KC
MM
PR
RT
SM
VC
ws
Yeats
DC
20
Helen Vendler, "Defensive Harmonies," rev. of Poetry and
Repression, Times Literary Supplement, 27 June 1976, pp. 775-76.
Paul de Man, rev. of The Anxiety of Influence, Comparative
Literature, 26 (1974), 269-75.
Frank Kermode, "Notes Toward a Supreme Poetry," rev. of
Wallace Stevens, New York Times Book Review, 12 June 1977, pp. 9
and 44.
Charles Altieri, rev. of Figures of Capable Imagination and
other books, Criticism, 19 (1977), 350-61.
Christopher Ricks, "A Theory of Poetry, and Poetry," rev. of
Poetry and Repression, New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1976,
p. 6.
Howard Nemerov, "Figures of Thought," rev. of The Anxiety of
Influence and other books, Sewanee Review, 83 (1975), 161-71. The
essay is reprinted in Figures of Thought: Speculations on the
Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays (Boston: David Godine, 1978),
pp. 18-29.
David H. Hirsch, "Deep Metaphors and Shallow Structures," rev.
Kabbalah and Criticism, Poetry and Repression, Figures of Capable
Imagination, and other books, Sewanee Review, 85 (1977), 153-66.
Robert Towers, "The Ways and Means of Literary Critics," rev.
of Kabbalah and Criticism and other books, New York Times Book Review,
21 Dec. 1975, pp. 15-16.
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure
and Psychology of Romantic Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1976).
Joseph Riddel, "Juda Becomes New Haven," rev. of Wallace Stevens,
Diacritics, 10, No. 2 (Summer 1980), 17-34.
M.H. Abrams, "How To Do Things with Texts," Partisan Review, 46
(1979), 566-88.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic:
The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).
^ The Frye and Abrams influences will be discussed extensively
in Chap. 1. For Pottle, see "The Case of Shelley," PMLA, 67 (1952),
589-608; rpt. in M.H. Abrams, ed., English Romantic Poets: Modern
Essays in Criticism, 2nd ed. (1960; rev. ed. New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1975), pp. 366-83.
^ See R.P. Blackmur, "W.B. Yeats: Between Myth and Philosophy,"
in Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1952), pp. 122-23.
^ See John Hollander, "Let a Thousand Blooms...," rev. of
Yeats, Poetry, 117 (1970), 43-45.
8
This is an often repeated Bloomian point. See especially the
discussion of "the dialectics of poetic tradition" in Chap. 2 of A
Map of Misreading, pp. 27-40.
21
9
See A Map of Misreading, p. 89. Bloom is responding here to
Geoffrey Hartman's review of The Anxiety of Influence, "War in Heaven,"
that appeared originally in Diacritics, 3, No. 1 (Spring 1973),
pp. 26-32, and which is reprinted in Hartman's The Fate of Reading
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 41-56. Hartman compares
Bloom unfavorably to Freud. Both writers, he says, rely on "the
analogical method," but Bloom's style is too "precariously assimila
tive," with the result that he cannot always make the rich and echoing
thoughts his own" (Fate, p. 51). Hartman's review is generally lauda
tory, of course.
^ For an uncompromising expression of this dominant Gidean theme,
see the First and Second Notebooks of The Couterfeiters, trans. Dorothy
Bussy and Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), pp. 367-
423.
^ Hartman, The Fate of Reading, p. 46.
^ See "Harold Bloom on Poetry," New Republic, 29 Nov. 1975,
pp. 24-26.
22
CHAPTER ONE: THE VISIONARY COMPANY IN ITS OWN TIME
The theory of the visionary Romantic imagination presented in
Harold Bloom's three earliest books seems in retrospect— an even
more privileged prophetic perspective than that enjoyed by Earl
Wasserman in 1959— to belong fully, almost inevitably, to the New
Age of Romantic Myth that had already been inaugurated in literary
criticism by Northrop Frye in his landmark studies, Fearful Symmetry
and Anatomy of Criticism./ The first Frye book, a study of the
mythic universe of William Blake, appeared in 1947 and revolutionized
a Blakean critical industry that had seldom before veered from its
original nineteenth-century inclination to view the poet as either
an inspired mystic or a raving madman or, more often, some odd
combination of both. Anatomy of Criticism, published ten years later,
drew heavily on Blake's "iconography" of the creative imagination
(FS, p. 421) to elaborate an encyclopaedia of modes, symbols, myths,
and genres envisioned by Frye as presiding over a distinct, and
distinctly definable, literary universe. Harold Bloom, himself
busy formulating, in the years immediately following the publication
of Anatomy of Criticism, a theory of poetry that could double as a
theory towards a revivified critical life, found in the Blakean
categories of his critical father profound instruction in the
2
"mythography" and "mythopoeia" of the life-giving Romantic vision.
Appropriating from Frye important models for describing romance in
23
English literary tradition, and sharing with him, as well, a passion
ate commitment to the "work of imagination" as "a decisive act of
spiritual freedom," a "vision of the recreation of man" (AC, p. 94),
Bloom presented, in the first stage of his career as a critic, an
anatomy of his own— an encyclopaedic chart of the mythmaking creations
of the "visionary company." This chapter will examine Bloom's early
map of Romanticism, and will attempt to elucidate its crucial relation
to a formidable critical precursor.
It is an illuminating exercise tc list some of the main points
Northrop Frye makes in Fearful Symmetry against established readings
of William Blake. Frye argues strenuously that Blake is neither a
mystic nor a madman, neither a Christian nor an esoteric philosopher.
He contends that Blake ij3 a great poet, but that his greatest poems
are not the traditionally admired Songs of "Innocence" and
"Experience" and other shorter lyrics. Rather, Blake's central
achievement resides in the long prophecies of his later years,
prophecies that must be read, Frye emphasizes, as complex visionary
constructions, and furthermore, as visionary constructions bearing
startling affinities to the line of English poetry deriving from
Spenser and Milton, and to the tradition of Hebraic prophecy most
3
strongly associated with the utterances of Ezekiel. What is in
structive here, of course, is that all these very points could easily
be abstracted from Shelley * s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, and
Blake's Apocalypse, as the central contentions of the early Bloom
about Blake. Bloom frequently acknowledges his debt to Frye in his
24
first three books, and specifies, in the Preface to the Revised
Edition of The Visionary Company, that the debt pertains not only
to the interpretation of Blake, but to the criticism of Romantic
4
poetry as a whole. In fact, the two critics share several crucial
beliefs about Romanticism, beliefs developed in both cases out of
an encounter with Blake, but, in Bloom's case, also formulated
through the happy medium of Frye's already established reading of
the poet. BothKcritics, seeing the world through a Blakean lens,
glorify the power of the mythmaking visionary imagination; both
insist, against established critical authority, that visionary poetry
requires a reading in terms of itself, in terms of the types of
visionary moments that it tries to present. And both critics go on,
then, analogizing in Blakean fashion from these types, to construct
an anatomy of the imagination out of the similitudes of imaginative
quest.
Where Frye and Bloom do differ, however, even this early— a
divergence whose extraordinary repercussions for Bloom's later
anxiety of influence theory will be explored in Chapter 4 of this
dissertation— is in their views of the nature of larger literary
tradition, and in their consequent motivation, as critics, for
anatomizing that tradition. Frye, while employing Blake's
"iconography" of the imagination to chart the archetypes, myths,
and symbols of the literary universe, does so in the service of a
conception of literary tradition as an "ideal order" which he has
derived from what he calls the "very fundamental criticism" of
25
T.S. Eliot (AC, p. 18). The role of the critic, then, for Frye, is
to describe and to classify that tradition as rigorously and
capaciously as possible, eschewing direct concern with "value-
judgements" of any kind (AC, p. 20). Bloom, on the other hand,
is inclined from the very start of his career, to view literary
tradition as not an "ideal order" but a competition— a competition
which the critic necessarily confronts, and about which he must
make evaluations and decisions. Bloom’s decision, of course, in
Shelley's Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, and Blake's Apocalypse,
is to valorize the visionary imagination almost exclusively, and thus
to erect— or resurrect— a much more circumscribed canon than that
which Frye charts in Anatomy of Criticism. The apparent "objectivity"
of Frye’s method, as he maps not only .romance, but comedy, tragedy,
and satire, not only myths, but symbols, modes, and genres, does not
for long obscure the fundamental fact that romance nonetheless
remains for him first among equals in its status as a profound
mediation between the divine and the human in the tales man tells.
Bloom* in contrast, presents himself quite consciously as a Romantic
critic writing about a body of Romantic poetry whose values and
central concerns he not only defines but shares; the precarious
but redemptive power of the autonomous visionary imagination is
his sole subject— and his own passionate "value-judgement" against
his chief competition, the anti-Romantic doctrines of the New Critical
regimen that had dominated the American academy for three decades.
There are four central characteristics of the visionary
26
imagination as it is defined by Bloom, under the strong influence
not only of Frye but of M.H. Abrams, in his early triad of books on
the English Romantics. First, the visionary imagination represents
a complex triumph over all that is merely "given," especially that
natural world whose charms are potentially a trap for the creative
man. Second, the visionary impulse, in struggling to achieve
expression, characteristically enacts a quest, a journey whose
travelings can be mapped as a distinctive kind of Romantic crisis-
lyric. Third, the moments of pure vision, or pure mythmaking, in
a Romantic poem, the moments approximating Blake's "Pulsation of
5
the Artery," are evanescent, as the visionary imagination, after
a brief transparent flash, necessarily lapses from sublimity back
into the constrictions of mere language. Fourth, this sublimity,
since it exists by virute of its passage beyond all context to an
absolute purity of vision, has, then, in some sense, no referent,
and is always focused on the problematics of pure visionary desire—
the desire, in Wordsworth's terms, for "something evermore about
to be."^
Several remarks that Bloom makes in his 1971 Preface to the
Revised Edition of The Visionary Company furnish a useful framework
for discussing his view of the place of nature in Romantic poetry.
First, Bloom observes that the book's "central contention" is the
radical one that' "the Romantics were not poets of nature" (VC, p. vii).
Second, he claims against a number of "negative critics," including
C.S. Lewis and Rene Wellek, that his study does "not translate" the
27
mind-nature dialectic of Romantic poetry solely "into Blakean
categories," but rather seeks out "the crucial analogues and
) 7
rivalries that connect these poets ..." (VC, p. vii). That
many commentators besides Lewis and Wellek have found the second
claim to be rather unconvincing suggests key questions about the
early Bloom enterprise: what precisely is the source of his vision
of the mind and nature in Romantic poetry, and what is the critical
context in which we can best appreciate that vision?
M.H. Abrams, with whom Bloom studied at Cornell University,
gave us, in his classic 1953 volume, The Mirror and the Lamp, our
central, and perhaps by now rather shopworn, metaphors for the
contribution of Romantic aesthetics on the issue of mind and nature.
The first figure, the classical one, provides an emblem of the mind
as a "reflector of external objects," an accurate recorder of the
g
givens of the sensory world. The second, marking "the prevailing
romantic conception of the poetic mind," sees the imagination in
creation as a "radiant projector" that imbues the life of the given
world with a profound life of its own. Bloom, in his three early
volumes, meets his teacher on the question of Romantic mind, and then
extends the light of the lamp even further. "What does ally" the
Romantics, he says in the first chapter of The Visionary Company,
echoing both Abrams and Frye, is "one of the great traditions of
English poetry, the prophetic and Protestant line of Spenser and
Milton, which reaches its radical limits in the generation after
Wordsworth" (pp. 7-8). The "characteristic concern" of this line,
28
he says, is "with the double transformation of the individual and
of nature," a transformation which involves the "apocalyptic ambition"
, to "humanize nature, and to naturalize the imagination" (p. 8).
While for Abrams, whose central Romantic protagonist is always
Wordsworth, the lamp of the Romantic mind remains a "projector,"
the poet’s eyes and ears, to paraphrase "Tintern Abbey," only half-
creating what they also perceive as independent objects, for early
Bloom, who loves Wordsworth but canonizes the apocalyptic humanist
Blake, the lamp is a much more radical power, a power moving away from
a mere naturalizing of imaginative life toward the transformation
of both man and nature into the lineaments of a solely visionary
imagination.
Several passages from Blake that especially preoccupy Bloom
might be taken as the guiding light for his reading of the other
Romantics on the question of the relation between mind and nature.
The first, from Blake's Milton, one of the longer prophecies so
important to both Bloom and Frye and crucial to the later development
of Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence, tells us that
"The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself"
(2.32.33). That is, the "Real Man," for Blake, ijs the "Imagination"
(CW, p. 878); the visions of the intensely creative imagination,
the visions— to use the Buberian language of Shelley's Mythmaking—
of the "I-Thou" relation, create completely for us that world of
unmediated communion or purely subjective relational events that
gives us true life. The sweep of such a visionary power is best
29
seen in another key Blakean passage, this from the conclusion to
Jerusalem, Blake's longest and most difficult prophecy. Here the
four Zoas, the four great powers or faculties in every man whose
disunity has brought about the fallen world of experience, "take
their places," Bloom says, "in a wonderfully active Eden" (VC, p. 122):
And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which
bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect,
Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination... (4.98.28-32)
This could be the text for Bloom's own reading of Romanticism.
"Visionary forms," for Bloom as well as Blake, are not merely pro
jections onto the already given of the phenomenal world; at their
best, as Blake's attempt to build a myth of Man regenerate through
the "Human Form Divine" of the active imagination shows, they totally
create for us the only life that really matters, the life-in-life
of vision. Bloom uses Blake precisely to reverse the conventional
notion that, above all, the Romantics longed for a union or a
"oneness" with a natural world and a cosmos that could somehow
save them. Against this popular reading, he cites the complex
Blakean conception of nature— a conception which he is at pains to
show does not, after all, merely present simple, static oppositions.
Blake's rejection of the natural world, Bloom says, is "dialectical
or provisional" (BA, p. 336) insofar as the "unorganized innocence"
of the state of Beulah depicts to a "limited but genuine extent" a
nature that is "paradisal" (BA, p. 298). However, Bloom goes on
immediately to claim, this "soft" view of nature, found mainly in
30
the over-esteemed early Blake, is later transcended in the much
greater and more authentic long prophecies, poems whose emphasis is
on "the extent to which nature is fallen," the extent to which
"the attractions of Beulah" begin "to be eclipsed by its dangers"
(BA, p. 298). The danger of too great a faith in the Beulah-world
of nature proceeds tautologically from the primary and defining
value of the creative imagination; too large a final faith in nature,
for Bloom, means, simply enough, too weak a faith in vivifying autono
mous vision.
Upon this Blakean distinction Bloom builds the entire evaluative
framework of his early canon of Romantic poetry. In some sense, he
tells us, all the "great Romantics . . . distrusted the Beulah of
earthly repose, the natural garden of a world" that they "longed
for," and yet that was so dangerous for them. In some sense, all
the "major" Romantics passed beyond Beulah "to a myth that promised
a humanism that could transcend nature’s illusions" (VC, p. 407).
And in still another more precise sense, then, the story of Romantic
poetry for Bloom must be a story of successes and failures in
grappling with the imperatives of the visionary impulse, successes
and failures to be charted in comparative fashion on the basis of
relative attainment to Blakean ideals. In this scheme, Shelley is
returned to a position of pre-eminence as an apocalyptic humanist
on the same level of aspiration, if not attainment, as Blake himself,
while the established Romantics of critical tradition— Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, and Keats— are, in varying degrees, devalued.
31
Bloom, in fact, has almost nothing to say about Byron, apparently
including him in The Visionary Company (44 pages out of 465) mainly
as a gesture of hollow and rather unconvincing obeisance to that
very tradition of reading Romanticism which most of the rest of the
volume seeks to overthrow. Byron’s career is encapsulated for us
in a few trenchant lines. Lacking "faith in his own imaginings"
(p. 281), he "never left the world, nor could he ever abandon any
of the existing conceptions of it" (p. 3). As the "most social" of
the Romantics and therefore the "least Romantic," he is "an unwilling
prophet" of the visionary sensibility and, finally, a failure (p. 3).
Coleridge, the one Romantic not only tolerated, but positively
esteemed, by the New Critics, receives even less attention than
Byron— 39 pages of The Visionary Company, none of them on the
Biographia Literaria, none of them on Coleridge's voluminous writings
in theology and philosophy, which, for Bloom, have "only a life in
death" (p. 237). Whereas Blake discovered in the theory of poetry
an authentic theory of life, the "philosopher-theologian" in the
"official" Coleridge (p. 21) "found what seemed a rock to build
upon," but turned out to be, for the poet, "only a fear of blind
matter, and the torments of the formless, a poet's true Hell" (p. 235).
"Coleridge could not be a fanatic, even of the Imagination" (p. 288),
Bloom tells us, and this is what, after the visionary triumphs of
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," destroyed him
as a poet.
The crucial antipode to Blake in Bloom's discussion of nature's
32
ambivalent place in imaginative activity is, of course, Wordsworth.
For Bloom, the critic's most salient task in reading Wordsworth
is to explain the forty-year senescence of the poet after his one
great decade of achievement. Just as Coleridge’s "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner" is read in The Visionary Company as a foreshadowing
of "the central fate of its creator, when the activity of the whole
soul will yield to torpor" (p. 212), so, too, all the monuments
of Wordsworth's visionary power at its apex— "Tintern Abbey,"
The Prelude, the great Ode—-are examined for clues as to the imminent
and precipitous decline in imaginative strength of their creator.
These clues center, as we might expect, in what Bloom sees as the
precarious Wordsworthian myth of a benevolent Nature, a myth
explicated time and again in The Visionary Company in terms of
the contrasting Blakean vision of the apocalyptic "Real Man" of the
imagination. First, though, Wordsworth is given his due. He is,
Bloom says, "the first poet ever to present our human condition in
its naturalistic truth, vulnerable and dignified, and irreducible,
not to be explained away in any terms, theological or analytical,
but to be accepted as what it is" (p. 140). Wordsworth's belief in
the "goodness of the natural heart," his "naturalistic celebration
of the possibilities inherent in our condition, here and now” (p. 128),.
found embodiment in "a heroic mode of naturalism" (p. 198) whose
"human glory" was bequeathed to poets as luminous as Keats and, in
our century, Wallace Stevens (p. 128).
And yet, for all of Wordsworth's grandeur, the Wordsworthian
33
myth of a benevolent nature is suspect— a perilous flirtation with
the cunning charms of Beulah. Blake himself condemned Wordsworth’s
doctrine of the exquisite congruence of "external World" and
"individual Mind" (PW, p. 590) with the terse dismissal: "You
shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted"
(CW, p. 784). His condemnation— and perhaps Northrop Frye's interpre-
9
tation of it in Fearful Symmetry — are implicit in much of Bloom's
commentary on Wordsworth in The Visionary Company. If for Blake the
Imagination either "totally destroys Nature and puts a thoroughly
Human form in its place, or else Nature destroys the Imagination,"
then for Wordsworth, "as for Stevens, the earth is enough," and poetry
is rightfully offered as a sort of "commentary" on the relation be
tween our imaginative lives and the sensuous givens of the neutral
world (VC, pp. 127-28). The danger in this myth of a benevolent
nature meeting a lamp-like imagination is that it does not allow the
poet ever to consider that "more sinister manifestation of Nature-as-
temptress" represented by figures such as Keats's Belle Dame,
Blake's Vala, and the duplicitous "Shape all light" of Shelley's
late fragment, "The Triumph of Life" (VC, p. 144). The result, says
Bloom, is that when at last Wordsworth does darken his vision of
nature in the final poems of his great decade, "Peele Castle" and
"Ode to Duty," he cannot "bear to indict Nature" for having deceived
him, and so "turns . . . upon himself," dismissing the "very bliss
of solitude he once held essential for vision," and thus in effect,
abandoning that "autonomy of his own imagination” which was both his
34
glory and "his freedom" (VC, pp. 187-88).
This reading of Wordsworth shows quite strikingly the extremity
of Bloom's stand on issues crucial to Romanticism. His claim that
he has not translated the other poets of the visionary company into
his own iconoclastic Blakean categories is difficult to endorse in
the light of comments such as the following on Wordsworth's career,
made by way of explicating Blake's "The Book of Thel" and "The
Crystal Cabinet":
. . . "Tintern Abbey," the "Intimations" ode, and "Peele
Castle" trace the stages by which the bard of Beulah,
desperately trying to maintain a vision of a married
land against the lengthening shadow of organic mortality,
gradually gives way to orthodoxy and timidity and at
last falls into the Ulro of the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets,"
and beyond that, the final abyss of the sonnets favoring
capital punishment. This cycle from the poet of "possible
sublimity" and "something evermore about to be" to the
Urizen who could write of "Fit retribution, by the moral
code," the natural cycle that Beulah alone as a vision
must at the last come to. (VC, p. 31)
And if there is justice in feeling that the imaginative life of
Wordsworth perhaps is distorted when rigidly charted according to
a "visionary" geometry derived from Blake, so too, obviously, can
a strong case be made that Bloom's readings misrepresent the other
great Romantics as well, and for the same reason. "La Belle Dame
Sans Merci," for example, yields easily to a reading precisely
the opposite of Bloom's own, if one chooses to see the temptress in
that poem as a figure not of seductive nature but of the Romantic
imagination itself. Certainly Keats, with his frequent broodings
over what, in the "Ode to a Nightingale," he calls the "deceiving
35
elf" of imaginative "fancy," gives us ample reason to read the
poem in that fashion.^ That Bloom chooses not to see Keats ever
as an ironist of the imagination, that he chooses instead to read
Keats solely according to the principles of Blakean "vision," is,
of course, just the sort of highly polemical act which alienated
many of his reviewers at the time— and which has helped him since
to gain the uncommon fame as a critic that he enjoys today.
The other three characteristics of the visionary imagination
presented by Bloom in his early work— its quest patterns, its
brief moments of epiphanic and sublime transparency, and its final
nonreferentiality— are all interrelated, and all derive from the
initial postulate that, at best, the visionary imagination triumphs
over and transforms the recalcitrant object-ness of the natural world.
Bloom's emphasis on the quest motif in romance owes much to Frye's
seminal schema in Anatomy of Criticism, which posits all four myth
forms, romance, comedy, tragedy, and irony or satire, as "episodes
in a total quest-myth" (AC, p. 215). Quest-romance is distinguished
by its complete tripartite form, featuring an agon or conflict, a
pathos or death-struggle, and an anagnorisis or discovery, the last
of which involves, says Frye, the "recognition of the hero, who has
clearly proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the
conflict" (AC, p. 187). The romance, as the "nearest of all literary
forms to the wish-fulfillment dream" (AC, p. 186), thus accomplishes
a crucial mediation, Frye goes on to say, insofar as its hero,
although mortal, nonetheless seeks and displays attributes associated
36
with divinity.
Bloom in his early work, and in his important transitional essay
of 1968, "The Internalization of Quest Romance,"'*''*' both assimilates
and profoundly transforms Frye's anatomy of agonistic Romantic quest.
Whereas for Frye "the meaning of a poem, its structure of imagery,
is a static pattern" (AC, p. 158), and its archetypes, thus, in
Geoffrey Hartman’s apt phrase, "neo-Kantian forms that serve to
12
objectify our experience of art," for Bloom, from the very start,
the meaning of a poem resides in the dynamic, temporal relation
between the poet's desires and his poem's quest toward their fulfill
ment. Frye's consciously spatial model of the quest-myth depends
on his belief that the critic comes after the reading experience,
and can then objectively describe the static, atemporal pattern
of the literary work. In Bloom’s hands, the theory of quest is
transformed into an agon, fully engaging the critic-as-reader, of
the Romantic warrior in a death-struggle first with nature, then with
the even more formidable foe of a blocking agent within the self that
would seek to thwart the poet's quest for visionary powers.
"Internalized" in this fashion, the quest motif in Romanticism is
embodied in what Bloom calls "psychologized versions of the ancient
patterns" of search and attendant "alienation" (VC, p. 399), patterns
whose end is to confer upon the quester the Romantic equivalent of
divinity: intense imaginative activity. In The Visionary Company,
Bloom tends to emphasize the alienation made inevitable by the
inability of nature to furnish an adequate and responsive context
37
for the immensity of the quester's desires. The key texts for this
discussion are Shelley's "Alastor" and Keats's "Endymion"— both poems,
Bloom says, powerful versions of Wordsworth's "The Excursion," and
both featuring the same preoccupation with the exigencies of the
isolate, and wandering, visionary self. Readers who might object
that such a reading is fruitful for "Alastor" but a grave distortion
13
of the rich, and perhaps partly Platonic, tensions of "Endymion,"
are advised that there is a discrepancy in the poem between Keats's
overt emphasis and the real, if hidden, drama behind it. The real
quest of Endymion, Bloom says, ends with the youth's emergence from
the Cave of Quietude, called "a den of Ulro, a deathly isolation"
(VC, p. 376), and his acceptance, unlike Shelley's relentless hero
in "Alastor," of the need to remain in the ordinary world. "Endymion"
is thus wrested into the confines of Blakean geometry, pitting the
visionary imagination against the charming but dangerous phenomenal
world of our ordinary lives, but to do so Bloom is forced to dismiss
the remaining section of the poem, that featuring the vanishing of
Endymion with the Indian maid newly transformed into a moon goddess,
as "a mechanical end," a "desperate" and "premature union" of "the
real with the ideal" (VC, p. 378). It was, of course, just this sort
of critical operation which led reviewers of the time such as the
ananymoiis TLS scribe mentioned in the Introduction to accuse Bloom
of thesis-mongering— a charge that has only intensified with the
years.
While The Visionary Company highlights the first stage of
38
quest romance, the disjunction between nature and the infinite
Blakean desires of the imaginative man, "The Internalization of
Quest Romance" takes as its subject the larger and, for Bloom, even
more important second stage, the drama of the imagination confronting
that in the poet's own self which threatens visionary flight. We
would anticipate the story of Bloom's development by lingering for
too long here on this crucial essay— it will be discussed at some
length in Chapter 2 as a necessary prelude to the culminating theory
of the anxiety of influence— but it is instructive to note at this
point that the enlarged scope of Bloom's later conception of quest
romance is really but the logical consequence of his commitment from
the start to an exaltation of pure vision over nature. In "the Real
Man, the Imagination, stage," Bloom observes in characteristically
Blakean language, "nature is the immediate though not the ultimate
antagonist." The final foe "to be overcome," he says, the
"recalcitrance in the self," is, in fact, "what Blake calls the
Spectre of Urthona" and Shelley "the unwilling dross that checks
the spirit's flight" (RT, p. 22). With the quest thus fully
internalized through the terminological offices of one of the most
dread of Blake's four Zoas, Bloom is able to make explicit, in this
key transitional essay, what had been often only implicit in
The Visionary Company: not just "Alastor," not just "Endymion," but
all Romantic poetry is a questing "made in the name of a humanizing
hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity" (RT, p. 15). All
Romantic poetry, then, is a crisis-poetry featuring as hero the poet
himself and his "creative process" locked in a deathly struggle for
39
power with "imaginative inhibitions of every kind," especially
those arising from within (RT, p. 19). In The Visionary Company,
Bloom had accepted Frye’s Blakean definition of an "apocalypse" as
"the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content
of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer
to being human than to being inanimate" (AC, p. 119). Now in an
essay written seven years later, he confronts more fully the impli
cations of that definition, and, for the first time in his published
work, explicitly criticizes Frye for an inadequate treatment of the
romance form. Frye "still speaks of the Romantics," Bloom observes,
as "seeking a final unity between man and his nature," but this, in
fact, is precisely not what they are seeking, at least not in the
"purest version of the quest form" (RT, pp. 20-21) as it is now
seen by Bloom to be delivered in the "greatest" and "most drastic"
Romantic quests, Blake's Jerusalem and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound,
respectively (RT, p. 29). Against a Frye anatomy that clings too
closely, for-all its:own Blakean impulses, to the rhythms of nature
and natural recurrence as a basis for charting the literary universe,
Bloom now posits, in the last phase before his turn to influences
and anxieties in Yeats, an imaginative iconography featuring the
problematics of "desire wholly taken up into the imagination"
(RT, p. 24), and imagination attempting then to fulfill a desire
that can never be fully realized by the act of writing the poem.
This conception of the Romantic imagination as an infinite and
inexpressible desire in the process of trying to utter itself is
40
crucial to an accurate understanding of Bloom in all his phases,
including the very earliest in Shelley1s Mythmaking, for it not only
underlies his notion of Romantic "mythopoeia" and the cherished
Romantic Sublime, but also, in turn, dictates the kind of reading
he gives Romantic and modern poetry— a reading which, again from the
very start, challenges the main assumptions of the Modernist approach
to literary texts. In Shelley's Mythmaking, The Visionary Company,
and Blakers Apocalypse, Bloom tends to distinguish between two types
of sublime Romantic achievement, the first a lesser epiphanic moment
still tied to the world of nature, and the second a greater apoca
lyptic rapture which, if only for one brief, purely visionary moment,
seems to leave all the.entrapments of natural context behind.
Bloom's definition of "epiphany" as the point "where a cyclical order
of nature and a higher eternal order come together" (VC, p. 14) is
taken directly from Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, where it appears
14
to have been gleaned from Blake. Bloom, in The Visionary Company,
makes the Blakean connection explicit; the point of epiphany in Blake
is "the upper limit of Beulah," from which we "look down benevolently
to the natural world, free of its cyclic variation, and up to the
eternal world," but from which, as well, "we are still more involved
in nature than the apocalyptic world need be" (p. 14). Wordsworth,
not surprisingly, furnishes the central examples of the creative
beauty, as well as the potential dangers, of this vantage point.
Bloom cites, in particular, the great passage from Book 6 of
The Prelude, in which Wordsworth describes his reaction to his
41
guide's assertion that they "had crossed the Alps":
Imagination— here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human
speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's
abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
'I recognise thy glory:' in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has re
vealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make
abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or
old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be. (6.592-608)
Even here, Bloom notes, in a passage verging on the purely
visonary, Wordsworth's emphasis is naturalistic, his senses are
"transcended by a natural teaching" (VC, p. 153). Yet, it is the
transcendence itself, or, rather, the imagination's marshalling of
strength to achieve it, which is for Bloom "the vital element" in
the passage, and, as we have already seen, it is the failure of
Wordsworth to retain such strength that dooms him, after his few
brief years of greatness, to the "Ulro" of an orthodox death-in-life
as a poet. The explanation for this failure now comes clearly into
focus as being entirely Blakean. If a poet, having attained a point
of epiphany, does not then pass beyond the gate of upper Beulah to
the fully apocalyptic world, then "he is doomed," Bloom says, "to
42
the vision of eternal recurrence and Beulah becomes the static
state of Ulro" (VC, p. 30).
The greatest moments of sublimity in Romantic poetry come,
Bloom claims, from the sudden "raptures of prophecy" in Blake and
Shelley (VC, p. 146), and it is to the crucial sharings, and the
equally important divergences, of these two Romantic prophets that
we must turn if we are completely to capture Bloom’s own "visionary"
contribution to the Romantic tradition. We have by now elucidated
the tremendous importance of Blake to Bloom; we have seen how ex
tensively and how resourcefully Bloom uses the iconography of
imagination provided by both Blake, and Frye on Blake, to make a
map of his own for Romanticism. Yet, Bloom's first book, after all,
is about Shelley, and there is ample evidence throughout his writings
to suggest that Shelley, not Blake or Stevens or Emerson, remains
the poet closest to his own heart's desires. Why is Shelley so
important to Bloom? Do Shelley's visionary flights, like Blake's,
condition in any way the terms of Bloom's reading of the other poets
of the visionary company? The Introduction to Shelley's Mythmaking
establishes a telling framework within which to answer these
questions— and to assess the nature of that Sublime central to
Bloom's reading of the Romantics. Bloom's main contention in
Shelley's Mythmaking is that Shelley is neither a Christian nor a
Platonist, but rather, a profound and passionate poet of the "mytho-
poeic" mode, a mode defined by Bloom as featuring unmediated relations
within the realm of the poet's consciousness, from which the poet
43
may then "dare to make his own abstractions, rather than adhere"
to the formulations of already established myths (SM, p. 8).
Shelley, Bloom says, stands with Blake as the greatest mythopoeic
poet of Romanticism but also crucially diverges from the earlier,
more confident Romantic prophet insofar as Blake was "a system
maker, a mythographer who catalogues his own meanings" (SM, p. 10),
while the more cynical Shelley gives us a myth that remains "quite
simply . . . myth: the process of its making, and the inevitability
of its defeat" (SM, p. 8). Thus, a key passage from Blake would be
something like the following,.from Book 2 of Milton:
"Judge then of thy- Own Self: thyr Eternal Lineaments explore,
"What is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihilable.
"The Imagination is not a State: it is the< Human Existence itself.
"Affection or Love becomes a State when divided from Imagination.
"The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State
"Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created.
"Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated: Forms cannot:
"The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife,
"But their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever. Amen. Hallelujah!"
(2.32.30-38)
This, the speech of the Seven Angels to Milton summarizing
Blake’s doctrine of States, is, for Bloom, a moment of sublimity,
but the sublimity is a function of the greatness of Blake's "argument,"
of the "moving passion” with which Blake believes "in the truth of
the awakened imagination, and the holiness of the affections of the
altogether human as opposed to merely natural heart" (BA, p. 364).
In other words, the grandeur of this passage for Bloom resides in
what the passage says, in the mythographic cataloguing of the
imagination which it provides— and which Bloom then uses as a key
44
to his own charting of that visionary impulse which he, too,
believes is "Human Existence itself." Contrast this to a sublime
moment in Shelley, the conclusion of "Epipsychidion," where the
poet realizes, with passionate woe, the impossibility of attaining
an earthly paradisal union with Emilia:
We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love's rare Universe,
Are chains of "lead around its flight of fire—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!^
Mythopoeia such as this from Shelley is read by Bloom, even
in Shelley's Mythmaking, through the frame of Blake's mythographic
account of the imagination. Against "the pastoral vision of Beulah-
land" in the preceding two hundred lines of the poem, Shelley is now
seen to dramatize the defeat of the poem's myth, a defeat inherent
in the myth's "paradoxical double commitment to an awareness of
human limitations and to the transcendent value of an infinite
desire" (SM, p. 218). While this passage, like Blake's, is read
for what it says, for its imaginative argument, the sublimity of
the lines here, that which moves us in them, inheres in their
45
passionate acknowledgement of the obverse side of the Blakean
universe. This passage, Bloom contends, achieves grandeur by
recognizing the inability of either earthly relationships or
linguistic expression to meet the immensity of the imagination's
desires. "Epipsychidion," by dramatizing the inadequacy of language
and Beulah-love, thus extends the argument of "Alastor" on the
trap of nature, and completes, for Bloom, the passage of the Sublime
beyond all context to a region where desire confronts only the
infinitude, rapturous, ineffable, and finally tuatologous, of its
own longings. Shelley, as the prototypical Romantic prophet of
myth that is its own subject and its own inevitable defeat, tempera
mentally is much closer to Bloom than Blake ever could be, precisely
insofar as Shelley's "moral heroism," his "agnostic faith in the
mythopoeic mode" (SM, p. 118), speaks more intimately and with
greater urgency to Bloom's sense of the temper of our own time, a
time seen by Bloom even in his early work to be belated, "atomized,"
and faithless (RT, p. 18). If the very success of Blake's myth—
"possibly the most formidable and organized ever created by a single
man" (SM, p. 117)— guarantees its use by Bloom as a mythographic
map for the questings of imaginative men, then the very defeat of
Shelley's ensures that the modern mapmaker will search always, and
only, for the Sublime of that drama of doomed desire which ascends,
like "a larger intelligibility" for our tormented time (VC, p. 464),
out of the words, so inadequate and impoverished, on the page.
And. thus we arrive at the peculiarities of Bloom's method for reading
46
Romanticism— and at the stridencies of his rhetoric against all
other readers who would deny the salience of pure Romantic vision.
Since literary tradition for Bloom is a competition and not
an ideal order, his first three books are best viewed as an extended
polemic against the tradition immediately preceding him, the tradition
which, through most of the twentieth-century, had slighted all the
Romantics but Coleridge, and which had been especially contemptuous
in its dismissal of the prophet of humanized apocalypse, Shelley.
Bloom's battles with the spectre of Irving Babbitt's "New Humanism,"
with the New Criticism of Tate, Ransom, Brooks, and Warren, with,
finally and perhaps most fiercely, what he calls the "Neo-Christian
matrix of modern Anglo-Catholic letters" represented by T.S. Eliot,
16
W.H. Auden, and C.S. Lewis, are based upon fundamental differences
in values, assumptions, and beliefs about virtually every form of
cultural activity known to engage man. Essentially, Bloom rejects
any orthodox cosmogony, especially Christian, which would see man
as a limited creature, and which would, under the rubric of con
ceptions as varied as Original Sin, classicism, decorum, and societal
duty, invoke that limitation as right and necessary. For Bloom,
again under the strong light of his own radical Blakean lamp, ortho
dox cosmogonies are but myths grown old and rigid, systems that can
only enslave. Against all such stale myths, against what he sees
as their limited and limiting view of man, Bloom preaches the apoca
lyptic humanism of Blake and Shelley, and presents a reading method
to go with it, a method derived directly from the central poems
47
of Romanticism as Bloom conceives it and intended completely to
counter the established reading regimen of his critical adversaries.
Where the New Critics, seeing literary tradition as an ideal order,
habitually took care to maintain a certain distance from the works
they examined, a distance meant to serve as a correlative to the
"objectivity"— the wit, irony, and paradox— of the work itself,
Bloom, basing his reading method on a powerful but narrow definition
of Romanticism as a primarily visionary mode, fully engages the
imaginative life of the works he admires, and thus replaces New
Critical objectivity with his own distinctly passionate advocacy of,
and prophecy about, the Romantic cause.
Bloom's readings in Shelley's Mythmaking, The Visionary Company,
and Blake's Apocalypse are best described as visionary paraphrases.
His characteristic method, one owing much to Blake and Frye, is to
quote a passage from a poem, summarize its "imaginative argument,"
and then elucidate the analogues and parallels obtaining between
that argument and the arguments of other poems by poets of the
visionary company, especially Blake and Shelley. One bewildered
reviewer of the original edition of The Visionary Company, Robert 0.
Preyer, described the process in particularly witty fashion:
There is little in the way of critical evaluation:
"from this point the poem soars into greatness," we
read. Other poems are called "brilliant," "profound,"
"superb," or "beautiful," and the reader's attention
is directed instead toward a tissue of correspondencies,
analogies, analogues, and similarities which the author
constantly observes as he reflects on the entire corpus
of works which belong within the autonomous world of the
Visionary Mode. One gets the impression that all these
48
works are simultaneously present to the author's
consciousness at any given moment— and that he is
incapable of forgetting. The result is astonishing,
but not infrequently astonishment and admiration are
followed by claustrophobia, the sense of being
imprisoned in a suffocating House of Art which in
turn dissolves into the appearance of a House of
Mirrors.
In his fits of total recall Mr. Bloom appears
to throw down on the page hot slabs of melded relation
ships rather than paragraphs.17
A cryptic observation that Preyer goes on to make— "it is as
thought the author cannot endure the presence of an occasional
poem"— takes us even closer to the heart of Bloom's visionary method
of reading. Bloom, as he will later clarify through his intense
valorization of Emerson, is in love with the idea of "a poetry never
18
yet written" — a poetry, furthermore, that never could be written
since to write a poem is, in the Buberian language of Shelley's
Mythmaking, already to transform the unmediated "Thou" of the poet's
conceptions into an object, into the "It" of the object-world of
unredeemed experience (SM, p. 89). Thus, a poem for Bloom is not,
cannot be, what it is for the New Critics: an artifact, words on
a page. Such a conception has in it the chill of death-in-life
for him. Rather, Bloom says, a poem must be seen as the promise
of a "fulfillment" that "is never the poem itself but the poem beyond
that is made possible by the apocalypse of imagination" (RT, p. 19).
Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry," called by Bloom "the most profound
discourse on'poetry in the language" (BA, p. 334), traces the
etiology of the inevitable fall into language of this promise that
remains always evermore about to be: "... but when composition
49
begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious
poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a
19
feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the Poet."
Bloom, interested solely in the transcendent desire that exists
beyond, or before, its inevitable limitation into language, reads
the poems of the visionary company not for the words on the page,
then, but for the visionary gleam those words may embody, and for
the battle with limitation that the presence of the poem-as-object
implies. All poems thus become commentaries on the process of their
own mythmaking, an activity that Bloom sees as nowhere more profound
than in Shelley, and best typified there by the battle for meaning
in the much belabored "Ode to the West Wind." The charges against
Shelley by modern critics such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, and
Allen Tate, are commonplaces in our critical lore, and are well
summed by Bloom's teacher, Frederick Pottle, in his 1952 essay,
"The Case of Shelley." Of all the Romantics, Shelley most incurred
the contempt of an age in revolt against Romanticism. Called
variously sentimental, self-dramatizing, self-pitying, immature,
febrile, and, most damning of all, a poor and a careless craftsman,
Shelley was transformed by the New Critics from one of the most
praised and popular poets of the nineteenth century into the man
20
on the dump of a Romantic tradition gone rancid with age.
Bloom's impassioned resuscitation of Shelley's reputation is
based on his contention that the New Critics, led astray by unpro
ductive and pernicious assumptions about the role of poetry in
50
society and about the place of imagination in poetry, grievously
misread the man who was the most complex and the most "urbane" of all
the Romantic prophets. If some of Shelley's followers have done him
a disservice in attempting to reduce his profoundly individualistic
mythopoeia to the doctrines of a Plato or a Godwin, an even graver
disservice has been wrought, Bloom says, by those like Leavis and
Tate who have failed, because of their assumption that poetry can
never, and ought never, to affirm the possibility of an "I-Thou"
relation, even to read Shelley's lines with a minimum critical compe
tence (SM, p. 74). "Of all the Romantics," Bloom contends, Shelley
"needs the closest reading" (VC, p. 282), but, as we might expect,
what Bloom means by a close reading has little to do, in Shelley's
Mythmaking and The Visionary Company, with that painstaking New
Critical attention to the manifold ambiguities and paradoxes of the
poem as a crafted object on a page which was de rigueur in the
academy of the time. Rather, since Bloom's readings reflect his
opposite sense that the object on the page somehow exists as a
commentary, thwarted and cryptic, on the problematics of its own
impetus as a visionary creation, what we get is a determined
devaluation of the image as a staple of poetic discourse, and a
corollary reaffirmation of the importance of poetic propositions.
"Once we dispense with the odd modern critical dogma that what
poetry is about is irrelevant to its aesthetic value," then we can
also see, Bloom observes, that "image, far from being the primary
pigment of all poetry, is irrelevant to much of the highest poetry,
51
whether in the Romantic tradition or not" (VC, p. 172). Thus,
"Ode to the West Wind," the victim of what is, to Bloom, one of the
most unconscionable hatchet jobs in the history of modern literary
criticism, does not represent the woeful miscarriage of craft and
literary intelligence that F.R. Leavis, dissecting the roiled
21
imagistic strands of the poem, claimed it did. The poem, Bloom
says, is a deep and moving dialectical drama of the stance of the
mythmaking poet toward a west wind that is itself imbued with the
breath of the Spirit of apocalypse, and thus, never merely an
object or an "It" to the poem within his poem. The poem's poignance
and its grandeur derive, Bloom contends, from the crucial opposition
between stanzas 4 and 5, where the poet at first despairingly seeks,
as a Thou, to be treated as an It, and then, in the famous final
lines, surmounts visionary despair to affirm once again "the
humanizing possibility of mythmaking" and "the value of the
relationship which can create poems" (SM, p. 86). Shelley is a
poet difficult for readers with inclinations as reductive as Leavis's
to understand because such readers are not able to see that Shelley's
ironies are those of prophecy, his often vague and seemingly con
voluted images those of vision. Shelley's ironies, Bloom says, do
not traffic in merely verbal or "metaphysical" wit, but present
the far more profound visionary's "awareness of the terrible gap
between aspiration and fulfillment" (RT, pp. 114-15). Shelley's
images, similarly, are not intended to be imagistic in the early
Modernist manner, but, rather, are visionary— and uncompromisingly
52
visionary in their maker's effort to subvert them in the very
22
act of presenting them. Shelley habitually makes visualization
"difficult" for us, Bloom notes (VC, p. 319), but he does so
deliberately, not carelessly, in order "to arrive at a more radical
kind of verbal figure" in which the world might be wholly, if also
skeptically, "taken up into the mind" (RT, p. 109). That he
"never altogether achieved" such a language is not, Bloom argues
with great passion, an indictment of him, but simply an acknowledge •
ment of the blocking power of what "Adonais" calls the world of
"unwilling dross" (43.384), the world against which, Bloom claims,
Shelley battled as heroically as any poet who ever lived, to a
poet's inevitable defeat. For a poetic agon much less heroic— but
for a Bloomian critical argument considerably more refined— we may
now turn, in Chapter 2, to Bloom's Romantic re-vision of that Modern
ist master, Yeats.
53
Notes for Chapter One
^ Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), and Anatomy of
Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). All
subsequent quotations from these works will be documented, in paren
theses in the text as (FS) and (AC).
2
See the Introduction to Shelley1s Mythmaking, pp. 1-10.
In his Preface to the 1969 Cornell Edition, Bloom tells us that
the first draft of Shelley's Mythmaking was written in 1955, thus
antedating Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism by two years. The influence
of Anatomy begins to be felt in The Visionary Company, while
Fearful Symmetry is a strong presence even in Bloom's first volume.
3
For Frye's dismantling of the Blakean critical context, see
Chap. 1 of Fearful Symmetry pp. 3-29. Frye's discussion of Blake's
earlier English and Hebraic connections is conducted throughout the
study.
4
See The Visionary Company, p. vii. I will use the 1971
Revised Edition of this book throughout this study. The changes
Bloom made in 1971, beyond adding a separate preface, prologue, and
epilogue, are not significant; the text itself remains virtually
the same as the original 1961 edition. All quotations from The
Visionary Company in this dissertation have been checked against the
earlier edition whenever it appeared a discrepancy might be signifi
cant to a consideration of the development of Bloom's thought. The
1971 edition is used as the base text because it is more widely
available and because it has the important additional materials.
^ See Milton, in Blake: Complete Writings, with Variant Readings,
ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 1.29.3.
All subsequent quotations of Blake will be taken from this standard
edition of his works and will be documented in parentheses in the
text. *
£
See The Prelude (1850 edition), in Wordsworth: Poetical Works,
ed, Thomas Hutchinson, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), 6.108. All subsequent quotations of
Wordsworth will be taken from this edition of his works, and will
be documented in parentheses in the text.
^ For Lewis's objections, see "Poetry and Exegesis," rev. of
The Visionary Company, Encounter, 20, No. 6 (June 1963), 74-76.
54
Lewis faults Bloom not only for his imposition of Blakean categories
on the other English Romantic poets, but also for his use of a
barbarous and fuzzy critical language. Wellek comments on Bloom
in "Romanticism Re-examined," in Concepts of Criticism, ed.
Stephen G. Nichols (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 218.
Noting with disapproval that Bloom "sees only the prophetic, the
visionary of the company," Wellek concludes that "we shall not,
I think, make much progress with the problem of romanticism if we
seek its prototype in such an exceptional and lonely figure as Blake,
who seems to me rather a survival from another century, however much
he may also anticipate the issues of our time."
8
See M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953),
p. viii.
9
For Frye on Blake's reaction to Wordsworth, see Fearful
Symmetry, pp. 39 and 324.
For Keat's reference to the "deceiving elf" of the imagination,
see "Ode to a Nightingale," in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack
Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1978),
p. 372, 1. 73-74. Keats also speaks of imagination as "Lost in
a sort of purgatory blind," in "Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds"
(listed in the Stillinger edition under the first line of the poem,
"Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed"; see pp. 241-44).
For trenchant readings of Keats as a skeptic about visionary
experience, see Stillinger's "The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism
in 'The Eve of St. Agnes'," Studies in Philology, 58 (1961), 533-55,
and "Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keats," which serves as
the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's
Odes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jack Stillinger
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 1-16. Both
essays are reprinted in Stillinger's "The Hoodwinking of Madeline"
and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1971), pp. 67-93 and 99-119, respectively.
^ "The Internalization of Quest-Romance" first appeared in
Yale Review, 58 (1969), 526-36. It was then reprinted in expanded
form in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1970), pp. 3-24.
Finally, it was included in The Ringers in the Tower in 1971, on
pp. 13-35. All quotations from the essay will be documented in
the text with reference to the latter volume. I have called the
essay an effort of 1968, despite the fact that it was not published
until 1969, because Bloom himself assigns the date of 1968 to it at
the end of the printing in Ringers (p. 35).
55
12
Hartman, "Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure,"
Yale French Studies, Nos. 36—37 (1966), p. 158, rpt. in Geoffrey
Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 14.
13
For precisely this objection, see James Benziger's review
of The Visionary Company in Criticism, 5 (1963), 185-88.
14
See Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 203-06. Frye defines
"epiphany" as "the symbolic presentation of the point at which the
undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature
come into alignment" (p. 203).
^ See "Epipsychidion," in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed.
Thomas Hutchinson, revised by G.M. Matthews (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1970), 1. 573-911. All subsequent quotations of Shelley's
poetry will be taken from this standard edition and will be documented
in parentheses in the text.
16
See Bloom's brief essay on Auden, "Christianity and Art,"
in New Republic, 5 Apr. 1969, pp. 25-28; rpt. in The Ringers in the
Tower, pp. 207-11. Bloom announces his preference for Auden as
the lesser of two evils over Eliot: "Auden is wittier, gentler, much
less dogmatic, and does not feel compelled to demonstrate the authenti
city of his Christian humanism by a judicious anti-Semitism." Auden
also "has more wisdom and more humor than Eliot, and his talent is
nowhere near so sparse . . . " (p. 26).
^ Robert 0. Preyer, "Voyagers of the Imagination," rev. of
The Visionary Company, Yale Review, 51 (1961), 316-19.
18
For this particular angle on Emerson, see especially Chap. 9
of A Map of Misreading, pp. 160-76.
19
See "A Defence of Poetry,” in The Complete Works of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926-30), 7 (1930), 135.
20
For Pottle's overview of the dynamics of the Shelleyan
critical reception, see "The Case of Shelley," in English Romantic
Poets, pp. 366-72.
21
For this most famous of attacks on Shelley, see F.R. Leavis,
"Shelley," in Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English
Poetry (New York: George W. Stewart, 1947), pp. 203-40. The
discussion is reprinted in Abrams, English Romantic Poets, pp. 345-66.
Leavis observes that Shelley's poetry "depends for its success" on
inducing "a kind of attention that doesn't bring the critical
intelligence into play . . . " (p. 207). He accuses Shelley of
having a "weak grasp upon the actual" (p. 206), and concludes that
56
even in Shelley's best work "it is impossible to go on reading him
at any length with pleasure; the elusive imagery, the high-pitched
emotions, the tone and movement, the ardours, ecstasies, and
despairs, are too much the same all through. The effect is of
vanity and emptiness ... as well as monotony" (p. 211).
22
See all of "The Unpastured Sea: An Introduction to Shelley,"
in The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 87-116. This essay, originally
written to introduce Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley (New York:
New American Library, 1966), and also appearing in Romanticism and
Consciousness, pp. 374-401, is the clearest and most straightforward
treatment by Bloom of a poet as important to him as any.
57
CHAPTER TWO: YEATS AND THE SPECTRE OF MODERNISM
Yeats is, in many ways, the pivotal book in Harold Bloom's
career as a critic. The publication of Shelley's Mythmaking, The
Visionary Company, and Blake's Apocalypse in the four-year span from
1959 to 1963 had firmly established Bloom as one of the truly indis
pensable critics on the great age of English Romanticism. Although
Bloom's uncompromising thesis that the Romantics were poets not of
nature but of "vision," and his concomitant elevation of Blake and
Shelley to positions of pre-eminence within the Romantic canon,
proved unsettling to more orthodox Romantic scholars, even those
who remained unconvinced were usually quick to acknowledge that the
brilliant young Romanticist conducted his argument with great
passion, rigor, and tremendous erudition. Robert Preyer, whom we
have already seen to be as troubled by Bloom as any, delivered an
evaluation of The Visionary Company in 1961 which might be taken
to.be characteristic of the response of many readers to the Bloom
enterprise over the years. "It is extremely difficult," Preyer
says at the start of his review, "to provide a substantive account
of this perceptive, irritating, repetitive, and even profound
'Reading of English Romantic Poetry.'"'*'
Perceptive, irritating, repetitive, difficult, and "even
profound": such was the strange mixture of exasperation and respect
58
which greeted Bloom's visionary Romanticism in the early phase of his
career— and which greets him still today. At the center of that
ambivalent response was a concern with the almost obsessive narrowness
of Bloom's focus. There were misgivings about a man who determinedly
violated the rules of critical decorum by quite consciously presenting
himself as- a Romantic writing about a body of Romantic poetry whose
central assumptions, values, and beliefs he shared, a man who, in
turn, read the central poems of the central Romantics with a for
biddingly firm and well-cultivated scorn toward any attempt to trans
form those poems into something he decreed they were not, any attempt,
that is, to see in them anything other than the purity of mythmaking
poetic vision. One sympathetic critic, James E. Benziger, observed
of The Visionary Company that "the chief weakness of this remarkable
study is a certain onesidedness; it has not the variety of the
2
materials it considers." With the publication of Blake's Apocalypse
in 1963 to complete the triad of books on the visionary company,
this one-sidedness had come to loom as the major threat to Bloom's
critical enterprise. The question proposed by Preyer in his review
of The Visionary Company seemed to stand for all misgivings about
Bloom's methods, his values, and his vision. What escape could there
be, Preyer asked, from the imposing, astonishing, and finally
"claustrophobic" House of Visionary Art that Bloom was laboring so
energetically to construct?
The answer was seven years in the coming, and when it was
delivered in 1970 with the publication of Bloom's longest and perhaps
59
most challenging book, Yeats, it proved to be not so much an answer
as a deliberate refusal even to countenance the question. Yeats,
a massive, synoptic reading of a great twentieth-century poet in
terms of his origins as a visionary Romantic, is the pivotal book
in Harold Bloom's career because it demonstrates so forcefully,
indeed eloquently, the character of Bloom's developing offense
against established literary tradition— and the quality of his
defense against the questions that such a tradition would present
him. Bloom's Yeats, by reading the whole of a central modern poet's
work as a complex, sometimes perverse, generally inferior, response
to the writings of his great poetic precursors, Blake and Shelley,
served to broaden the expanse of the House of Visionary Art while at
the same time securing even more firmly all the portals of that
dwelling against any opening onto traditions different from the
visionary. In so doing, the book both extended the Blakean argument
of Bloom's early work on the primacy and the sublimity of the visionary
imagination, and presaged the central thesis of the later volumes that
such a sublimity can only be earned through the grievous expense of
a dark and treacherous competition for visionary space between
poetic latecomers and their descendants-in-imagination. Part of this
grievous expense, Bloom says in Yeats and in his many other volumes
of the seventies, inheres in the simple melancholy following our
recognition as readers that the source of our cherished sublime in
literature is such baleful and inhumane ground. Bloom's own style
in the phase inaugurated by The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, a
60
style thick with what unpersuaded critics have labeled melodramatic
posturing, is intended to embody the anguish which BlOom says we
should all feel, an anguish to accompany the crumbling of our
illusions about the "ideal order" we had naively thought literature
to be. The main subject of this chapter will not be that anguish,
however— the agonistic quality of Bloom’s own rhetoric of pathos
will be discussed in some depth in Chapter 6— but the other major
expense of competition featured in the new Bloomian theory, an
expense proceeding logically from the premise that where there is
a battle, necessarily there is a loser. Bloom's impassioned and
polemical rereading of Yeats is most important for its two related
and controversial contentions that Modernist poetry as represented
by Yeats, no matter how strongly it tries to be anti-Romantic,
remains Romantic nonetheless, and that, as such, what it delivers
necessarily is an inferior Romanticism, a Romanticism diminished by
the inexorable force of its own visionary belatedness.
In examining the intricate network of values and beliefs’ ;with.
which Bloom, via Yeats, meets the spectre of Modernism, we might find
it helpful to use once again the schema advanced in Chapter 1 for
Bloom's theory of visionary Romanticism. "Yeats's immediate
tradition," Bloom announces in his Introduction to Yeats, "could be
described as the internalization of quest romance, and Yeats's most
characteristic kind of poem could be called the dramatic lyric of
internalized quest" (p. 5). Yeats's poems, that is, assume the dia
lectic of nature and the imagination in Romantic poetry, and then,
61
at their best, pass beyond that confrontation to the deeper dialectic
of poetic desires questing for visionary fulfillment amid a universe
of death. The key text for placing Yeats within the Romantic tradi
tion thus becomes Shelley's "Alastor," the "single poem that most
affected" Yeats's "life and art" (p. 8), and the first great poem
by a man who, of all the Romantics, has shown the most power to
provide "developing imaginations with a paradigm for the torments of
their own processes of incarnating the poetical character in them
selves" (p. 17). Shelley's lyric portrayal of a young man doomed to
wander the earth in a relentless and finally destructive search
for "the spiritual form of his total desire" (Yeats, p. 17) is seen
by Bloom to figure heavily and fruitfully in Yeats's early poetry,
especially in "The Wanderings of Oisin," one of Bloom's main
reclamation projects from a history of critical neglect.' More impor
tant than any specific influence, though, is the furnishing by
"Alastor" to Yeats of an entire rich world for Yeats's poetic
imagination to build itself upon. As Bloom describes it, the world
bequeathed Yeats by Shelley is one in which the initial antagonist
is nature, and the quest is for a mysterious and elusive epipsyche
or beautiful woman who will wondrously complete the life of the
quester. The inevitable ruin in such a world, Bloom says, is the
ruin of imagination veering into a sublimity too fierce in its
solipsism, and thus enduring a destructive self-conscious separation
"both from others and itself" (p. 90). Translated into Yeatsian
terms, "Alastor" incarnates in him the germ of his crucial conceptions
62
of the "antithetical," defined by Bloom as meaning "anti-natural"
(p. 21), the Maud Gonne figure, or "representation of the Mask as
an Image" which the poet must desire and also must never have,
and the dalmonic man, the poet of Phase 17 of A Vision for whom
Yeats's desired "Unity of Being" is most possible, yet who must also
suffer, if his quest be false, the pangs of an "enforced self-
realization" (AV, p. 240) which is the equivalent of what Bloom calls
the "agony of self-consciousness" afflicting Shelley's haunted and
doomed young quester (Yeats, p. 91).
Already, one of the dangers of Bloom's mapping operation is
apparent: the danger, as Preyer warned, of becoming lost within the
bewildering corridors of analogues and parallels that abound in the
r
Bloomian House of Visionary Art. And yet the essential point is
simple enough: Yeats appropriates from, and in some way, however
perverse, always shares with Shelley a "conviction that the most
poetic images are necessarily those of unfulfilled and unfulfillable
desire" (Yeats, p. 350). He finds, too, in Shelley, who died so
young and whose last real poem was that testament to profound
visionary despair, "The Triumph of Life," a moving emblem of his
own deepest concern, the "rage" against growing old which preoccupied
4
him in his own final phase as a poet. Yeats's poetry at its most
compelling, Bloom says, is built upon a Shelleyan quest for imagina
tive immortality, and an equally Shelleyan despair over the fate of
that quest in a world seemingly designed to thwart it. Now the
main argument of Yeats enters. While Yeats at his best is a strong
63
Shelleyan prophet, and thus a quester who believes completely in the
profound Blakean prescription from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
that "Where man is not, nature is barren" (CW, p. 152), he is also
a poet who is often not willing or able to confront the imperatives
of that total commitment to the -visionary imagination so forcibly
mandated in the works of his key Romantic precursors. Instead,
Bloom says, Yeats distorts that mandate by cunningly, eloquently,
and sometimes viciously, misreading the works of Shelley and Blake,
and by then using that misreading to generate and to justify the
Gnosticism and perverse theosophical systematizing of his own poetry,
including the formulations of the "considerable if flawed major poem,"
A Vision (Yeats, p. 211). In attempting to explain how Yeats makes
his precursors over in the lesser image of himself, and, just as
important, why he feels compelled to do so, Bloom delivers his
indictment of modern and Modernist poetry, and adumbrates his famous
theory of the anxiety of influence.
Yeats, as much as he loves Shelley and recognizes what Bloom
calls Shelley's (and Blake's) "infinite desire to break through
natural barriers and so uncover an altogether human universe" (Yeats,
p. 60), also accuses his ancestral prophet of two grave sins against
the imagination. First, in the early essay of 1900, "The Philosophy
of Shelley's Poetry," he charges that, while Shelley does at times
intuit an enticing and authentic spiritual world, he then lacks the
authority and the theosophical roots fully to realize that world in
his poems and ends up producing poetry which at times suffers from
64
"an air of rootless fantasy. Second, Yeats, in his discussion of
Phase 17 in A Vision, criticizes Shelley for lacking the "Vision of
Evil" that would have made him one of the very greatest of poets, a
vision which Yeats seems to equate with the ability to conceive of
the world as a "continual conflict" (p. 144). As we might expect,
Bloom sees both charges to be drastic and pernicious misreadings of
Shelley's world, misreadings which in turn, he says, aid Yeats in
buttressing the foundation of his own departures from what is most
vital to visionary Romanticism. Here is the concluding stanza from
Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant," to which Yeats's first accusation
pertains:
For love, and beauty, and delight
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure. (3.134-37)
Bloom, repudiating as always any imputation of Platonic or
spiritualist orthodoxy in the poetry of Shelley, contends that these
lines "clearly" confirm the central lesson of Shelley's work: "our
senses are inadequate to the full humanity of our desire" (Yeats,
p. 61). Yeats, on the other hand, sees here what Bloom derisively
calls "a palpable spirit-world, a universe of squeaking phantasms that
can be invoked by a Soho medium or a self-induced trance" (p. 61).
Observing that Shelley "seems in his speculations to have lit on
that memory of Nature the visionaries claim for the foundation of
their knowledge," Yeats goes on to condemn his predecessor for not
fully plunging into the "witch's cauldron" (Bloom's term) of occultic
65
faith, a condemnation which, to Bloom, is more revealing for the light
in which it shows Yeats’s own desperate need for a faith, any faith,
than for any insight it might offer into the passionate "visionary
skepticism" of Shelley (Yeats, p. 188). Bloom’s Shelley, against
Yeats, is the skeptical young man of the "Notes on Queen Mab" who
remembers always the injunction: "All that we have a right to
infer from our ignorance of the cause of any event is that we do not
know it . . ." (PW, p. 823). Yeats, Bloom says, "despite his own
temperamental skepticism, adopted always the contrary attitude,
inferring from his ignorance a range of occult causes" (p. 188).
Yeats’s second charge against Shelley, that he lacked a "Vision
of Evil," is to Bloom even more ridiculous than the first, and just
as revealing about the unfortunate turn that Yeats’sv own systemati
zing took. Shelley, in fact, was "afflicted," Bloom claims, "by an
all-but-excessive consciousness of the prevalence of evil" in the
world (p. 62), while Yeats’s own work must be seen often to endorse
"most things that are to be abhorred, including violence and
prejudice . . (p. 61). Why the misreading, then? Because,
Bloom says, Yeats is attempting to build the self-serving myth of
the poetic latecomer, the myth that the earlier poet was somehow an
"incipient" version of his descendant, but a version doomed to
failure because lacking an essential component of the latter’s
vision (p. 61).
Bloom’s contention that it is in every case the latecomer who
lacks range and depth of vision, is most fully focused in his
66
treatment of the complex relationship between Yeats and that other
great exemplar of pure Romantic wisdom, Blake. The categories of
Chapter 1 are again pertinent: if Shelley furnishes Yeats with a
model for meeting the poet's impossible immensities of desire,
then Blake, the one completely successful "mythographer" of
visionary imagination in the history of poetry, a man with "conceptual
powers unique among the poets" (Yeats, p. 226), provides his descen
dant an iconography for charting poetic quest. Much of Yeats is
devoted to supporting Bloom's argument that the central failing of
Yeats's poetry is the malignant and distinctly un-Blakean manner in
which he uses the magnificent map bequeathed him by his precursor.
Many Yeats critics, of course, had already explored the ground of
Blake's influence on Yeats, an influence especially notable in the
system of A Vision, in the gyres which are its equivalent of the
Blakean vortex, in the twenty-eight phases of the Great Wheel of
incarnation which Yeats derived from his study of Blake's twenty-
seven phases or churches of history. Bloom diverges from most
earlier critics, however, especially from their most eloquent
representative, Thomas Whitaker,^ in arguing that the influence of
Blake on Yeats consists not of a healthy and benign transmittal of
ideas and images from earlier to later poet, but, rather, of
"creative misinterpretations" of Blake by his lesser descendant,
misinterpretations so great that "sustained parallel studies of Blake
and Yeats are never likely to prove fruitful" (p. 309). Milton is
the relevant text for Bloom here, as it so often was in Chapter 1,
6 . 7
and as it will continue to be in Chapter 3. Bloom is especially
preoccupied by a scene from Book 2 of the brief epic, where the Seven
Angels are about the business of instructing Milton in the Blakean
doctrine of "States":
"Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States.
"States Change, but Individual Identities never change nor cease.
"You cannot go to Eternal Death in that which can never Die.
"Satan & Adam are States Created into Twenty-seven Churches,
"And thou, 0 Milton, art a State about to be Created,
"Called Eternal Annihilation, that none but the Living shall
"Dare to enter, & they shall enter triumphant over Death
"And Hell & the Grave: States that are not, but ah! Seem to be.
(2.32.22-29)
The very next strophe, we might recall, delivers the famous
formula that the Imagination is not a "State" but "Human Existence
itself." Yeats, says Bloom, errs profoundly in taking from Blake’s
cosmogony the doctrine of States, but then formulating a theory of
imagination and of poetry out of that doctrine, without seeing that
in Blake the Imagination does not reside in any of the states them
selves but supersedes them all. In theory, Yeats thus condemns the
poet always to exist within the Blakean world of Beulah, a world
which Blpom, following Blake, says is marked by mere receptivity,
8
passiveness, and the tyranny of cyclical recurrence. Yeats himself
asserted in the "Packet for Ezra Pound" at the beginning of A Vision
that, beyond a few suggestions on the "historical logic" of the twenty-
eight "incarnations," there "was nothing" in Blake’s "unfinished
confused Prophetic Books" which "could help" him in formulating the
system presented in the book (AV, p. 12). Against this, Bloom argues
that Yeats, in the deepest recesses of his poetical character, did not
68
want to be helped by the real Blake, the great visionary mythmaker
of a confident Romanticism, but instead chose to misread the prophetic
books, transforming them into a second-rate hash of theosophical
gobbledygook and Gnosticism having little to do with Blake but much
to do with the failure in vision of Blake's belated poetic son.
The key transformation involves the relation of the twenty-seven
states or churches and the important figure, also in Milton, of the
"Covering Cherub," or "Shadow of Milton," a figure that, as we will
see in Chapter 3, has come to represent for Bloom the very heart of the
darkness of Poetic Influence. Shortly after the doctrine of States
is announced, the "Twenty-seven Heavens & their Churches" are named
by Blake, and then placed:
All these are seen in Milton's Shadow, who is the Covering Cherub,
The Spectre of Albion in which the Spectre of Luvah inhabits
In the Newtonian Voids between the Substances of Creation.
(2.37.44-46)
In the edition of Blake that he edited with the pre-Raphaelite
painter and poet, Edwin J. Ellis, Yeats interprets this passage to
mean that "the Cherub is divided into . . . twenty-seven passive
states through which man travels" and through which "Blake found . . .
9
the whole story of man's life . . In this edition he also defines
the Covering Cherub, in a manner anticipating his own central con
ception of A Vision, as the "mask of created form in which the un
created spirit makes itself visible."^ Against both these Yeatsian
interpretations, Bloom first cites the malevolent reality of the
Cherub in Blake, and in Blake's source for the figure, Ezekiel:
69
Thou art the annointed cherub that covereth;
and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy
mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in
the midst of the stones of fire.
Thou was perfect in thy ways from the day thou
wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.
By the multitude of thy merchandise they have
filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou
hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane
out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy
thee, 0 covering cherub, from the midst of the
stones of fire.H
The Cherub, Bloom says, is not in any way for Blake an aid to
imaginative fulfillment; quite the contrary, the figure represents
what Bloom, even as early as Blake* s Apocalypse, had called the
"barrier between creative desire and artistic completion" (BA, p. 359),
and what he now explicitly labels "the negative or stifling aspect
of poetic influence" (Yeats, p. 6). Furthermore, Bloom observes,
making his most telling point, the Cherub in Blake is never explicitly
associated with history, and the fact that Yeats chooses, from a
multitude of possibilities, this one particular figure, so malevolent
and oppressive, to help him find his way into his own doctrine of
historical incarnation, is as startling an instance of the "true
imaginative inwardness" of poetic influence and misinterpretation
as any poet has ever given us (p. 78). Yeats's description of the
twenty-seven churches as "passive," and as representing the "whole
story of man's life," is as spectacularly inadequate on Blake, Bloom
contends, as it is judicious in accounting for the phases of the moon
in Yeats's own work. "To Blake these Churches are not necessarily
passive," Bloom says, "and in them he certainly did not find the whole
70
story of our life" (p. 78). Rather, it is through the "Eternal
Annihilation" of the twenty-eighth state, of the "State about to be
Created" featuring Milton himself, that what Bloom calls the "awakened
humanity in a man" arises to embrace the Imagination which "cannot
pass away" (BA, p. 349)— the Imagination, that is, as "Human Existence
Itself." Yeats, Bloom observes, misreads Blake so as not to see
this all-important passage beyond the cycles of a fallen history,
and thus, at the very center of his thought, presents, through the
twenty-eight spokes of the Great Wheel, a world in which true
imagination and authentic and fully human love can never live.
What, then, does Yeats have to offer us in A Vision and in the
poetry engendered by that book? If he misreads and mis-takes Shelley
and Blake so grievously, what is such misprision in service of?
What precisely in Yeats's "vision," and what is wrong with it?
In defining his position, Bloom is quite aware of his adversary re
lation to a whole body of critical opinion, ranging from the New
Critical strictures of Allen Tate to the acolyte's eloquence of
Thomas Whitaker to the pre-eminent Yeatsian domain of Richard Ellmann
(to whom Yeats is dedicated). For all their many differences, what
these critics have in common is a greater willingness than Bloom
evinces to accept Yeats as not only a great poet but a wise thinker.
A Vision, of course, has always been at the center of the Great Debate
on Yeats. The master's contention that the volume had been dictated
to his wife by spirits was one of those scandals of the Modernist era
which, like Pound's cranky economics or the discreet anti-Semitism
71
of Eliot, seemed best dealt with tactfully, if indeed confronted at
all. Yet, there were several attractive ways for mainstream critics
to handle the problem of A Vision, and the relation of its theory
of history and imagination to Yeats's poetry. Many chose to invoke
the spirit of a Spenglerian age, thus aligning A Vision in loose
confederation with other massive undertakings of the time such as the
cultural anthropology of Frazer and Weston and the Viconian myth
making of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Myth in this view became Modern
ist insofar as it was used in the Eliotic manner of "The Waste Land,"
the manner prescribed in Eliot's famous essay on Ulysses, which
recommends mythic parallelism as a legitimate tool of the modern
12
artist in the face of a complex,fragmenting, and inchoate time.
Another persuasive option, this one for those still dubious about
A Vision and yet unwilling to damn Yeats's poetry on that account,
was to argue that the vast majority of Yeats's work could profitably
be read without recourse to the systematized ideas and body of symbols
inherent in it. A Vision could thus be relegated to ancillary status
as helpful background— a suggestion for "supplementary reading" in the
rich but sometimes admittedly rather odd symbolic universe of the
13
greatest modern poet.
Bloom will not endorse either of these two approaches to the
conundrum of Yeats's philosophy. The second, he says, is a trans
parent attempt to evade the obvious: the philosophy and symbols of
A Vision are integral to Yeats's poetry, and often destructive of it.
While the categories and cycles of A Vision may not be "adequate
72
to Yeats's own imagination" (p. 210), they are nonetheless almost
always operative within it, and contribute prominently to the vicious
and reductive poetic arguments marring many of Yeats's supposedly
greatest poems, including ''The Second Coming," "Leda and the Swan,"
"The Gyres," and the Byzantium poems. The other bid to bypass
the troublesome question of Yeats's systematizing is, in Bloom's
eyes, much more imposing and thus much more malign. The Modernist
conception of myth as a tool to be employed by the writer, a sort
of conceptually powerful trick of the trade for ordering the raw
welter of his materials, is inimical to Bloom, who, as we have shown,
sees poetry at its best to be identical with the act of mythmaking
itself. Yeats's own position on A Vision, that the book primarily
serves to furnish metaphors for his poetry, is labeled by Bloom a
misrepresentation of the real center of the volume, which is,
inescapably, its esoteric philosophy. A Vision, Bloom sums, "is
nothing if it is not wisdom literature," and yet the terrible’failing
of the book is that "it is sometimes very unwise" (p. 218).
Bloom's exegesis of the Yeatsian philosophy in A Vision is the
best and most brilliant part of his study. Occupying over eighty
pages in the very heart of the book, Bloom's reading of A Vision
as the "culminating work" (p. 210) in Yeats's quest for the meaning
of history and the poetic imagination becomes the basis of his
notoriously polemical evaluations of all the poetry from The Wild
Swans at Coole onward— all the poetry, that is, of the late middle and
later Yeats which had been canonized by modern criticism as the
73
foremost sustained poetic achievement of our century. If the early
Shelleyan Yeats of "The Wanderings of Oisin" and "The Shadowy Waters"
is a much more formidable poet than most modern critics had
acknowledged, and if the middle Yeats of In the Seven Woods, The
Green Helmet, and Responsibilities, with its absurd "anti-Romantic
revisionist" strain (p. 162), is much less distinguished than had
hitherto been supposed, then the Yeats of The Wild Swans at Coole
through the Last Poems is, for Bloom, the most complex and the most
puzzling Yeats of all, since the poems of these later years alternate
between an imaginatively appropriate fidelity to the great line of
Romantic vision and a completely repugnant departure from that line
into the dehumanizing and reductive world of Gnostic theosophy
presented by A Vision.
The germ of all the errors of A Vision is exhibited for Bloom
in a comment Yeats makes apropos of Blake in his 1893 edition of
Blake's writings. "The chief difference between the metaphors of
poetry and the symbols of mysticism," Yeats observes, "is that the
14
latter are woven together into a complete system." The notion
implicit here that, as Bloom acidly puts it, "poetic metaphors are
the blocks for building theosophical mansions, and poetry is a
gnosis that has yet to go the whole way" (p. 70), is fully realized
in the grand edifice of A Vision, a "theosophical mansion" whose
chart of the twenty-eight phases of the Great Wheel is meant, in
Yeats's words, to help him hold "in a single thought reality and
justice" (AV, p. 25). Working from his interpretation of Blake's
74
Covering Cherub, Yeats in A Vision constructs a geometry of the
creative imagination realizing itself through cycles shared by
biography and history, cycles which are strictly determined by the
dialectical logic of the interplay between the Yeatsian faculties
of Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate. Bloom, reading
A Vision in terms of "its most direct ancestors," Blake's epics,
and "another forerunner," Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (p. 212),
maintains that the book must be assailed at the very start for the
"curious assumptions" (p. 217) behind its main dialectic of the
"antithetical" and the "primary." Yeats's "antithetical" is defined
by Bloom as "the thrust toward individuality" in man (p. 217), a
thrust which we have already seen Bloom label "'anti-natural' (not
'unnatural')" (p. 26). "Primary," on the other hand, is identified
by Yeats with the "complete passivity, complete plasticity" of Phase
1 (AV, p. 183), and is summarized by Bloom as a "counter-movement
toward" a highly suspect "unity" (Yeats, p. 217). This conception of
a subjective and creative antithetical pole in dialectical opposition
to a primary pole of inert objective knowing is clearly derived,
Bloom says, from Shelley's "rather fearful Either-Or" pitting the
"lonely ecstasy of the artist" as Alastor figure against the objective
wisdom of a society which can so often stultify and repress (p. 224).
And yetj as usual in Bloom's critical universe, the taking is seen
only to famish the receiver; Yeats's "subjective" is, for Bloom,
entirely too much an affair of spooks and the supernatural, while
his "objective" is not really a formidable enough foe for its
75
opponent, thus revealing Yeats's propensity for closing off most of
the agonistic possibilities of a true Romantic rhetoric. If the
epics of Blake and Shelley present quests which attain maturity
and imaginative grandeur precisely by realizing that the greatest
visionary struggles are those which occur within, then Yeats's
crude caricature of a dialectic, stalled as it is at the level of a
monolithic but empty "antithetical,” can only confront the imperatives
of the first, or "promethean," stage of imaginative battle, and,
after that, must return to the confines of quest as mere "cyclic
renewal," with the corollary "renewed necessity for heroic defeat"
which is a dominant topos of the Yeatsian poetic universe (Yeats,
p. 230).
Bloom, of course, has no quarrel with "heroic defeat" as such—
his own theory of poetry exploits the pathos implicit in such a
notion— but he does argue that the specifically Yeatsian conception
of heroism is empty, violent, vicious, and anti-poetic, and he suggests
that the heroic ideal of Yeats is so reductive precisely because, at
least according to A Vision, all quests, imaginative or otherwise,
can only exist within the cyclical and thoroughly deterministic world
of that "fallen" history which Yeats catastrophically embraces via his
misreading of Blake's doctrine of the Covering Cherub. Bloom's
condemnation of Yeats's Gnosticism— and his Blakean basis for doing
so— are nowhere better revealed than in the following long and
crucial passage from Bloom's exegesis of the Great Wheel:
76
Blake and Shelley both posited a Fall of Man where the
more naturalistic Wordsworth and Keats did not, but
their versions of the Fall are neither orthodox Christian
nor Gnostic, though Yeats confounded Blake with Blavatsky
and would not see the difference. For Blake and the
Gnostics, as opposed to orthodoxy, the Creation and the
Fall are one event. It is in meeting a fallen world, in
learning how to live in history, that Blake and the
Gnostics, and so Blake and Yeats part (as do Shelley
and Yeats also). To Yeats, the fallen world or shadow
of history contains the daimon of the antithetical or
subjective man, of the poet who seeks to redeem time.
So the other self, that can lead one toward Unity of
Being, is both natural and temporal, and must be met
by an embrace of the shadow. Yeats does not seek to
exorcise the shadow by clarifying it, or by compelling
it to a full manifestation of itself. This is deliberately
Yeats's choice; it is the crucial moral choice that the
Gnostic makes for himself. Not to see that Blake makes
quite another choice from the start is not to see Blake,
and makes a mockery of the life and work of a prophet
who was as great a moral figure as Ezekiel or Jeremiah.
To Blake the shadow or serpent was a selfhood, but not
the "other" or creative self; it was the stifler or
Covering Cherub, the separating or inhibiting force
of nature and history, sanctified by an inadequate version
of reason, and by an unjust organization of society.
(pp. 217-18)
It is the thoroughly anti-Blakean attempt of Yeats described
here to find the "daimon" of his antithetical self within the shadows
of a fallen and thus imprisoning history which, in Bloom's eyes,
engenders most of the other grievous flaws of Yeats's natural
Gnosticism, especially his Gnostic celebration of a natural Jungian
religion, and his consequent yearning toward a collective folk wisdom
of the unconscious or anima mundi, a wisdom to be attained, of course,
through the unhappy medium of the Gnostic adept. Such an anima mundi.
Bloom says, representing nothing but "a saving construct of the
therapeutic idealist, of the subjectivist driven in on his own
77
desperation," delivers a "natural religosity" which is the precise
opposite of the glorious "final form of Protestant inwardness"
marking the Romantic Imagination of Blake and Shelley (p. 221).
At the end of Yeats's quest, Bloom observes, "one finds neither a
more human man nor God the Father, but rather an individual fantasy
that precedes or hopes to precede a fantasy of the uncultured, a new
natural religion" (p. 222). The prophecy- and the affirmation that
so many Modernist critics have seen Yeats to give us in poems such
as "The Gyres" and "Lapis Lazuli" become, in Bloom's view, "inhumane
nonsense" (p. 438), the "tragic joy" of "The Gyres" (CP, p. 291)
merely a paean to what Bloom, citing Buber-, calls the "composite god"
of a vicious and dehumanizing historical process (p. 470). Such a
process, Bloom says, denies man his freedom and his dignity, the
/
freedom which in Blake and Shelley resides "in the imagination which
struggled with the will" (p. 275), the dignity which inheres in the
passion and the profundity of that very struggle.
Yeats's one attempt to build for the imagination a City of
Eternal Art through Byzantium, associated with Phase 15 of A Vision,
the "phase of complete beauty" where contemplation and desire are one,
fares no better in Bloom's schema.^ It too delivers a reductive
and anti-human view of the imaginative possibilities of man, because
its strained "supernatural subjectivity" (p. 236) vaults too quickly
beyond not only all the merely natural but, Bloom contends, all the
specifically human as well. Unlike both Blake and Shelley, who, in
Bloom's view, present complex dialectical accounts of the relation
78
between vision and nature and are thus skeptical of any easy and
empty transcendence, Yeats, misreading his precursors to simplify them,
delivers in Byzantium's "artifice of eternity" (CP, p. 191) an all too
palpably self-serving supernatural salvation which succeeds only in
devaluing "all human existence" before and beneath it (Yeats, p. 242).
Yeats's Byzantium, Bloom concludes, "is no country for.men, young or
old, and the monuments it contains testify to aspects of the soul's
magnificence that do not support humanistic claims of any kind
whatsoever" (p. 347).
It is especially as a vision of Last Things that Yeats's
Byzantium seems cold and limited to Bloom, "a casting-away rather
than a refining of the human" (p. 392). As usual, Yeats suffers in
comparison to Blake, whose Last Judgment in the apocalyptic "Night
the Ninth" of The Four Zoas yields the liberating picture of "the
infinite & Eternal of the Human form" (1. 374) only after "all
Tyranny" is "cut off from the face of the Earth" (1. 80). Yeats's
Byzantium does not deliver "a state of imaginative liberty at all"
(p. 347), Bloom contends. While the moments of pure visionary aspira
tion toward a referentless Sublime in Blake and Shelley can be
characterized precisely by their status as representative expressions
of the desire toward imaginative freedom living in the hearts of all
men, Yeats's visionary journey to Byzantium, Bloom says, finally
stands for nothing beyond itself, nothing beyond the intensely personal,
highly circumscribed, and typically aristocratic conception of trans
cendence offered by a poet who, in his worst incarnations, was often
79
too eager to be gathered out of time into the disdaining dome of
eternity.
Where, then, in Bloom's view, resides the greatness of Yeats's
poetry in its later phases? If A Vision represents a culmination
of Yeats's thought and a framework for much of his later work, how,
then, can Bloom agree with his critical adversaries that the later
Yeats is indeed the greatest Yeats, that The Tower and The Winding
Stair, in particular, are his two most distinguished volumes of
lyrics? These questions take us to the heart of Bloom's method for
reading Yeats, a method completely consonant with the tactics of
visionary appropriation that we outlined in Chapter 1, tactics now
used seven years later in Bloom's own career and a hundred years later
in the history of literary "mythmaking" to secure for the canon of
Romantic art one of its most formidable prodigal sons. The Yeats
of The Wild Swans at Coole through the Last Poems remains a great
Romantic and a great humanist, Bloom contends, only when he finds
the courage to doubt or to refute the system which he himself had set
up in A Vision and which so often enslaved him, and advances instead,
with bold confidence in the visionary imagination, into those regions
of internalized quest and pastoral romance which had always been the
mark of authentic High Romantic art. Thus, "Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen" is praised by Bloom for its argument "forsaking" Yeats's
"emerging system, and returning to the great Romantics, particularly
to the teachings of Blake and Shelley as to how the poet's imagination
needs to meet a time of political disillusionment" (p. 358).
80
"A Dialogue of Self and Soul" is admired for the concluding affir
mations of the "Self," which "fights free" of "everything in Yeats
that has mythologized at its expense" (p. 375) to the grandeur of
the lines, "We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is
blest" (CP, p. 232). "At Algeciras— A Meditation upon Death" is
rescued from relative obscurity by the stirring proclamation of its
last stanza against the shadow of death-— "for once" in Yeats, Bloom
says, a reply that "is confidently in the power of the imagination"
(p. 384):
Greater glory in the sun,
An evening chill upon the air,
Bid imagination run
Much on the Great Questioner;
What He can question, what if questioned I
Can with a fitting confidence reply. (CP, p. 241)
And if Yeats remains great in a lyric such as this, which, with
its "visionary affirmation" casting off the challenges of Blake’s
"Idiot Questioner," can be called Yeats’s "most genuinely Blakean
poem" (p. 382), then he also retains visionary immortality insofar
as he continues to work in the other, the Shelleyan, part of the
Romantic visionary tradition. While the exuberant mythographer Blake
confers upon Yeats whatever confidence he still owns in the imagina
tion, the mythopoeic quester Shelley continues to move Yeats profoundly
within the tradition of "Romantic pastoralism ... in its internal
ized Romance phase," the tradition which gives Yeats his "true Mask,"
which for Bloom is the "Image of solitary wisdom in a natural context"
(pp. 243-44). This image, Bloom says, an amalgamation of the youth in
"Alastor" and the sage, Ahasuerus, in Shelley's lyrical drama, Hellas,
81
becomes in Yeats "the simplification through intensity of a manifold
of images, of everything in pastoral romance that is a vision of
Innocence, of change without decay and the body's wisdom" (p. 244).
In other words, our categories of Chapter I continue to hold tightly
here for this new Bloomian reading project, as Blake and Shelley
become the arbiters for evaluating the various impulses of a poetic
achievement coming a full hundred years to the decade after the death
of the judges.
Bloom's central contention, of course, is that much of the later
Yeats is unfaithful to its Blakean and Shelleyan heritage, and thus
must be acknowledged to be a less profound and less humane poetic
achievement than its Modernist critics had previously claimed.
The polemical core of the last half of Yeats is its firm devaluation
of poems formerly regarded as Yeatsian masterpieces, poems such as
"The Second Coming," Leda and the Swan," "Under Ben Bulben," and
"The Circus Animals' Desertion," all of which Bloom claims are, in
varying ways, unsatisfying in their imaginative import because too
closely tied to the reductive categories of A Vision in their imagina
tive inception.
It is here, with Bloom's attempt to subsume Modernism at its
putative strongest by his special version of visionary Romanticism
and thus to deliver a resounding blow against critical tradition,
that we encounter the most troubling aspects of his reading method,
and the most unsettling prophecy of things to come under the bril
liantly one-sided Bloomian anxiety of influence. Bloom has a simple
82
enough problem when evaluating the older Yeats: many of the poems
he wants to condemn seem even to him to be masterpieces of poetic
craft and rhetorical force. His argument against them is seldom a
quarrel over their craft (though he does contend, in opposition to
many other critics, that Yeats generally harmed his poems in the
rewriting). In fact, Bloom is, as usual, simply not much interested
in meter, rhyme, diction, or any of those other attributes of the
poem as text, as a crafted object on a page, which have been the
traditional concern of literary critics. Rather, he is concerned,
again as usual, solely with that attribute of poetic meaning which
most resists the imprisonment of existence as mere words on a page,
vision,.and his indictment of many of the established greatest poems
of the later Yeats rests on the simple enough premise that, whatever
their excellence as products of poetic art, they do not advance
imaginative arguments which are acceptable within the tradition of
Romantic vision. The same criteria, then, that we saw in Chapter 1
to guide Bloom’s method of reading the visionary company and thereby
of canonizing its neglected and derided avatars, Blake and Shelley,
are now used to keep a distinguished latecomer within the House of
Visionary Art, while at the same time confining him occasionally to
the dungeon for willful disobedience of his several fathers'
instructions. The only difference in Bloom's method of reading here
in Yeats derives from the obvious difference in critical situation.
While he seldom had to deal with transgressions when analyzing the
primal prophetic words of the Romantic fathers, Bloom now, in his
first encounter with what will prove to be an entire flock of dis
obedient sons, must do so, and the only way he can do so is always
to read the sons’ words in one light and one light alone: as
deliberate distortions of the wisdom of the Romantic fathers. Thus,
the "anxiety of influence" is born— and the tautologies of the
narrow canonizing logic behind it.
Continually, in the latter part of Yeats, Bloom is forced to
make a distinction between the rhetoric of the poem, a rhetoric which
he usually concedes to be uncannily powerful, and the poem's argument,
or what it says, which is seen to be all the more dangerous precisely
because the poem's rhetoric is so strong. Even to make this dis
tinction; of course, is to refute one of the central tenets of the
New Criticism, with its insistence that the "content" of the poem
could not really be separated in any fruitful way from the manner of
its presentation. More important, though, is the further heresy
that Bloom's paraphrases operate in service of, the heresy which
sees in the imaginative arguments of Yeats's prized poems a Modernism
which is no more than a disguised and diminished Romanticism— a
Romanticism ruined by the failure in vision of the Modernist latecomer.
Perhaps the key text in Bloom's discussion of Yeats's failings as
a poet— and, by extension, the failings of an entire era— is that
poem which, more than any other Yeats effort, had been celebrated by
critics of virtually all persuasions over the last half-century as
a true classic in the poetry of our language. Bloom, aware, of
course, of the stature of "The Second Coming," and professing to
84
maintain a properly "Johnsonian respect for the common reader"
(p. 317), nonetheless condemns the poem, and he does so precisely
on the grounds that the poem's undeniable power finally is used for
nothing more exalted than to persuade us "of our powerlessness"
before the terrible grinding of a deterministic Gnostic history
(p. 324). "The Second Coming," that is, communes too closely with
the categories of A Vision, and like that longer flawed poem,
succeeds only in making "explicit a cyclic necessity" which Yeats
"implies the imagination must accept" (p. 261). Against the many
critics who either evade the dire implications of the "rough beast,
its hour come round at last," slouching "towards Bethlehem to be
born" (CP, p. 185), or who prefer to see in the poem's concluding
lines the profundity of true artful prophecy, Bloom aligns himself
with Yvor Winters, a critic completely his opposite in literary
taste but quite close in reading habits. Winters observes of "The
Second Coming" that "• • • we must face the fact that Yeats's
attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the
beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying— he is Yeats's
judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of
this kind of brutality .
If Bloom's thesis on "The Second Coming" is "that our horror"
is Yeats's "ecstasy" (p. 280), then the thesis in turn is based,
as always, on a comparison with Blake and, to a lesser extent,
Shelley. "As much as any other poem by Yeats," Bloom observes,
"'The Second Coming' bears its direct.relation to Blake and Shelley
85
as an overtly defining element in its meaning" (p. 317). Insofar as
this involves merely identifying the many allusions in the Yeats
poem to "Ozymandias," Prometheus Unbound, "The Book of Urizen,"
"Europe, A Prophecy," and other poems by Shelley and Blake, the
thesis is nothing new and covers ground already mapped by previous
Yeats scholars. But Bloom goes on to argue that the result of the
Allusions is, in almost every case, "deliberate" misinterpretation
of the precursors' apocalyptic desires (p. 324), transforming their
optimism about human potential into an ecstasy bordering on horror,
taking their celebration of the freedom of imaginative man and
changing it utterly into a willed capitulation before the inexorable
gyres of history. "What Blake presents as disaster Yeats accepts as
revelation," Bloom observes (p. 261), and there could be no greater
condemnation of the inglorious latecomer than this. Furthermore,
Bloom says, the poem's several basic inconsistencies and lacunae— its
inappropriate and unmerited title hearkening back unto an irrelevant
"primary" Christianity to intimate an "antithetical" new age, and
its use of "surely" to welcome the "revelation" when no context has
been established to justify such certainty— show that Yeats, unlike
Blake, has a tendency "to leap too quickly past his own argument"
in the fever of apocalypse (p. 170), and thus to undermine the authen
ticity of the prophetic voice itself.
"The Second Coming," as a test case for Bloom's theory of
visionary reading as that theory metamorphoses into the anxiety of
influence, reveals quite fully the Bloom thesis that even the
86
established masterpieces of Modernism must be read through the lens
of visionary romance, if only to show that such romance is dying
in our time from lack of confidence in its own visionary powers.
And yet, Bloom is much more successful at this point in telling us
how such a transformation and a diminishing occurs than he is in
answering the even greater question his work poses: namely, why
this falling away from Romantic knowledge and power is inevitable.
In "The Internalization of Quest Romance," Bloom hazards the obser
vation that "Modernist poetry in English organized itself, to an
excessive extent, as a supposed revolt against Romanticism, in the
mistaken hope of escaping" the inherent "inwardness" of the Romantic
quest (RT, p. 16), but, while this helps explain the savagery of
Modernist distortions, poetic and critical alike, it still does not
account for the inevitability of the entire unhappy situation. In
a brief essay on Walter Pater composed a year before "The Internal
ization of Quest Romance," Bloom perhaps comes closer to delivering
an answer to our question, and, in the process, to revealing the
full range of his assumptions about modern culture and the place
of literature within it which underlie everything he has written
before or since. Pater, whose doctrine of the "privileged moment"
Bloom feels to be an important bridge between Wordsworth's "spots
of time" and the "epiphanies" of much modern and Modernist writing,
"inaugurates, for writers and readers in English, the decadent
phase of Romanticism, in which," Bloom says, "when honest, we still
find ourselves" (RT, p. 190). Why do we still find ourselves in this
87
phase? Why is there no escape? What have we done wrong to earn the
exile of our modernity? Bloom, in as vulnerable and forthright a
passage as he has ever written, responds to these questions in a way
that anticipates the fully elaborated theory of influence of his
critical maturity.
What Pater, and the modernist masters following him,
lack is not energy of apprehension, but rather the active
force of a synthesizing imagination, so titanic in Blake
and Wordsworth. Yet this loss— in Yeats, Joyce, Stevens—
is only an honest recognition of necessity. Except for
the phenomenon of a last desperate High Romantic, Hart
Crane, the faith in the saving, creative power of the
imagination subsides in our time. Here too Pater is the
hinge, for the epiphanies of Marius only help him to live
what life he has; they do not save him, nor in the context
of his world, or Pater's, or ours, can anyone be saved.
(RT, p. 190),
"An honest recognition of necessity": upon such bald (and
Shelleyan) visionary despair, Harold Bloom will continue to build, in
his many books of the seventies, a House of Visionary Art for our
belated and unredeemable epoch. The ravages of time, especially its
relentless destruction of imaginative confidence, will now become
his central subject, and the battles against time's depredations
by our century's greatest poets— Stevens, even more than Yeats,
among the moderns, A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery among contemporaries—
will now offer him his only hope and sustenance. That such a tale
of literary history as Bloom now goes on to tell seems as thoroughly
deterministic as the history against which he rebels in Yeats should
not surprise us. According to his own logic, Bloom, like Yeats, can
not "be saved"; the anxiety of influence to which we now turn, and
88
the canon of modern literary history which that theory yields, are
quite self-consciously intended by their creator to deliver what is,
at best, a protest against the very necessity that subsumes them.
89
Notes for Chapter Two
" * ■ Preyer, Yale Review, 51 (1961), 316.
^ Benziger, Criticism, 5 (1963), 186.
3
W.B. Yeats, A Vision, rev. ed. (1937; rpt. New York:
Macmillan Co., Collier Books, 1966), p. 142. In this study I will
use the final version of A Vision, incorporating all the author's
changes. All subsequent quotations from this work will be documented
in parentheses in the text as (AV).
4
See especially "The Tower," in The Collected Poems of
W.B. Yeats, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1976), p. 195:
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
All subsequent quotations from this volume will be documented in
parentheses in the text.
See "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" in W.B. Yeats,
Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 74:
"Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will,
but ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East,
and the Elemental Spirits of mediaeval Europe, and the Sidhe of
ancient Ireland, and whose too constant presence, and perhaps
Shelley's ignorance of their more traditional forms, give some of
his poetry an air of rootless fantasy."
^ Ibid.
7
Whitaker’s Swan and Shadow: Yeats 1s Dialogue with History
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1964) is perhaps
Bloom's most formidable adversary in Yeatsian criticism. Whitaker
provides not only a consistently penetrating analysis of the Blake-
Yeats relationship, but also delivers— to use Bloom's own description—
a "strong" argument for "the relevance of certain esoteric traditions"
in Yeats's work (Yeats, p. vii). Whitaker's thesis on the Yeatsian
attitude toward history is less uncompromising, not as single-minded,
as Bloom's. Whitaker suggests that "history was for Yeats a mysterious
interlocutor, sometimes a bright reflection of the poet's self, some
times a shadowy force opposed to that self"; he finds in Yeats's
doctrine of history a passage beyond "facile subjectivism" to complex
and authentic wisdom (p. 4).
g
See Yeats, p. 73. Also see the discussion of Bloom's use
of Blake's Beulah in Chap. 1 of this dissertation.
90
9
See The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical,
ed. Edwin J. Ellis and W.B. Yeats, 3 vols. (London 1893), 1, 290.
10 Ibid., 288.
See Ezekiel, 28:14-16. The Cherub, like most of the figures
which preoccupy Bloom, is discussed extensively in Frye’ s Fearful
Symmetry.
^ See "Ulysses, Order and Myth," in The Dial, 75 (1923), 480-83.
The essay is reprinted in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank
Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 175-78.
Eliot sees in myth the possibility for art to manipulate "a continuous
parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity ..." Such a device,
Eliot notes, "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving
a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history." Yeats is cited as a pioneer
in this type of Modernist mythmaking: "It is a method already
adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats
to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method
for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and
whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The
Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even
a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the
mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making
the modern world possible for art . . ." (Kermode, pp. 177-78).
13
Both options for dealing with A Vision are employed by
Northrop Frye in "The Rising of the Moon," perhaps the most penetrating
exegesis of the philosophy and symbology of A Vision yet offered.
Frye first locates Yeats's cosmology within the framework of other
great symbolic orders in the Western poetical tradition, including
those of Dante and Blake, and then goes on to note the strong affini
ties of Yeats's cyclical historicism with Spengler's. For Frye,
Yeats's elaborate cycles of history and the individual exhibit not
only a deficient sense of evil but an inadequate conception of the
fundamental identity in great art between subject and object, creative
imagination and created image. Happily, Frye concludes, most of Yeats's
best poems do not require the apparatus of A Vision in order to be
understood. The reductive cyclical orderings of A Vision are irrele
vant, he says, to the profound union of sensuous image and timeless
artifice found in poems such as "Byzantium" and "Sailing to Byzantium."
Frye's essay first appeared in An Honoured Guest, ed. Denis Donoghue
and J.R. Mulryne (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), pp. 8-33,
then was reprinted in Frye's own Spiritus Mundi: Essays on'Literature,
Myth,' and Society (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 245-
7 4 . .
14
Ellis and Yeats, 1, 238.
91
See Yeats's discussion of this most crucial of phases in
A Vision, pp. 135-37. Bloom argues that the "contrast between Phases
1 and 15 is Yeats's only genuine dialectical distinction in the whole
A Vision; the other distinctions are merely cyclic" (Yeats, p. 236).
Nonetheless, for Bloom the dialectic remains empty because Phase 15,
the very center of Yeats's vision and his values, "is opaque both as
image and as concept" (p. 241)— "really fit stuff for Yeats's spooks
to have instructed him in" (p. 240).
^ See Yvor Winters, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (Denver: Alan
Swallow, 1960), p. 10. Bloom throughout his work conducts a running
dialogue with the virulent anti-Romantic, Winters. While the two
critics differ greatly in their values, they do read in much the
same way. Both tend to treat poems as arguments, as a series of
propositions; both rely heavily on the "heresy of paraphrase."
92
CHAPTER THREE:
VISION’S REVISION: THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE
I
Perhaps the best way into the labyrinthine complexities of
Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence is through the
figure which Bloom announces as the central emblem of his entire
discussion, the Covering Cherub.'*’ We have already considered the
Bloomian perspective on Yeats's reductive misreading of Blake’s
Cherub, a misreading said by Bloom to involve Yeats's first
"interpreting a dialectical figure as though it were cyclic," and
then twisting Blake's "demonic" into the "daimonic" of the Yeatsian
Mask (Yeats, p. 218). Unlike Yeats, who interprets the Cherub in
Blake to have two "aspects" for every man, serving not only as a
"satanic hindrance keeping our eager wills away from the freedom and
truth of the Divine World" but also as a potential road to imaginative
2
salvation, Bloom, at the very heart of his theory of poetic
influence, conceives of the Cherub as totally a demonic or thwarting
agent, and cites Blake, Milton, Ezekiel, and Genesis against Yeats
to support a definition of the figure as "that portion of creativity
in us that has gone over to constriction and hardness" (AI, p. 24).
The Cherub, standing for the "creative anxiety" that afflicts all
imaginative men (AI, p. 36), thus helps to demarcate the true enemy
in all Romantic quest, an ultimate enemy now fully revealed to have
93
its origins within, and identified by Bloom as the spectre of the
internalized poetic precursor.
This Bloomian conception of poetic history as a tale of parri
cidal battles between the Titans of the past and their increasingly
desperate poetic descendants owes much to his extensive readings in
philosophy, psychology, literary scholarship, and Jewish theology.
Even a brief list of the thinkers appropriated by Bloom to contribute
insights to his map of the defensive rhetoric of Romanticism would
have to include figures as diverse as the sixteenth-century
Kabbalists, Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria, the eighteenth-century
Italian philosopher of rhetoric, Giambattista Vico, the early
nineteenth-century Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, and a whole
host of more modern philosophers, psychologists, and literary theo
rists, ranging from the Germans Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Freud,
to the French poets Stephane Mallarme and Paul Valery, to the American
explorers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Kenneth
Burke, to, finally, academics of formidable recent achievement such
as Angus Fletcher, Walter Jackson Bate, Geoffrey Hartman, and
3
Paul de Man. Many reviewers have complained of the rhetorical
opacity which results from Bloom's penchant for dropping these names
so licentiously and with such little accompanying explanation— a
penchant particularly pronounced in the alarming seizures of the
associative sensibility which mark much of the almost impenetrably
4
allusive vanguard volume, The Anxiety of Influence. Yet it is
possible that Bloom's forbidding erudition, coupled with his
94
distinctively Emersonian refusal to deliver the expository grounds
of his many assertions, has contributed to an air of almost Gothic
mystery about his whole recent project that is not altogether
warranted by what the project itself portends. As Denis Donoghue,
one of Bloom’s most distinguished reviewers, has noted, Bloom's
recourse to masters such as Vico, Nietzsche, Emerson, Pater, and
Freud "is frequent but opportunistic."^ These and the other thinkers
Bloom uses with such profligacy in his recent work are "models,"
Donoghue observes, not "sources"; for the real source of the later
Bloom's theories, we need only look to Bloom himself and to his
early writings on his true precursor, Blake, especially to the
crucial chapter on Milton in Blake* s Apocalypse, Ttfhich, Donoghue
sagely observes, "could easily be translated into the idiom of
The Anxiety of Influence."
A brief summary of Bloom's approach to Milton in that early
study will show the acuity of Donoghue's point. Blake's Milton is
about the descent of John Milton from Eternity in order to redeem
his works, cast off his Spectre, and embrace his saving Emanation,
Ololon. To accomplish all this, the character of Milton must
confront Urizen, the false deity who, in Blake's world, stifles human
energy and imagination, and with whom Blake associates the historical
John Milton in his Puritan orthodoxy. And yet, Milton is not written,
Bloom says, merely to "correct" Paradise Lost or the public doctrines
of its author (BA, p. 308); rather, as the union of Milton with Blake
in Book 1 of the poem makes clear, Blake's epic is intended "to
95
invoke Milton as a savior for Blake and for England, and therefore
for mankind" (p. 308). Although Milton was for Blake "a prophet who
had not subdued his own Spectre" and who had thus contributed much
toward the "Deist" culture that the bard of the apocalypse inveighs
against one hundred years later, Blake's poem called Milton "does
not exist to convert John Milton into being a Blakean." On the
contrary, Bloom says, "Blake's part in the poem rises out of his
desperate need for Milton’s strength" (BA, p. 322). By the end of
Book 1 of the poem, after the magnificent vision of time and space
achieved by Los in the famous "Pulsation of the Artery" passage, it
is apparent that Milton's descent has indeed answered Blake'si needs,
thus saving the later poet, Bloom says, "for the life of prophecy"
(BA, p. 341).
We have already.approached, from several different angles in
Chapters 1 and 2, a few of the more important moments of Book 2 of
Milton, including most notably the.enunciation of the doctrine of
the States by the Seven Angels before Milton. The action in this
second half of Blake's brief epic is minimal; Milton, after descending
to Blake's garden in all the revealed errors of his Spectre,
vanquishes his enemy with an assertion of prophetic power that
secures for him Ololon, the saving contrary of his vision with whom
he may find love, and thus, in Bloom's words, the "divine form of
the human" (BA, p. 356). The climax of Book 2 is Milton's "great
chant of prophetic dedication" (BA, p. 357) in Plate 41:
96
"To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human,
"I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration,
"To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour,
. "To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration,
"To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering,
"To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination,
"To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration,
"That it .no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of
Madness
"Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots
"Indefinite, or paltry Rhymes, or paltry Harmonies,
"Who creeps into State Government like a catterpiller to destroy;
"To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning
"But never capable of answering ... (2.41.1-13)
This passage of great visionary affirmation delivers what Bloom
sees as the central message of Blake's epic, which is that the ways
of God are justified to many only insofar as "certain men have the
courage to cast out what is not human in them, and so become Man,"
and, in becoming Man, thus "become God" (BA, p. 363). For man to
become fully Man, he must, of course, pass through the "Eternal
Annihilation" of the twenty-eighth state, the state of Milton, and
enter then that "Imagination" which is "not a State" but "Human
Existence itself." Bloom, in Blake's Apocalypse, sums up the
differences between the twenty-seven Churches, representing the
"demonic cycles of fallen history," and the twenty-eighth:
The State of Milton, which is about to be created
by the poet's self-purgation, is a state of self-
annihilation, in which the Spectre is cast off by
the awakened humanity in a man. To enter that state
is to cast off also everything that can die, every
mortal encrustation ... We verge for the first time
in Blake on what will be the burden of Jerusalem,
the distinction between mortality as the self's prison
and immortality as the imagination's freedom. (pp. 348-49)
Milton, who in his orthodoxy was "one with the Covering Cherub"
97
(p. 353), is thus finally identified in Blake's epic with that
state which purifies us to enter the sublimity of authentic
Imagination, in the process of casting off the "Idiot Questioner"
of creative anxiety in whose shadow, Bloom says, we may discern
"the Covering Cherub acting as barrier between creative desire and
artistic completion" (p. 359).
The implications of all this for Bloom's later theorizing are
obviously striking. The entire conceptual framework for the theory
of the anxiety of influence is, in fact, here in nuce, along with
many of the ruling emblems of the later Bloomian critical universe.
Already in Bloom's early reading of Blake there is an emphasis
on the relations between precursors and descendants as the central
constituent of poetic meaning; already there is the acknowledgment,',
via Blake, of all the Spectres, Cherubs, and Idiot Questioners whose
dualisms and whose doubtings may undermine the thrust toward imagi
native immortality of the visionary impulse. Already, too, we
have the germ of Bloom’s contention that it is the later poet who,
in every case, depends on the primal strength of the. precursor,
even as he may be amending the import of the earlier poet's life
andlwork. What we do not have here yet is the key to that obsessive
brooding over the inescapable burden of poetic influence which marks
the later Bloom; what we do not have is the acknowledgment ' that
the latecomer poet is necessarily disfigured as well as diminished
by his relationship with his precursor— a dark recognition built
into the very warp and woof of Bloom's later theorizing on the
98
moderns.
Given that in Milton Blake summons his ancestor in order to
profit from him, that Milton comes to awaken, not to thwart, the
magnificent human imagination of his descendant, why, then, does
the later Bloom's theorizing take the dark turn we see to he so
pronounced from The Anxiety of Influence onward? Why does Bloom,
in his many books of the seventies, call Blake the "theorist of the
saving or revisionary aspect of Poetic Influence" (AI, p. 41), but
then proceed relentlessly to emphasize his own visionary despair
over the final impossibility of any poet every fully attaining a
saving strength within the "vast visionary tragedy" (AI, p. 10) of
the Romantic tradition? We have already begun to answer these
questions in the previous chapters. Blake, Bloom says, is largely
exempt from the onerous burdens of influence simply by virtue of
his remarkable conceptual powers— greater than those of any single
poet before or since— and his equally remarkable confidence in the
visionary imagination; Blake remains always in Bloom's mapmaking
the Grand Exception and, as such, the grand Romantic mythographer
against whose visionary demarcations all other achievements in the
tradition must be measured. Yeats, as a "prologomenon" to the study
of poetic influence, goes about this business of measuring the most
celebrated modern poet against Blake and, to a lesser extent, Shelley,
and finds Yeats wanting in almost every way. It is only when Bloom
turns his visionary gaze to the modern and contemplates what he sees
as the profound inferiority of Yeats in relation to his chief Romantic
99
precursors, that he comes to appreciate the grim implications of
the theory of influence advanced by Blake. The intellectual shock
of this new phenomenon is well revealed in Bloom's pithy summary at
the conclusion of Yeats: "Blake was one of the Instructors who came
down on Yeats's path, but he failed to do for Yeats what Milton had
done for him" (p. 471). Blake fails to help Yeats because, as we
have seen, Yeats misreads him on the very emblem of the Covering
Cherub which marks the Blakean conception of stifling creative
anxiety, a misreading so severe and, to Bloom, measuring matters from
his strenuously Blakean vantage point, so perversely anti-poetic in
its implications, that it cannot be accounted for by anything other
than an imputation of willful distortion. Thus, a hypothesis to
cover the Blakean facts: Yeats's misinterpretation of the sublime
wisdom of his Instructor, and the body of poetry which that misin
terpretation yields, can only be functions of the motivated malignancy
of a latecomer poet who knows, with "deep self-knowledge" and "true
imaginative inwardness" (Yeats, p. 78), that his only hope for
securing imaginative space in a cruelly belated time is ruthlessly
and cunningly to assault the Great Ones who have come before.
The Anxiety of Influence and its several sequels of the seventies
thus might best be seen as Bloom's attempt to account for the modern
swerve away from the great Romantics by using a language and a map
drawn largely from the master whose most powerful poems not only
anticipate the swerves of influence relations in their choice of
Miltonic subject but also demand, by the very force of their
100
visionary confidence, that such a troping away from a primal
Instructor proceed inexorably from them as well, and in less benign
fashion than their visionary instructions could ever have foreseen.
What is in Blake a belief finally in the saving power of the visionary
imagination, and in early Bloom a fervent hope that such a sublime
power might at least be held out as a possibility for the poet in man,
now becomes in the re-visions of the later Bloom a brooding over
the inextricability of the "rotten rags" of memory and poetic desire,
and a rare explicit refutation of the master insofar as memory is
now seen "always" to be "the most important mode of thought" in
poetry, "despite Blake's passionate insistence upon the contrary
view" (PR, p. 30). The swerve begotten by the memory of the late
comer facing his internalized poetic precursor Bloom now calls a
clinamen, "necessarily the central working concept of the-theory of
Poetic Influence" (AI, p. 42), and a concept derived primarily,
despite its nominal Lucretian origin, from Blake's account of the
fall of Los under the baleful influence of the stifling Urizen
in "The Book of Los," and from that greatest of all falls so often
parodied by Blake, the casting out of Lucifer from Heaven in Paradise
Lost. "The true history of modern poetry would be the accurate
recording of these revisionary swerves," Bloom says of clinamen in
The Anxiety of Influence (p. 44), and it is precisely this history
which his many volumes of the seventies seek to construct. As
history, Bloom's enterprise is what the Miltonic inspiration of
clinamen might suggest: an attempt to read Romanticism not only
101
forward to our own time, but also backward to the time of its origins
in the great age of Milton and, to a lesser extent, Spenser.
Spenser's Gardens of Adonis in The Faerie Queene loom formidably as
a source for all Romantic pastoral from Blake to Yeats to Ashbery,
but the real focus of much of Bloom's theorizing in his anxiety of
influence phase is Milton— specifically, Milton seen through the
Blakean lense of a self ■ ‘ -avowed "unreconstructed Romantic" (PR, p. 23).
Milton's powerful role in the tetralogy of books initiated by
The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 derives not only from Bloom's reading
of Blake's Milton, but also, just as importantly, from Bloom's
response to the notorious Blakean and Shelleyan readings of Paradise
Lost presented in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" and "A Defence
of Poetry." Both poets, of course, see in fallen Satan a moral and
imaginative energy far outshining the cold, authoritarian morality
of Milton's God the Father; Blake, delivering an early instance of
what M.H. Abrams has called "that radical mode of romantic polysemism
in which the latent personal significance of a narrative poem is
found not merely to underlie, but to contradict and cancel the
surface intention,"^ goes on to offer the famous thesis that Milton
"was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it"
(CW, p. 150). "Most modern scholarly critics of Milton sneer at the
Blakean or Shelleyan temerity," Bloom observes, perhaps with
C.S. Lewis in mind, "but no modern critic of Milton is as illuminating
as Blake and Shelley are, and none knows better than they did how
omnipotent an opponent they lovingly faced, or how ultimately hopeless
102
the contest was" (RT, p. 97). Bloom's own remarkably rigorous brand
of Romantic polysemism is predicated upon a thoroughly Blakean dark
and revisionary reading of Milton's conscious intent in Paradise Lost,
and a consequent celebration of Satan as, variously, a "great
rhetorician" (PR, p. 23), an "archetype of the modern poet at his
strongest” (AI, p. 19), and "the greatest really Modern or Post-
Enlightenment -poet in the language" (MM, p. 37). In Bloom's diabolic
Blakean allegory, Satan's salience for the modern poet and reader
resides in the very nature of his falling, which is a curse trans
formed into a blessing only through Satan's "profoundly imaginative"
refusal to "repent" before the harsh Miltonic God. To repent, Bloom
contends, would be "to accept a God altogether other than the self,"
a God of "cultural history" and "dead poets," the oppressive God of
"a tradition too wealthy to need anything more" (AI, p. 21). Against
such a disastrous fate, what Satan manages, at least for awhile, is
a heroism and a poetry which Bloom professes to "respond to . . . more
strongly than to any other poetry I know"(MM, p. 37), a heroism which
is poetic precisely because it sets so grandly about the "task" which
Bloom now thinks to be central to the motivation of all poetry: "to
rally everything that remains" (AI, p. 22). Satan lapses later in
Paradise Lost, retreating into merely facile rebellion with his
g
formula, "Evil be thou my good," but for a few brief books in Milton's
epic he presents what is for Bloom the greatest heroism of all, one
"exactly on the border of solipsism, neither within it, nor beyond it"
(AI, p. 22), a heroism which "chooses ... to know damnation and to
103
explore the limits of the possible" within its necessary exile
(AI, p. 21). Clinamen for Bloom, then, is the central working
concept of the theory of poetic influence because the swerve that
it effects away from the blocking power of a previous creator is
the only way into the possibilities for agonistic imaginative meaning
that are manifest in the ensuing five ratios of the Bloomian map.
"Poetic influence is the passing of Individuals through States,"
Bloom says, employing the Blakean distinctions of Milton, "but the
passing is done ill when it is not a swerving" (AI, p. 45). The
strong poet, to attain his strength, must, in other words, cultivate
the o'erweening pride that comes after a fall: "'I seem to have
stopped falling; now I am fallen, consequently, I lie here in Hell,'"
the poet as Satan says, but even as he says so, he is thinking,
'"As I fell, I _ swerved, consequently I lie here in a Hell improved
by my own making'" (AI, p. 45).
We have by now examined Milton's importance to Bloom from two
key Blakean angles— the principle of the relation between poets as
a central constituent of poetic meaning featured in Milton, and the
allegory of Satan as a prototype for the Romantic and modern poet
derived from Paradise Lost via "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."
We now approach a third crucial Miltonic angle, one which is a
product of the union of the first two. If in The Visionary Company
Bloom had noted in passing that Blake and Wordsworth both sought
"to emulate and surpass Paradise Lost" (p. 5), now, twelve years later
in The Anxiety of Influence, he is able fully to elaborate the dark
104
implications of such an observation, and boldly declares that Milton
is "the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence
in English" (AI, p. 33) precisely because he is the prior creator
against whom all Romantic poets must lovingly rebel if they are to
find their own imaginative strength. Keats's observation, "Life to
him would be Death to me," now becomes, in Bloom's view, the motto
for all English poetry in the shadow of Milton, a shadow created not
only by the simple fact of Milton's magnificent achievement as an
epic poet— an achievement which many of the Romantics themselves
confessed to find daunting— but also by the characteristic concerns
which he displays in his calling as epic bard. Milton as the eloquent
preacher of "the power of the mind over the universe of death"
(AI, p. 34) in poems such as "L'Allegro," "II Penseroso," and
Paradise Lost is, Bloom says, the father of all post-Enlightenment
and Romantic poetry, a poetry whose "obsessive theme" is precisely
what Wordsworth, Milton's ephebe, calls the extent to which "the
mind is lord and master— outward sense/The obedient servant of her
will" (PW, p. 577); Milton as a false prophet of orthodox religion,
of the triumph of God the Father over Satan, is, on the other hand,
a, Covering Cherub whose conscious commitment to doctrines that kill
must be confronted by a legion of lovingly defiant eighteenth and
nineteenth-century descendants, all of whom but Blake will, like him,
fail for lack of ultimate faith in their own radically creative
visionary powers.
The remainder of Bloom's map for reading the anxieties of
105
influence attempts to chart the wrestling with the mighty dead made
possible by the latecomer poet’s initial clinamen away from his
precursor. As we have seen in the Introduction, Bloom calls the six
revisionary movements "ratios"— yet another term appropriated from
that master revisionist, Blake, who uses it to signify the uncreative
mechanisms of Newtonian reason. Bloom defines "ratios" as "relations
between unequal terms," wherein "the later poet always magnifies the
precursor in the very act of falsifying (’interpreting') him"
(MM, p. 95). Besides clinamen, the ratios are, in order, tessera,
kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades, all with their own
psychic, rhetorical, imagistic, and topical components, all partici
pating in the "dialectic of revisionism" which Bloom derives from
his study of the Kabbalist, Isaac Luria.^ While we do not want to
get lost amid the gothic complexities of the fully elaborated Bloomian
terminology, we do need to examine Bloom on and in his own terms here,
even if, as some reviewers have complained, the profusion of terms
reveals the critic finally to be trapped within the prison house of
his own critical language.
Clinamen, whose psychic defense is reaction-formation and whose
rhetorical trope is irony, again yields a key to Bloom's enterprise—
in this case, insight into his cunning,use of sources as well as his
continuing Romanticism. Reaction-formation, like all the psychic
defenses associated with Bloom's revisionary ratios, is taken from
Freud (or, in the case of some of the others, from Anna Freud's
schema in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence).^ For Freud,
106
reaction-formation, "Reaktionsbildung," is a primary mechanism of
12
defense by the ego against the id, a mechanism whereby the psyche
adjusts itself and the anxieties of its own conflicting impulses.
For Bloom, borrowing from Freud yet quite consciously misreading him
in terms of the largely Blakean principles we have already examined,
reaction-formation as a psychic defense manifest in any given poetic
agon is an anxiety in the process of unfolding— not a separate and
distinct defense or adjustment against anxiety. Bloom, in fact, now
defines the poem itself as an "achieved anxiety" (AI, p. 86), a
definition starkly in contrast to that of more orthodox Freudian
scholars, who tend to see the poetic text as an emblem of the poet’s
struggle to overcome anxiety Try defense. Clinamen, then, achieves
rather than combats anxiety insofar as the first lines of any
Romantic poem, opening it not only by falling but by swerving from
the precursor, gain through that swerving, imagistically, an absence,
a determined "limitation" of meaning which is an implied correction
of the precursor's poetic instructions'. This swerve is combative,
not placatory, because, like all strong revisionary movements, its
"self-saving caricature" and "distortion" of the precursor, its
"perverse, willful revisionism" (AI, p. 30), operate in service of
one desire and one desire alone: to continue to exist, to live to
fight another line. Thus (to introduce an example I will use through
out the following discussion) the opening stanzas of Wordsworth's
"Intimations" Ode, lamenting "That there hath past away a glory from
the earth" (PW, p. 460, 1.18), actually reveal, Bloom contends, the
107
poet's fears of the passing of his own glory, the waning of his own
prophetic powers as a latecomer at poetry's feast; their misleading
phrasing, their reaction-formation, must, in this light, be seen as
an attempt to ward off the "internalized influences" of the "precursor-
fixation," John Milton— here, the Milton of that elegiac hymn to the
13
strength of poetic election, "Lycidas." The irony inheres in
Wordsworth's saying the opposite of what he means about past glory,
and in the corollary dialectic of images of absence alternating with
images of presence which dominates the poem's first four stanzas as
the poet ponders his loss of "the visionary gleam." Such an irony,
which obviously turns not upon verbal wit, but upon what we have
seen Bloom in' Chapter 1 call "an awareness of the terrible gap between
aspiration and fulfillment" (RT, pp. 114-15), is the "primary trope"
of the map of misreading, because for a strong poem written late in
literary history, the only way ho get started is through the fine
art of lying about the precursor's seemingly fulfilled meanings
(Bloom, who sometimes follows Quintilian in calling irony "illusio,"
might be playing cleverly off the Latin root, illudere, to deride).
The example from Wordsworth is especially salient in that Bloom
in the phase featuring the anxiety of influence calls the Wordsworthian
crisis-poem the "paradigm for the modern lyric" (MM, p. 95), and
Wordsworth himself the "exemplary Modern Poet, the Poet proper"
(AI, p. 20). Bloom's notion of the Romantic crisis-poem, although
clearly indebted to M.H. Abrams' pioneering discussion in "Structure
and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," alters Abrams' emphasis
108
on the interplay of mind and nature, subject and object, in the
14
expected direction. For Bloom, Wordsworth is the exemplary modern
poet, much more modern than the confident mythographer Blake,
precisely because his great poems, "Tintern Abbey," "Resolution and
Independence," The Prelude, and the "Intimations" Ode, present crises
in vision which are inextricably bound up with crises in visionary
memory— mainly, Bloom observes, of Milton— and which deliver, as such,
prototypical instances of that "internalized" poem of Romantic quest
whose formidable presence, and whose final visionary failure, all
poets in England and America since Wordsworth have had to confront.
But Bloom is not content with the Wordsworthian model alone to
characterize this mode of modern poetic memory. Rather, he now has
recourse to yet another paradigm, this one appropriated from a
seemingly much more distant source in the medieval tradition of
Jewish commentary on Holy Scripture known as the Kabbalah. If the
introductory map of The Anxiety of Influence turns mainly to Freud
and Nietzsche as xjell as to the master, Blake,, for models and
analogues, then the more fully elaborated system of A Map of Misreading
through Wallace Stevens relies heavily for its insights into the
psychology of revisionism on the sixteenth-century Kabbalistic theory
of Creation advanced by Isaac Luria, a theory which Bloom now super
imposes on the Wordsworthian crisis-poem model as "the best paradigm
available for a study of the way poets war against one another in the
strife of Eternity that is poetic influence" (MM, p. 5). A brief
summary here of Bloom’s borrowings from the Lurianic Kabbalah (which
109
are often mediated by his readings in the great twentieth-century
15
scholar .of the history of Kabbalah, Gersliom Scholem ) will serve
as a helpful backdrop for our discussion of the final five movements
of the Bloomian map.
The central importance of the LurianiC Kabbalah for Bloom is
in its rereading of the greatest of the medieval Jewish commentaries
on the Bible, Moses de Leon's thirteenth-century Zohar, whose attempt
16
to describe God through the tenfold images of the Sefirot delivers
what Bloom calls a "progressive" myth of the outward emanation of
God's Creation (KC, p. 39). Luria's creative interpretation over
two centuries later of de Leon's own highly elliptical reading of
Scripture transforms the smooth movement of Sefirotic creation seen
by de Leon into "a startlingly regressive process, one in which an
abyss can separate any one stage from another, and in which catastro
phe is always a central event" (KC, p. 39). As such, Luria's account,
strongly mixing an orthodox neo-Platonism with a darker Gnostic
dualism and sense of evil, yields what is for Bloom the first great
instance of Western revisionism— a revisionism engendered by the very
wealth of tradition already accrued by centuries of Kabbalistic
commentary, and by the grim historical fact of the expulsion of the
Jews from Spain in 1492. Luria's story of creation, a story composed
in a troubled exile against a massive and imposing body of rich prior
interpretations of Scripture, is important to Bloom chiefly for the
implicit "psychology of belatedness" (KC, p. 34) which it develops
in response to a cultural situation obviously quite similar to the
110
one Bloom envisions for poetry and for criticism in our own time.
This psychology of belatedness takes shape in Luria's rendering of
the triple rhythm of a Creation-in-exile from its too-strong Creator,
a Creation whose "wandering meaning" (KC, p. 82— Bloom here is paral
leling Kabbalah with Freud's "Bedeutungswahdel"^ ) is based on "the
beautiful necessity" of its own need, aa meaning, to protect itself
from the stifling otherness of prior meaning (KC, p. 82). The triple
rhythm, called by Luria "zimzum," "shevirah ha-kelim," and "tikkun,"
is the process whereby Creation endeavors first to contain the radiance
of God's name through contraction, then is shattered by the primal
force of the deity into a pattern of substitute vessels, and finally,
at the last, is able to restore itself in its by now fully human exile
through acts of mediation "that lift up and so liberate the fallen
sparks of God from their imprisonment" in the fallen world (KC, p. 43).
Applied by Bloom to the situation of Romanticism and its discontents,
Luria's creation myth of contraction, breaking-of-the-vessels, and
restitution becomes the pattern of all modern crisis-poetry as that
poetry enacts a quest for visionary power against the far greater
visionary priority of its precursors, and, through the triple rhythm of
contracting or limiting itself, shattering or substituting meaning,
and seeking the saving force of representation, fails fully to secure
such strength.
Clinamen, as the first of the revisionary ratios or states through
which the individual poet passes in his battle with his precursor, is
seen through the Lurianic light to be "a dualizing phenomenon"
111
(KC, p. 77) insofar as the engineered withdrawal of the creative power
of the prior poet necessarily leaves the world of the later poem some
how impoverished and in exile amid a "dearth-of-meaning, a sense that
representation cannot be achieved fully, or that representation cannot
fill the void out of which the desire-for-poetry rises" (KC, p. 74).
The Wordsworthian crisis-poem at this crucial juncture then shatters
into a substitution, a "replacing of one image by another," which
yields the substituting representation of tessera, whose trope of
synecdoche succeeds in manifesting influence as "a kind of belated
completion," a part transformed into an "antithetical whole" (MM, p.
72). The remaining four ratios of the poem similarly divide into this
tripartite Lurianic rhythm, as the metonymic emptying out of kenosis
is shattered into the restoring representation of the Romantic Sublime,
daemonization, only in turn to yield to the pronounced dualism of
askesis's sublimating metaphors before the final restoration of meaning
in the movement known as apophrades, whose metaleptic reversals of
time constitute "the revisionist trope proper and the ultimate poetic
resource of belatedness" (MM, p. 101).
What are we to make of this exceedingly intricate schema for
mapping the Wordsworthian crisis-poem, a schema so complex and with
such a bewildering maze of analogical corridors (we have only knocked
at the front door) that it seems at times bound to defeat all critical
imaginations less capable than the mapmaker's own? As we saw in the
Introduction, even admiring reviewers have expressed alarm over the
intimidating ellipticality of Bloom's highly associative and para
digmatic style, a style which might justly be characterized as the
.112
critic’s self-conscious self-fulfillment of his own critical prophecies
regarding the sublimity of solipsism for a belated time. Recalling
Preyer's objections to Bloom’s early theorizing, and seeing that the
situation he laments has only worsened with the ensuing years, we may
very well ask once again: is there any way out of the "deep "tautolo
gies" of Bloom’s critical discourse? Can we remove the critic from
this new House of a darkly Revisionary Art that he is laboring so
energetically to imprison us all within?
The best way to capture the whole of the new Bloom map is to
continue our analysis of it in terms of its Blakean origins. Let us
recapitulate for a moment. In The Visionary Company, Bloom follows
Abrams in taking a mind-nature dialectic as his starting point, but
only to emphasize the sublimity of the creative mind desiring a vision
which cannot be met by or in the context of the merely natural world.
The crucial transitional essay of 1968, "The Internalization of Quest
Romance," then makes explicit where the real drama of Romantic vision
ary life occurs: within the imagination questing against all inhibi
tions, but especially against those strongest of stifling forces
engendered not by nature but from within. Yeats , assuming as its main
tabk the problem of characterizing the nature of Yeats's failure vis-a-
vis his Romantic precursors, especially Blake, concludes provisionally
that what is internalized is the inhibiting power of a master whose
imaginative instructions the latecomer poet must confront, twist askew,
and finally lapse before. The tetralogy of books we are now examining,
representing the conceptual exfoliation of the more delimited analysis
of Yeats, elaborates a map of Romanticism out of an astonishing variety
113
of models and sources, and sees in that map a story of all modern
poetry as existing in terms of its own frustrated visionary desire to
clear for itself imaginative space, and thus reverse imaginative time,
in the face of an internalized tradition-memory which is altogether too
rich and too mighty really to be overcome. Poetry, in this latest and
most "Influential" of Bloom's theories, since it achieves meaning only
through defending itself against the internalized spectre of prior
poetry lodged in the psyche of the latecomer poet, may now be defined,
perversely amending Wordsworth, as the work of poems speaking to
another poem, and "that poem answering back with its own defensive
discourse" (KC, p. 108). Imagination, which began in Bloom as a
yearning toward a curiously contextless Sublime, now is said explicitly
to have "no referential aspect" (MM, p. 100), and is seen finally to
be, with a sideways glance at Vico, "the faculty of self-preservation"
(PR, p. 25) in a strong poet which exists as meaning only to battle for
continued meaning against the thwarting Cherub of the precursor.
What is obvious, as we follow the dialectical transformation of
Bloom's own terms, is that Blakean visionary values, as well as the
Blakean ideas and symbolism we have already examined, continue to
impel Bloom's project, even as the story of Blake's Milton and the
unhappy twist of Yeats's generally malign relation to Blake combine
to convince the critic that those values have much darker implications
than the master himself could ever have anticipated. Here are some
crucial observations from the Second Series of Blake's "There Is No
Natural Religion," observations which should aid us in our analysis
114
of Bloom's own key concepts of daemonlzatlon and apophrades:
VII. The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is
Infinite & himself Infinite.
Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees
God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only.
Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.
(CW, pp. 97-98)
In his discussion of this passage in Blake's Apocalypse, Bloom
notes that what Blake presents here is a "humanistic displacement of
the doctrine of the Incarnation" (BA, p. 28), an Incarnation, further
more, whose desired fulfillments can come, as Blake says in his
accompanying tract, "All Religions Are One," only from the "true
Man . . . the Poetic Genius" (CW, p. 98). As Bloom also observes,
however, there is in every man as well "the self or ratio," and
to confront this "bounded mental abstract" or "negation of the
Infinite" is, for Blake, "to see only one's own divided self" (BA,
p. 28). Over a decade later, in his theory of the anxiety of influ
ence, Bloom combines this Blakean concept of the constricting
ratios of a self exiled against itself with the equally Blakean
valorization of infinite desire yearning toward infinite fulfillment
to produce a theory of poetic meaning wherein poets attempt through
misreading and distortion to make the human God of their internalized
precursors become more as they are, in order that they might be as
he was: powerful, proud, and prior.
The focal points of this visionary grappling are in the re
stituting representations of tessera, daemonlzatlon, and apophrades,
movements that, in dynamic contrast to the limiting, dualistic ratios
of clinamen, kenosis, and askesis, feature defenses and tropes which
115
manifest the boldness of visionary desire. The ratios of contraction,
as "acts" which succeed in translating desire into the world of the
poem by making "presence more dialectical” (clinamen), by reducing
"differences" (kenosis), and by changing "our sense of otherness,
of being elsewhere, by perspectivizing it" (askesis) (PR. pp. 253-54),
are maligned by Bloom just insofar as such a success in the translation
of the infinite can only be gained through a capitulation to all
those limits imposed on the creative imagination by the deathly force
of the Other. "The prime poetic desires are," on the other hand,
says Bloom, in a logical culmination of his emphasis from the very
start of his career on the contextless telos of the visionary
imagination, "to be elsewhere, to be different, and to represent that
otherness, that sense of difference and of being elsewhere" (PR,
p. 254) . When he goes on to add in the same passage in Poetry and
Repression, as a totally Idiosyncratic "surmise," that all readers
"tend to value poetry more for its desires than for its acts" (PR,
p. 254), we are once again alerted to the ultimately polemical core
of his literary history--a central subject of the next two chapters—
and to the importance of seeing here that Bloom as a relentlessly
Romantic critic comes not merely to map the ratios of representation
but to praise them.
The cherished Sublime of Bloom's early theory is now located
in the ratio of representation known as daemonization, a term which
Bloom claims to derive from "general Neo-Platonic usage, where
an intermediary being, neither divine nor human, enters into the
116
adept to aid him"(AI, p. 15), but which also seems to owe much to
the Yeatsian conception of the "daimonic" man in A Vision and Per
18
Arnica Silentia Lunae. Yeats's cultivation, through his doctrine
of the Mask, of the "daimon" or mysterious other that would complete
him, is translated by Bloom into the dialectic, of influence as a
daemonizing ratio whose sublime representations are achieved at the
high cost of a fierce repression of the internalized presence of the
precursor. Bloom, who also follows Yeats in calling the ratios of
representation "antithetical" and the ratios of limitation "primary,"
identifies the repression of Romanticism's daemonizing Sublime with
images of height and depth and the trope of hyperbole— the trope
which seems to him "the most important of my six ratios for High
Romanticism" (MM, p. 73).
Bloom's rhetoric at this point passes beyond that of Kenneth
Burke, whose four master tropes include all three of Bloom's limiting
ratios (clinamen-irony, kenosis-metonymy, and askesis-metaphor) but
19
only the first of his ratios of representation (tessera-synecdoche).
Bloom, typically "expanding" an eminent previous theorist to his own
"purposes" (PR, p. 253), adds the hyperbole of daemonization and
the metalepsis of apophrades because they deliver the "successively
more heightened representations" of visionary "desire" (PR, p. 253)
in which Romanticism proper finds its glorious home. "The glory of
repression" for Bloom, "poetically speaking, is that memory and
desire, driven down, have no place to go in language except up onto
the heights of sublimity, the ego's exultation in its own operations"
117
(MM, p. 100); the darkness of repression is that such an exultation,
with its sublime knowledge and its power, is purchased by the late
comer at the high and "self-crippling" cost (AI, p. 109) of making
"the son more of a daemon and the precursor more of a man" (AI,
p. 106). Continuing with our earlier example, the Sublime in
Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode is found in the hyperboles of Stanza 8,
whose invocation of the little Child as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!"
(1.114) is said by Bloom to strain "at the limits of expression"
(MM, p. 146), and thus to produce the extremes of imagery at "being's
height" (1.126) and depth which mark the passage. The shadow with
whom Wordsworth struggles remains Milton, "the severe father of the
Sublime mode" in English (PR, p. 21) whose most glorious invention
is, of course, Satan, but whose sublime elegy for the poet struck
down by an indifferent universe, "Lycidas," continues to be more
pertinent for Bloom here.
The obvious objection arising at this point— that Milton is
nowhere mentioned in the Wordsworth poem— can best be dealt with by
examining the logic of Bloomian repression, a repression whose
struggles of influence operate, by their very nature, in the depths
of poetic meaning, not in the superficial transmission of ideas,
styles, or images from one poet to another. It is here, in his
disquisition on the beautiful lies of repression hidden in the
daemonizing depths of the Romantic soul, that Bloom owes the most to
Freud, that prophet of a "rationalized Romanticism" (MM, p. 65)
whose theories Bloom frequently uses but, almost without exception,
118
deliberately "misreads." At the center of Bloom's use of the man
whom he calls the "strongest of modern poets" (MM, p. 90) are two
crucial Freudian formulations: first, that "instinctual drives" are
20
all "satisfied" in "one wish: to be the father or oneself" ; and
second, that tradition in culture is "equivalent to repressed material
21
in the life of the individual:" Bloom, whose appropriation of
Freud is based on the idiosyncratic and entirely typical premise that
"his insights work better for poems than for people" (MM, p. 92),
translates the first dictum into the idiom of modern poetry under
the aegis of Milton's Satan, who bristles in the darkness of poetic
influence that "We know no time when we were not as now; / Know none
22
before us, self-begot, self-rais'd / By our own quick'ning power."
With the help of Freud, such boasting can be seen to be the necessary
blindness of the poetic son questing for power against an Oedipal
father whose very priority establishes the conditions for meaning
in his son's revolt. Tradition, then, again with the help of Freud,
must be regarded as an internalization, an internalization, further
more, whose repression in the revisionary movement of the Romantic
Sublime is really an act of parricidal violence "wholly centered
on the poetic survival value of malforming all that is past" (AI,
p. 110).
It should already be apparent that Bloom's use of Freud is not
only "a strangely literal transfer to art of one strain in Freud's
23
thinking," as Geoffrey Hartman has called it, but also a signifi
cantly self-conscious and self-serving exploitation of even that
119
one strain. Freud's hypothesis of a Family Romance in the life
of a biological son afflicted by the Oedipus complex features two
important principles which are boldly misread by Bloom. First,
Freud tends to emphasize in such Oedipal drama the sexual element,
the desire of the son to rescue his mother by "giving her a child
24
or making one for her." Bloom, translating the Freudian mother
into a poetic Muse whom the poet longs to rescue from the "degra
dation” (Yeats, p. 5) of her conjugal alliance with the poetic father
through the ultimately futile ploy of savagely misinterpreting the
precursor, displaces Freud's emphasis on sexual impulses into his
own agonistic affirmation of the primacy of aggression. Freud's
two Primal Scenes, the Oedipus complex in biological relations and the
25
engendering History scene in the life of a culture, thus become
in Bloom a single Primal Scene of Instruction, a scene which "strong
poems must will to overcome, by repressing their own freedom into
the patterns of a revisionary misinterpretation" (PR, p. 27).
Next, Freud's theory of psychoanalysis features a faith in
the idea of a second chance in psychic relations, a chance to break
free of the repetition-compulsions of one's Oedipal youth via the
psychic adjustments of sublimation and substitution. Although a
theorist of the "catastrophe" of influence, "of the giving that
famishes the taker" (MM, p. 11), Freud opts finally, as Bloom puts
it, for the "qualified . . . optimism that happy substitution is
possible" (AI, p. 8), that "thought" can be "liberated from its
sexual or dualistic past, by the rare person capable of true
120
sublimation" (MM, p. 66). For Bloom, such an optimism with its
principle of compensatory imagination, while perhaps offering
"pragmatic wisdom" (AI, p. 9) for our lives as men, is nonetheless
hollow and vicious counsel when applied to the life of poets, who
"as poets cannot accept substitutions" (AI, p. 8), and who, if they
accept sublimation, find that they have accepted as well "the self's
sense of its own diminishment" and the "precursor's survival as the
inevitable form of the other, as a dualism that never again can be
banished" (MM, p. 73). Against such capitulation, Bloom, ringing
a change on the famous Freudian formula, argues that the prescription
for every strong poet must be "Where it, the precursor's poem, is
there let my poem be" (AI, p. 80). The precursor, Bloom concludes,
has no choice but to confront his poetic father within the realm of
the id, where he must fight for his creative life against not only
the precursor poet himself, but against all those mediating forces
within him which would seek a reductive and uncreative adjustment
of the tensions of the Oedipal agon.
With this profound "misreading" of Freud by Bloom in mind, we
are now in a position to assess the final two ratios of the Bloomian
map, the "too happily dualistic defense" (MM, p. 100) of the
sublimating metaphors of askesis, and the metaleptic reversals of
time in the final restituting movement of the Romantic crisis-poem,
apophrades. "The central argument" of the theory of the anxiety of
influence, Bloom says in A Map of Misreading, "is that sublimation
is a defense of limitation even as metaphor is a self-contradictory
121
trope of limitation" (p. 99). Bloom profoundly devalues metaphor,
the central trope in the rhetoric of the New Critics, because the
perspectivism it delivers, the inside-outside imagery following the
heights and depths of the Sublime in the Romantic crisis-poem, only
engenders "confusions" (MM, p. 100), "polarities of subject and
object” which "defeat" every attempt to "unify them" in their own
terms (MM, p. 101). Askesis, that is, while necessary as a compen
sation "for the poet's involuntary shock at his own daemonic expansive
ness" in daemonization (AI, p. 12), is nonetheless reductive and self-
defeating in that it returns the poem to a problematical confrontation
with that world of nature which, Bloom has told us all along, can
never be the poet's home. Indeed, we are given a sense of the
essential identity of Bloom's thought in all phases of his career
when we find in Poetry and Repression that he explicitly associates
the hopeless "dualistic imagery of inside consciousness against
outside nature" (p. 19) featured in the fifth revisionary ratio of
Romantic metaphor with that "secularized epiphany" whose precarious
perch within the world of Blake's Beulah was a main subject of
26
discussion in Chapter 1. If the poet does not secure his release
from the upper gate of Beulah, he is doomed, Bloom says in The
Visionary Company, to "the vision of eternal recurrence" (p. 30),
a vision whose perspectivizing confusions are now fully elaborated
fifteen years later in Poetry and Repression via the Nietzschean
nightmare of a trope that sublimates in order to save, but succeeds
only in stifling all that is strongest in the poet.
122
Of course, the Romantic crisis-poem does not end with the dead
end of sublimation and metaphor. If it did, the Cherub of tradition
would have a complete victory over the latecomer poet, and even the
desperate hope for strength-in-belatedness upon which Bloom builds
his theory would be revealed to be a chimera of the unregenerate mind.
In the "Intimations" Ode, if Wordsworth were to accept the sublimating
wisdom offered by stanza 9, if he were to embrace the vision of a
compensatory oceanic sense after the grandeur of his own primal vision
has fled, then, Bloom pointedly observes, "we could cease calling it
'the Great Ode'" (AI, p. 9). Although Wordsworth, like Freud, seems
to admit in the Ode that "repetition or second chance" is "essential
for development," and "that we can redirect our needs by substitution
or sublimation" (AI, p. 9), although the Ode, in fighting "nature on
nature's own ground . . . suffers a great defeat" (AI, p. 10),
nonetheless the poem for Bloom "retains its greater dream," which
is the dream of visionary desire so powerfully represented in the
precursor poem's resurrection of the drowned poet "Through the dear
27
might of him that walkt the waves." The revisionary ratio of
apophrades, with its metaleptic reversals "without which poems would
not know how to end" (MM, p. 102), now concludes the Romantic crisis-
poem with a representation in essence of what all strong poetry
written since Milton is all about— time as tradition, its strength
and its many belated sorrows.
Metalepsis, a figure Bloom derives from Quintilian via a footnote '
in Angus Fletcher's Allegory, where it is discussed as a major
123
28
stylistic device in Milton, is defined as "the trope of a trope,"
a "scheme, frequently allusive, that refers the reader back to
any previous figurative scheme" (MM, p. 74). In Milton, whose
densely allusive style marks him as the master of metaleptic trans-
umption, the device is used deliberately and knowingly to distance
the poet from his epic precursors, and thus to assert the legitimacy
of epic in the shadow of Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Dante, and Spenser.
That later poets do not so successfully contend with the shadow of
Milton is shown in the final stanza of the "Intimations" Ode, where
Wordsworth's attempt to transume Milton's "garland" of immortality in
"Areopagitica" with the "other palms" of a Miltonic "race" (1.203) is
seen by Bloom to be "not a convincing substitute" (MM, p. 149) for
29
the precursor's prophetic power and glory.
The Freudian defenses with which metalepsis is associated,
projection and introjection, are united in their attempt "to reverse
anteriority by forsaking the evasions of mental space" featured in
askesis for "those of mental time" (KC, p. 89). These defenses
and their allied images of earliness and lateness represent for
Bloom a culminating aggression by the latecomer against the internal
ized spectre of the precursor, a culmination that can be called
temporal in that the defenses involved seek to make of the earlier
poem's earliness a lateness and of the later poem's lateness an
earliness, with both reversals hoping to achieve, if only for one
evanescent moment, the "greatest" of all poetic illusions, the
"poetic immortality" of "having fathered one's own fathers" (PR,
124
p. 20). Thus, Wordsworth in his Ode projects or casts out the
threatening glories of the Miltonic past with his apparent acceptance
of belatedness in stanza 10, only to introject, or identify with,
the same anterior visionary glory in the final stanza of the poem,
whose vision of a still bright future was, Bloom ruefully notes, to
be sadly belied by the diminishment of Wordsworth's poetry in the
years following the completion of the great Ode.
It is here, with this final ratio of revision, the ratio whose
figures are figures of a previous figure, whose defenses "trope most
directly against other defenses" (MM, p. 102), that we find the
ultimate source and the cynosure of Bloom's revisions of both his own
earlier Blakean visionary Romanticism and of the "rationalized
Romanticism" of that late, great Romantic "poet," Freud, whose
theories Bloom so frequently and so opportunistically employs.
The "antithetical" High Romantic "vision" featured in Bloom's early
work, a vision which must confront a "primary" nature that it needs
to transcend, is now seen through the lens of the anxiety of influence
to produce a "super-mimesis of essential nature" (K.C, p. 101), a
heightened representation which in its greatest and most character
istic moments, the revisionary ratios of the daemonizing Sublime and
of concluding metaleptic reversal, over-completes and over-fulfills
nature precisely by taking the natural world as only one synecdochal
part of a far greater whole. This greater whole Bloom now locates
in the embattled oneness of the Visionary Imagination itself, as that
Imagination defines itself through its struggles, so dark and yet so
125
glorious, with and within Time. Poetry is not, then, as Freud in
his occasional incarnation as prophet of a redemptive psychoanalytic
rationalism would have it, an emblem of a psychic defense that has
succeeded in achieving sublimation. Rather, poems depend, for their
very beginnings as well as for the uneasy stand-offs which mark their
endings, on a "primal repression" which is, Bloom observes, a
hyperbole for a deeper fixation than the biological hypothesis of
30
Freud could ever allow. The "vision" of strong; poetry, BloOm
contends in this latest and most controversial stage in his career,
is built upon an extremely powerful psychic ambivalence, a mixed love
and hatred of the poetic son for his poetic father, from whose origins
in the metaleptic "trope of a trope" (MM, p. 56) of a Primal Scene
of Instruction there can be, for the Poetical Character, never any
escape.
II
At this point, having completed our initial journey through the
dark and sometimes drear land of Bloomian influence, it might be
helpful to explore in some depth the pattern of a typical Bloom
reading as that reading was first established and developed early in
Bloom's career, and then transmogrified into a full-blown mapping
operation under the impetus of the thoroughgoing systematizing of
the last decade. Our objectives here will be twofold: first, to
recapitulate the major points made thus far by delineating as
completely as possible the nature of Bloom's continuing Romanticism:
126
and second, to provide a preliminary assessment of the logic, methods,
and assumptions of the Bloomian critical enterprise before moving on
to an examination of his notorious and influential canon for modern
and contemporary poets in the following two chapters. Bloom's
treatment of Shelley’s late, unfinished poem, "The Triumph of Life,"
offers itself as an especially felicitous vehicle for a discussion
with these aims. "The Triumph of Life" is a poem with a long and
rich history of Bloom readings and rereadings, beginning with the
extremely lengthy analysis given it in Shelley's Mythmaking and the
synopsis of that analysis provided in The Visionary Company, and
continuing through the transitional stage of the Shelley essay in
The Ringers in the Tower to the explicitly revisionary reading of
31
Shelley's anxieties and influences in Poetry and Repression.
"Triumph" is a particularly telling example of the directions of
the Bloomian critical enterprise over the years not only because
Bloom has reread himself so energetically on the poem, but also
because the nihilistic picture that he sees in it of the inevitable
conquest of the visionary imagination by the world of nature and
Blakean "experience" is a picture, and a perceived peril, at the
heart of all his own theorizing.
Bloom devotes 56 pages to "The Triumph of Life" in his first
book, Shelley’s Mythmaking, much of that spent disputing canonical
critical readings which, in the terminology of his later work,
would be said to "idealize" the meaning of Shelley's quest by
casting it into the mold of Platonic idealism, of an aspiration
127
after God or the Good that, according to Bloom, just is not there in
32
the poem— or in Shelley's work as a whole. In Shelley's Mythmaking,
Bloom offers in response to the spiritualizers what he calls a reading
"without preconceptions" (p. 237) of the meaning of the poem's key
figures, Rousseau, the Chariot and the Shape of Life within it, and
the final "Shape all light" (1.352) that seduces Rousseau. These
forms belong, he says, to the Blakean mode of Vision, not Allegory,
and thus should not be made to mean anything "in addition to what they
are" (p. 243). What they are for Bloom are figures of the destructive
world of nature and experience, a world where, as Shelley says,
" . . . power and will / In opposition rule our mortal days," where
God has "made irreconcilable / Good and the means of good" (1.228-31).
Bloom, in The Visionary Company, calls these lines from "Triumph"
the "central statement of Shelley's poetry" (p. 358). In Shelley* s
Mythmaking, he terms "the finest lines of the poem" (p. 257) those
which speak most directly to the failure of Rousseau, "the chastened
prophet of the state of nature" (VC, p. 357), before the temptations
of this dangerous world of our everyday lives:
'I feared, loved, hated, suffered, did and died,
And if the spark with which Heaven lit my spirit
Had been with purer nutriment supplied,
'Corruption would not now this much inherit
Of what was once Rousseau,— nor this disguise
Stain that which ought to have disdained to wear it . . .
(1.200-05)
Thus, Rousseau, speaking as a ruined one, as another in the
gruesome procession of Life's triumph, acknowledges his failure— a
failure which, Bloom contends, Rousseau fully admits is of his
128
own making:
' . . . I was overcome
By my own heart alone, which neither age,
'Nor tears, nor infamy, nor now the tomb
Could temper to its object.' (1.240-43)
"Rousseau can no longer see," Bloom emphasizes (SM, p. 255);
in a poem about the extinguishing of the "saving spark of imaginative
vision" by "the Shape all light, by the light of the everyday world,"
Rousseau thus becomes for Bloom the central emblem of imaginative
failure, a grotesque and pathetic figure who must now subsist in
"the hell of his awareness of this failure, and the responsibility
for it" (p. 257). Though Life has indeed made victims of most of
those in the diabolical procession, it is not Life, Bloom says,
which has "conquered" Rousseau. Rouseau's failure is more poignant,
more desperate: he is "self-defeated, overcome by his own heart alone,
all of whose impulses he took to be naturally good" (pp. 259-60).
The last two hundred lines of the poem, those which present Rousseau's
account of his waking to seduction by the "Shape all light," are
thus seen by Bloom to deliver the "consequences" and "circumstances"
of Rousseau's self-defeating faith in natural religion and natural
passion, a faith which puts him, Bloom concludes, "in a position where
Life inevitably would triumph over him" (p. 260).
We have already noted in Chapter 1 that Shelley, of all Bloom's
subjects, is perhaps the poet temperamentally closest to him. Shelley
seems to have been Bloom's first love— or at least his first scholarly
subject. Shelley's Mythmaking and The Visionary Company, Bloom's
129
earliest books, are, as much as they are anything else, eloquent and
strenuously argued attempts to affirm the value of Shelley as a
great Romantic poet against the canonical readings of Leavis,
Eliot, and the New Critics, readings which had seen Shelley's work
as generally turgid, immature, and clogged with ponderous and somewhat
33
feverish poetic abstractions. Even those critics— A.C. Bradley
and Carlos Baker, most notably— who had read Shelley sympathetically
had, Bloom charges, idealized and simplified his work, in effect
still underestimating the precision of Shelley's passionate Romantic
34
intellect and the depth of his Romantic vision. The keen
demarcations of this vision, as Bloom sees it, are nowhere more
apparent than in the magnificently lucid and complete "Triumph of
Life." The poem is about falling: Rousseau's fall is "complete"
when he has plummeted "from divinity through nature down to life"
(SM, p. 272). The question that concludes the poem—-"'Then, what is
Life?'" (1.544)— is answered by the poem as a whole. "Life is what
triumphs over nature," Bloom says, "even as nature triumphs over
imagination" (VC, p. 361)— or, to get the causal chain straighter,
"the light of nature destroys the inner light of the poet, only to
be obliterated in turn by the real light of everyday life" (SM,
p. 231). The only power that could forestall the triumph of nature
and life, the initial divine "spark of imaginative vision," is seen
finally to be powerless, inadquate to the task. All the "valuable
qualities" of human aspiration and desire, "beauty, strength, fresh
ness, innocence of youth" (SM, p. 274), are trampled by the wayside,
130
fallen into shadow. And furthermore, Bloom says, the dark and
defeated world that "The Triumph of Life" gives us is not an
aberration of the Shelleyan vision; .it is, he claims, the necessary
culmination of Shelley's profoundly "apocalyptic humanism" (SM,
p. 253), a humanism which, since it could not accept the easy answers
of Rousseauistic natural religion, was forced then to accept as a
consequence of that rejection the terrible truth of the necessary
failures of all that is best in man. "The full implications latent
in all of Shelley's mythmaking are finally visualized in this triumph
of life over almost all human integrity and aspiration," Bloom
concludes (SM, p. 221). The "world of the 'Triumph' is a world
deliberately emptied of myth, a world of things"; as a poem about
the "consequences" of the "absence" of vivifying myth, as "a myth-
unmaking poem," "The Triumph of Life," Bloom summarizes, "is properly
Shelley's last work" (p. 220).
In Shelley's Mythmaking and The Visionary Company, Bloom thus
is doing more than simply presenting a polemical reading of Shelley
against a horde of New Critical detractors. He is, in fact, as we
have seen in Chapter 1, finding in the Shelleyan universe as he reads
it much of the substance of his own critical*and imaginative vision,
a vision which from the start displaces several of the most important
traditional emphases of Romantic critical theory. Bloom recognizes
the mind-nature split crucial to so many of our accepted readings
of Romanticism, but then turns traditional Romantic values on their
35
head by seeing in the issue of a Wordsworthian "natural piety" that
131
would seek a felicitous union of imaginative vision with the world
of benevolent nature not glory and contentment, but danger and
profound degradation. Even more dangerous, however, he goes on to
say— and has said in his work ever since Shelley * s Mythmaking—
are the traps and manifold temptations of the world in which we live,
that "cold, common hell" of our "experience" together in which we
can only, Bloom observes with an echo, "wake to weep" (VC, p. 361).
The obvious correlative of this profound Bloomian distrust of
both nature and society is an equally strong desire, again apparent
in Bloom's criticism from the very start, that he and his poets have
as.little as possible to do with either. Like Emerson, the great
rhapsodist of a severe and uncompromising Romantic solitude (and a
key figure in the next chapter), Bloom cannot conceive of a human
being ever attaining any of his heart's true aspirations or desires
while contaminated by contact with what is in "Triumph" called the
"public way" (1.43). Unlike Emerson, but like Shelley and Blake,
Bloom also cannot trust the inner suasions of man alone either,
since solitary man may easily be duped into believing that the
impulses of his natural heart and being are good. These impulses
are not good, Bloom says time and again in Shelley's Mythmaking,
The Visionary Company, and Blake's Apocalypse; what jis good, the
sole value, passion, and interest for imaginative man amid the
wasteland of Romantic despair and degradation, is the Romantic
Imagination itself.
What kind of imagination is this? The answer should not surprise
132
us. The "spark of imaginative vision" that early Bloom admires in
Shelley does not appear to exist in reference to anything other than
its own will toward perpetuation or "self-preservation" in the face
of all the defining threats offered against it by nature and society,
and by that negative Blakean "Selfhood" (SM, p. 230) which would
settle for the merely personal pursuits of the entrapped social man.
In his Introduction to Shelley's Mythmaking, Bloom is, as we have
seen, quite explicit about the curious process of Shelleyan imagina
tive vision. The myth of Shelley's poems, he says, does not present
anything— it does not make a referential statement of any sort.
Rather, the myth "quite simply, in myth, the process of its making,
and the inevitability of its defeat" (p. 8). If we recall here that
Bloom thinks the "central statement" of Shelley’s poetry to be that
passage in which Shelley grimly characterizes the world of our
experience as one in which "power and will" stand in irreconcilable
opposition, then the significance of this definition of an oddly
empty imagination becomes clear. Bloom, like the youthful visionary
Shelley, is appalled by the "corruption" (1.174) and "misery" (1.121)
of a Life where power and will can never be harmonized. Against such
a world, both Bloom and Shelley— or, at least, the Shelley of Bloom's
reading— offer the answer, and the obviously desperate antidote, of
an apocalyptic humanism, a humanism which, even here in his first
book, Bloom defines essentially as visionary will— will desiring to
harmonize itself into a Power that will endure, will knowing in its
very quest to do so that such a desire and such a power can only end,
down one dark "way" or another, in defeat.
133
We have in Shelley. ' s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, and
Blake's Apocalypse the essential contours of Bloom's vision. What
we do not have yet is his full working out of the implications of
that vision. When Bloom does unravel the logical possibilities
inherent in his early values, methods, and assumptions, the result
will be his theory of the anxiety of influence, a theory which sees
poems as "acts of reading" (PR, p. 26), or, rather, savage and
solipsistic "misreading," of precursor poets, and which then defines
the "meaning of a poem" in radically revisionist fashion as "another
poem— a poem not itself" (AI, p. 70). The rereading of "The Triumph
of Life" in Poetry and Represssion serves as an excellent illustration
of these culminating directions in Bloom's theorizing, and in doing
so, also shows us how Bloom elaborates his map of misreading out
of the comparatively unrefined "apocalyptic humanism" of his earlier
work.
Bloom's reading in Poetry and Repression now maps "The Triumph
of Life" into the six revisionary ratios and sees the poem to achieve
its meaning through Shelley's struggle against the blocking influences
of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton— especially Wordsworth, the
"Covering Cherub" with whom Shelley conducted "a seven-year wrestling
match" from the writing of "Alastor" in 1814 to "Triumph" in 1821
(Yeats, p. 11). The key figures of "Triumph" are reread according
to these changes. First, Rousseau is no longer Rousseau; Bloom has
forgotten his earlier injunction not to make the figures of the poem
mean anything "in addition to what they are." Rather, Rousseau i^s
134
now Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent, Coleridge, and the only
reason he is not named as such, Bloom instructs us, is that the tact
ful and urbane Shelley would not have wanted obtrusively to malign
those who "were still, technically speaking, alive" when he wrote the
O f .
poem (PR, p. 104). Second, the "Shape all light" of Rousseau’s
vision, labeled even in The Visionary Company a representation of
"Wordsworthian nature” (p. 359), is now more precisely individuated
as "a sublimating metaphor for everything that Wordsworth called
'nature’" (p. 107), and as such may be considered, Bloom tells us,
armed with the "fire" of "Nietzschean perspectivism" and extremely
dangerous (p. 108). Finally, the Chariot itself, while still
symbolizing the grotesque triumphal power of death-in-life, is now
seen by Bloom to arrive at that import through a "transumptive
allusion" to the traditional trope of the Merkabah, or divine Chariot,
as it appears in the writings of Ezekiel, Dante, and Milton, and as
it had already been subverted in the work of Blake (whom Shelley,
37
of course, had not read).
The first point to be made of this new reading is that it is
not nearly the radical departure from the old reading that all the
trappings and the esoteric jargon of the map might lead us to expect.
The import of the poem is not fundamentally changed. "Triumph" is
still about imaginative defeat, about the traps of nature and the
greater temptations of the everyday world. It is still, above all,
about the greatest peril to face the visionary: self-defeat before
the exigencies and the harsh imperatives of imaginative vision. What
135
has changed, however, in this new reading is Bloom's strategy for
arriving at these meanings. We can easily see the direction of
this change by comparing representative passages from the two stages
of Bloom's reading of* "Triumph." Here he is in The Visionary Company
on the symbolic equations of the poem: "The chariot's glare is the
light of life; the sun's, of nature; the stars', the visionary light
of imagination and poetry. Nature's light obliterates that of the
poet, only to be destroyed in turn by the light of life, the moonlike
cold car of Life" (p. 354). Now, here is Bloom's reworking of these
equations in Poetry and Repression: "The cold light of the chariot
overcomes the light of the Wordsworthian Shape, even as the light
of nature overcomes the earlier light of Rousseau, or of the young
Wordsworth" (p. 107).
What Bloom has done is, in one sense, simple enough: he has
read Wordsworth into the poem, and Rousseau out of it. Wordsworth,
as the new blocking spectre for Shelley's vision, and thus the
necessary condition for the achieved meanings of Shelley's visionary
quest, takes over the burden of all the blocking agents in the
original reading: nature, life, and the weaknesses of the self.
As the "Shape all light," Wordsworthian "natural piety" is now
recognized by Shelley to be especially dangerous, since it is the
origin of his own desire to "carry through the Rousseau-Wordsworth
dream of natural redemption" (p. 100). This desire, of course, must
be repressed if Shelley is to survive as a strong poet; the pageantry
of the Triumph-of-Life, featuring the "Sublime collapsed into the
136
Grotesque," constitutes that "powerful repression" (p. 100).
Wordsworth himself had not survived; he had first succumbed to the
duplicitous call of nature, then had fallen before the "light of
common day" of the world of our experience, of society and its
38
orthodoxy. This is the burden for Shelley in "Triumph," and this
is the overriding danger which he must trope against. His key
maneuver, thus, is to employ against Wordsworth the transumptive
allusion of the Chariot of Life, a Chariot which in its canonical
meaning had been invested with the spirit of God, but which Shelley
audaciously tropes into the opposite, into the triumphant spirit of
"Death-in-Life" (PR, p. 102). Since this chariot was the undoing
of the parent poet— "Life came riding along in such a chariot, and
triumphed over Wordsworth," Bloom notes (p. 107)— it must itself exist
in the poem as a kenosis, or "undoing," of the dual chimeras of
benign divinity and Shelley's own "vision of love" (p. 100).
Why the chariot in particular, though, since it never appeared
as a figure in Wordsworth's own poetry? Bloom's deliberately out
rageous answer is, as we know, that ."poetry is not an art passed on
by imitation, but by instruction" (PR, p. 105). By this logic, the
very absence of the figure in Wordsworth's poetry makes it an
especially powerful weapon for Shelley to use in his battle against
the treacherous blocking of that poetry. "The anti-mythological'
Wordsworth would not handle" such an image in his work, Bloom says
(p. 107); he certainly, then, could never hope to "handle" it when
finding it posed against him in the war of influence waged by his
137
powerful ephebe, Shelley. The chariot, "the poem's central trope"
(p. 104), thus becomes Shelley's central means for rejecting what
"he had always feared," that life which can only be "death-in-life"
to "strong poets" (p. 104).
These, then, are the main contours of Bloom's revisionist
reading of "The Triumph of Life." The obvious objections of a
conventional critic— that Wordsworth is not even in the poem, and
furthermore, that Bloom presents very little evidence of any kind,
textual or biographical, for Wordsworth's "influence" on it— are met
by Bloom with his featured principle of repression. Influences are
best gauged by the manner of the ephebe's evasion of them; the
most powerful evasion, and the source of the Romantic Sublime,
repression, by definition guarantees that the influence will not
be manifestly there in the poem. And if the conventional critic is
aghast at the solipsistic and tautologous logic of all this, Bloom
has only to remind him of the dark truth that criticism is, after all,
"the discourse of the deep tautology, of the solipsist who knows
that what he means is right, and yet that what he says is wrong"
(AI, p. 96).
How, then, does Bloom get from his reading of Shelley as a
mythmaker in the early studies to the revisionist reading of Shelley
as a poet who knows "instinctively what Vico knew overtly, that
poetic meaning is always concerned with the struggle for poetic
survival" (PR, p. 106)? The answer is implicit in our very formu
lation of the question: the process of imaginative mythmaking in the
138
earlier Bloom reading, already so strangely empty and nonreferential,
is now transformed into its logical and solipsistic culmination as
"the perpetual struggle of becoming a poet, and.then remaining a poet,
by continually becoming a poet again" (PR, p. 102). Following this,
the poem itself is now seen as what it only implicitly was in
Shelley's Mythmaking: a defensive process "in constant change"
(PR, p. 26). And yet, of course, what is defended against has been
altered by Bloom; nature, experience, and "Selfhood" are now all
embodied by the precursor poet or poets. Why did this happen?
We will return to this crucial question in Chapter 6, but three
preliminary points might profitably be made here. First, Bloom's
early emphasis on the duplicity of the "natural" and solitary "heart"
had to go somewhere; reinforced by his shock over the malignancy of
Yeats's treatment of Blake and Shelley, and buttressed theoretically
by his highly selective readings in Freud and, to a lesser extent,
Nietzsche, it became the psychic savagery and willful misprision
of the poetic latecomer fighting for imaginative survival. Second,
since the imagination always did exist in Bloom's theory only to
fight for its "life," and since too, that imagination had always
been decreed to be inner-directed and nonreferential, it was
inevitable, especially as the critic confronted Yeats and all the
oth&r fallen moderns through the sternly evaluative frame of his
Blakean visionary Romanticism, that he would see this imaginative
process to be an agon which could feature only battles with itself
and with others of its own kind. Bloom notes in his analysis of
139
"Triumph" in Shelley’s Mythmaking that the poem, "like so many of his
works, is a poem about poets and poetry" and "their relation to one
another," but he goes on here in this early work to emphasize other
relations, those "to the light and life of everyday, as well as
to another life and light contrasting to that of everyday" (p. 227).
By the time he published Poetry and Repression in 1976, Bloom had
fully elaborated the consequences of his continued assertion of the
autonomy of the imagination: poets can only fight with the powers
of other imaginations, other visions as "strong" or stronger than
their own, because imagination is all that the imagination can ever
really know.
An especially important final factor in the evolution of Bloom’s
theory of the anxiety of influence involves his educing of the
consequences of his early position that the figures of poetry display
the meaning only of "themselves, not something else." The fact is
that Bloom never really did take these figures to be, in any
commonsensical way, just "themselves"— not even in Shelley's Myth
making . The Chariot is already seen to operate "in deliberate
contrast" to its representation in Ezekiel and Milton (p. 236); the
pageant of Life "is a mockery, a diabolic parody of the triumphal
procession" in Ezekiel, Dante, and Milton (p. 244); Rousseau is
"the poet-celebrant of natural religion and natural passion" (p. 253);
the "Shape all light" is, "like Vala," a "type of Rahab, the New
Testament Great Whore embodied in the natural world which is a snare
for the visionary" (p. 271). What Bloom really means by his
140
seemingly naive prescription in this early work for literality in
reading "Triumph" is that the figures of the poem are presented as
Blakean "Vison," not "Allegory" (p. 243); what this means, though
Bloom did not completely work it out at the time, is that the figures
should not and cannot be read as abstractions from the world of
"experience," but must rather be seen as essences of imaginative or
visionary life. The progress of Bloom’s thinking then is to see,
again with the help of Blake— this time the Blakean mode of radical
polysemism that we spoke of earlier— that such visionary essences are,
in their engendering, visionary evasions, and that these evasions can
only exist as relations among poets in an imaginative tradition which
must not, for strong poetic talents, be joined, but battled. Bloom,
who begins under the shadow of Frye, thus comes to turn Frye and
Frye’s mentor, the T.S. Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"
inside-out, making his own transumption of a "tradition of figural
interpretation" which he sees in his later work to "have allowed a
curious overspiritualization . of texts canonized by poetic tradition"
(PR, p. 95).40
There is one significant change in Bloom's rereading of "The
Triumph of Life" that has not yet been mentioned, another change that
eventuates from his working out of the consequences of his vision and
one that signals in the process, perhaps, the depth of his own despair
and the extent of his desperation as a determinedly "belated" Romantic
critic. In all his earlier readings of "The Triumph of Life," Bloom
finds no real hope in the final meanings of the poem. In Shelley's
141
Mythmaking, he sees the poem ultimately to register the horrible
triump of the Buberian "'It' of experience" (p. 275), of "a world
deliberately emptied of myth, a world of things." In The Visionary
Company, he sees in "this poem of total despair" the "story closest
to Shelley's individual fate, the overcoming by Life of the poet's
unextinguished imaginative spark" (p. 358). Even in the transitional
reading of The Ringers in the Tower, Bloom sees the Shelley of
"Triumph" as "altogether the poet of this shadow of ruin," a poet who,
"in giving himself, at last, over to the dark side of his own vision,"
has "ceased to celebrate the possibilities of imaginative relationship"
(p. 89).
The culminating revisionist reading in Poetry and Repression
alters the emphasis of all these despairing pronouncements in an
important way, and it does so through the saving perspectives afforded
Bloom by his most distinctive and radical contribution to the
rhetorical study of tropes, the metalepsis of the map's final de
fensive ratio, apophrades. The metaleptic reversals of the last
lines of "Triumph," detailing Rousseau's seduction by the "Shape all
light," are now seen to present the expected "introjection" of the
past, "and so of Wordsworthian defeat," but are said at the same
time to deliver a "projection of poetic future, and so abandonment
of what has become merely a life-in-death" (p. 100). The death-in-
life of Life, Bloom goes on to remark, is "clearly" what Shelley
"rejects in his sublimely suicidal last poem" (p. 104). Such a stand
is "suicidal" insofar as the poet willfully chooses to cast off that
142
Life which, after all, does devour its visionaries, one "way" or
another; it is sublime because in taking his stand against life,
Shelley is not only repressing but casting off his treacherous
Wordsworthian desires, and thus achieving a grand final instance of
the tragic power of the visionary latecomer before the primal stifling
otherness of the precursor.
The conventional critic will again be quick to point out— perhaps
"misreading" Bloom"s own earlier pronouncements on the need for
literality in reading— that there is no evidence in the poem for
such projection or rejection, nor for such sublimity as Bloom professes
to find. But Bloom has subtly altered the grounds for judgment.
The Visionary Company pronounces ’ "Triumph" a work of "total despair"
despite seeing in it the "unextinguished imaginative spark" of the
poet overcome by life. Bloom’s later map is better able to assess
the value of such paradoxical resistance by the imagination of what is,
after all, inevitable. If poetic meaning arises solely out of the
concerns of poetic survival, the final Bloomian logic of daemonization
and apophrades goes, then merely to have written a poem that struggles
so strongly with the living ghosts of the mighty dead is to have
achieved a rejection of death-in-life and thus a sort of victory,
albeit a victory amid the dark ruins of a greater defeat. That there
is no evidence in the poem for this victory need not bother the critic,
since poems as super-mimetic imaginative creations do not, Bloom
affirms, say anything in a merely referential manner anyway. Through
apophrades, the final and the most cunning of the many cunning ratios
143
of his map, Bloom as mythographer of the Romantic Imagination
metamorphosed into an Agon of Influence is thus able finally to
consolidate the self-consuming victory he has always so strongly
desired, a victory secured by the perilous but redemptive principle
that it is only the mythopoeic process of the imagination in its
relentless defensive definitions of itself which really matters,
for reading or Romanticism, for poets or for those who, like the
poets, are strong enough to confront a faithless and belated time,
and still hope to rally what remains.
144
Notes for Chapter Three
^ See Yeats, p. 218, and The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35.
^ Ellis-Yeats, 1, 288.
3
I will not discuss Bloom's often touted relation to Bate in
this study. While Bloom does acknowledge that Bate's The Burden of the
Past and the English Poet (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap
Press, 1970) is an important contribution to the study of poetic
influence, he also quite correctly sees that his own attempt at writing
a literary history on the model of Freud's "family romance" shares
little or nothing with the methods and the working philosophy of Bate's
more conventional historiography (see The Anxiety of Influence, p. 8).
Bate's thesis that the modern poet is huanted by the excessive rich
ness of the poetry of the past takes its place within the tradition of
humanistic scholarship known as the "history of ideas." Bloom's vision
of all post-Enlightenment poetry as a savage grappling for imaginative
space between poetic sons and fathers is designed precisely to subvert
some of the key ideas of that tradition, especially the assumption of
an essential continuity and "objectivity" in literary history.
4
See especially Nemerov's scathing review, "Figures of Thought,"
in Figures of Thought, pp. 18-29.
Denis Donoghue, "Stevens at the Crossing," rev. of Wallace
Stevens, New York Review of Books, 15 Sept. 1977, p. 39.
^ In "Blake's Jerusalem: The Bard of Sensibility and the Form
of Prophecy," an essay appearing in The Ringers in the Tower, Bloom
concludes that the "form" of Blake's epic is "twisted askew by too
abrupt a swerve or clinamen away from" the precursor, in this case
the prophecies of Ezekiel (p. 76). Thus, though his formidable
conceptual powers enable him "heroically" to formulate and confront
the dread subject of the anxiety of influence in Milton, even Blake
is not fully exempt from the disfigurings of the "baneful aspect of
Poetic Influence" before a Biblical Titan such as-Ezekiel (pp. 75-76).
^ Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 251.
g
See Paradise Lost, in The Complete English Poetry of John
Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963),
4.110.
9
See The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols.
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), 2, 212. This letter was
written by Keats to George and Georgiana Keats in late September, 1819.
145
^ The entire chart is presented by Bloom in A Map of Misreading,
p. 84, and in Poetry and Repression, as a frontispiece to p. 1.
^ See Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, trans.
Cecil Baines (London: Hogarth Press, 1948). Chap. 4 is especially
relevant, with its listing and brief description of the ten
mechanisms: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation,
undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, reversal,
and, as a final addition, sublimation, the "displacement of instinctual
aims" (p. 47). Bloom incorporates all ten of these Freudian defenses
into his map, reserving the place of dishonor for sublimation.
12
For Freud’s discussion of reaction-formation and sublimation,
their differences and their similarities, see Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, Part 2, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, in
collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and
Alan Tyson, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 7 (1953), 178.
For Freud on how represssion can itself employ reaction-formation,
see "Repression," in Works, 14 (1957), 157. For a pointed later
discussion of. the roles of repression and reaction-f ormation as dis
tinct defenses, see Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, in Works, 20
(1959), 101-18.
13
For Bloom's discussion of the influence of "Lycidas" on
Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, see A Map of Misreading, pp. 144-49.
^ See Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic
Lyric," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to
Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 527-60; rpt. in Romanticism
and Consciousness, pp. 201-29.
Isaac Luria's thought survives only in the writings of his
disciples, whose accounts of his theories often conflict. The most
powerful of these accounts is Ets Hayyim, by Hayyim Vital Calabreze.
Bloom's use of the Kabbalah of Luria, as well as of de Leon and of
Luria's master, Moses Cordovero, relies heavily on the magnificent
scholarship of Scholem. See especially Scholem's most famous studies:
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941);
Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd ed.
(1960; rev. ed. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America
1965): On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York: Schocken Books, 1969): Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/New York
Times Book Co., 1974).
For a key to Bloom's perspective on the significance of Scholem's
work, see his review of Gershorn Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History,
by David Biale (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), in New Republic,
23 June 1979, pp. 36-37. "In our post-Holocaust time, the unknown God
146
of Scholem, contracted and withdrawn from our cosmos, seems more
available than the normative God of Akiba and Maimonides," Bloom
observes (p. 37). "Without wholly intending to take up such a stance,
Scholem has become a kind of prophet of a still-emerging Jewish
spirituality that has little or no relation to the normative rabbini
cal tradition. His writings, however insistently historical, begin
to provide the basis for another Jewish Gnosis, perhaps the inevitable
religion of Jewish intellectuals for whom the doctrine of Akiba is
dead" (p. 36).
^ The standard English edition of de Leon is The Zohar, trans.
Harry Sperling, Maurice Simon, and Paul P. Levertoff, with an
Introduction by J. Abelson, 5 vols. (1934; rpt. New York: Soncino
Press, 1970). Abelson’s introduction to Vol. 1 provides a capsule
summary of the long controversy in Hebrew scholarship over the writing
of The Zohar, with Abelson himself concluding that the work could not
possibly "have emanated from the brain of one man" (pp. x-xi).
Bloom is especially concerned with the rhetorical implications
of the Sefirot. In Kabbalah and Criticism, he notes that Scholem
gives "a very suggestive list of Kabbalistic synonyms for the Sefirot:
sayings, names, lights, powers, crowns, qualities, stages, garments,
mirrors, shoots, sources, primal days, aspects, inner faces, and limbs
of God" (p. 26). The list is suggestive for Bloom since rhetorically
these attributes "range over the entire realm of the classical trope,"
a realm which Bloom will go on more fully to assimilate into his own
map in the theoretical chapter which concludes Wallace Stevens.
For Scholem's most pointed discussion of the imagistic attributes
of the Sefirot, see Kabbalah, pp. 96-116.
^ See A Map of Misreading, pp. 89-92, for Bloom’s most cogent
explanation of his use of Freud’s "Bedeutungswandel." His appropri
ation of Freud here is typical: what is in Freud the "wandering
meaning" that unfolds through the psychobiological metamorphoses of
man becomes in Bloom the agonistic unfoldings of poetry and its
anxieties.
18
Bloom’s treatment of Yeats’s conception of the daimonic is
discussed in Chap. 2. For Bloom, the final sections of "Anima
Hominis" in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae, Yeats’s brief reverie of 1917,
present a far more profound vision of the relation of the daimon to
poetry than anything Yeats went on to offer in the over-elaborations
A Vision. Bloom sees great significance in the Yeatsian lines
opening Section X of "Anima Hominis": "It is not permitted to a man
who takes up pen of chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his
only business ..." Bloom's reading of Yeats’s symbolism in the
ensuing sections of "Anima Hominis" as a clinamen away from Blake is
one of the most ingenious discussions in all his work; see Yeats,
pp. 182-85. For the relevant sections of Per Arnica Silentia Lunae,
see W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan Co., Collier Books,
1969), pp. 339-42.
147
19
See Burke's "Four Master Tropes," Kenyon Review, 3 (1941),
421-38; rpt. In A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945;
rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 503-17. Bloom
follows Burke in associating metaphor with "perspective," irony with
"dialectic," and metonymy with "reduction" (p. 503); he diverges from
Burke in strenuously praising synecdoche as "representation" at the
expense of the other three— and in using synecdoche as the gateway
to his specifically Romantic rhetoric of hyperbole and metalepsis.
20
See "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," in Works,
11 (1954), 173: "All his [the son's] instincts, those of tenderness,
gratitude, lustfulness, defiance and independence, find satisfaction
in the single wish to be his own father." In the text of this chapter,
I have quoted the translation that Bloom uses. See The Anxiety of
Influence, pp. 63-64.
21
For Freud's most cogent discussion of the parallels between
tradition and the impulses of the unconscious, see Moses and Monotheism,
Chap. 3, part 1, in Works, 23 (1964), 91-102 and 132-37. In the text
of this chapter, I have quoted the translation of Freud that Bloom
uses— here, from the American edition of Moses and Monotheism (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). In Works, tradition is translated less
elegantly as "something in a people’s life which is past, lost to
view, superseded and which we venture to compare with what is repressed
in the mental life of an individual" (p. 132). For Bloom's discussion,
see The Anxiety of Influence, p. 109, and Kabbalah and Criticism, pp.
97-98.
22
Paradise Lost, 5.859-861.
23
Hartman, The Fate of Reading, p. 53.
2 /
See "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," in Works,
11, 173: "With a slight change of meaning . . . rescuing his [the
son's] mother takes on the significance of giving her a child or
making a child for hier— needless to say, one like himself." In the
text of this chapter, I have quoted the translation that Bloom uses.
See The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 63-64.
25
For the classic discussion of the primal killing of the
father as an engendering cultural deed, see Totem and Taboo, Part 4,
in Works, 13 (1955), 140-61.
26
Bloom in Poetry and Represssion acknowledges Pater's use of
"ascesis" as a source for his own conception of this most counter
productive of Romantic ratios:, "... Pater was attempting to
refine the Romantic legacy of Coleridge, with its preference for mind/
nature metaphors over all other figurations. To Pater belongs the
distinction of noting that the secularized epiphany, the 'privileged'
148
or good moment of Romantic tradition, was the ultimate and precarious
form of this inside/outside metaphor" (p. 19). Pater's importance for
Bloom's reading of Yeats and the passage from Romanticism to Modernism
is briefly discussed in Chap. 2.
^ The Complete English Poetry of John Milton, p. 125, 1.173.
28
See Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), p. 241, n. 33. For
Quintilian's discussion of metalepsis, see Vol. 3 of the Loeb Classical
Library edition of The Institutio Oratoria, trans. H.E. Butler (New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), 8.6.37-39.
Bloom's indebtedness to Fletcher's Allegory extends far beyond
this one borrowing. In particular, Chap. 1 of Fletcher's study,
"The Daemonic Agent," which finds in the quest of such an agent in
allegory "a maximum of will and wish-fulfillment with a maximum of
restraint" (p. 69), is salient to Bloom's whole enterprise. For
Bloom!s enthusiastic critical response to Allegory, see his review,
"Myth, Vision, Allegory," in Yale Review, 54 (1964), 147-49. Here is
an especially telling nugget of praise from that review: "No book on
literary theory since Frye's Anatomy of Criticism has excited me as
much as this continually inventive and exuberant attempt to bring
a flexible order into an outrageously chaotic area" (p. 147).
29
See "Areopagitica," in Complete Prose Works of John Milton,
ed. Ernest Sirluck, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953- ),
2 (1959), 515. Bloom is citing the famous passage: "I cannot praise
a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd and unbreath'd, that
never sallies out and sees her adversary, but.slinks out of the race,
where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and
heat." It is indicative of Bloom's style of "misreading" that he
translates Milton's image of the "garland," which is itself probably
derived from 1 Corinthians, 9:24-25 and which, in "Areopagitica,"
has to do with the victories of Christian salvation, into the dialectic
of poetic influence via the rather farfetched verbal similitude of
the "race." The figure of the "race" not only exists within vastly
different contexts in the works of the two poets, but there is also
the question of why Wordsworth would have taken the image from Milton
alone, since he could easily have been aware of it from his own
exposure to Corinthians or through his reading in English pastoral
poetry, where palms were often the reward for triumphs. Bloom seems
to be more than usually conscious of the arbitrary nature of his analy
sis: '"another race' means perhaps the race in 'Areopagitica'," he
says (MM, p. 149; emphasis mine). Of course, the arbitrariness in
Bloom's tracing of this one image only stands for the greater and
distinctly polemical arbitrariness of his single-minded search for the
deeper visionary essences behind the verbal figures of poetry. Thus,
for example, the transumption in the final stanzas of the "Intimations"
Ode is seen by Bloom to involve a continuing Wordsworthian desire
149
for visionary power against all the losses of encroaching age,
despite the fact that Wordsworth himself speaks of his "eye” as one
"That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality" (1. 201-02). "Keeping
watch over mortality does not mean yielding to it, wholly," Bloom
argues (MM, p. 149), but his argument is really only assertion.
30
For Bloom's quarrel with Freud on this key issue, see
A Map of Misreading, p. 56. For the Freud essay with which Bloom
is entangled here, see "Repression," in Works, 14, 146-58.
31
For Bloom's discussion of "The Triumph of Life" in Shelley's
Mythmaking, see pp. 220-75; in The Visionary Company, pp. 352-62;
in The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 89 and 112-14; and in Poetry and
Repression, pp. 83-111.
32
For Bloom's most explicit refutation of the "allegorizers"
of Shelley's work "who have read it as Plato versified," see The
Visionary Company, pp. 282-84, and The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 94-
96.
33
Eliot, in a 1933 lecture at Harvard, speaks acidly of the
immaturity of Shelley— and of the immature temperament required to
appreciate Shelley’s work: "The ideas of Shelley seem to me always
to be ideas of adolescence— as there is every reason why they should
be. And an enthusiasm for Shelley seems to me also to be an affair
of adolescence: for most of us, Shelley has marked an intense period
before maturity, but for how many does Shelley remain the companion
of age?" See "Shelley and Keats," in The Use of Poetry and the Use
of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933) p. 89.
34
Baker in Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a . Vision
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948) is the most prominent
Bloom adversary, with the two disagreeing on almost every major point
of interpretation in every major poem of the Shelley canon. Bloom even
goes so far at one point as to accuse the other critics of falling
prey "to the most fatal of temptations": they are "at work writing"
their "own poem" (SM, p. 268). The accusation is not without irony
in light of subsequent developments in Bloom's career.
35
The phrase is, of course, from the epigraph to the
"Intimations" Ode by way of "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold":
"The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."
Bloom emphasizes the tremendous "influence" of the "Intimations”
Ode on Shelley, especially on Shelley's own "Ode to the West Wind."
See A Map of Misreading, pp. 149-53.
150
Bloom's downplaying of the role of the historical Rousseau
in Shelley’s conception of "The Triumph of Life" is highly suspect.
For an entirely different perspective on Shelley's use of Rousseau,
see Edward Duffy's Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley's
Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1979), pp. 106-51. After closely analyzing the influence of French
intellectual and political life on the thought of Shelley, Duffy
argues that "The Triumph of Life" is best seen as a long dramatic
rumination by Shelley on the meaning of Rousseau's life and work.
Shelley, he says, "sat down to write a poem that would be a
reclamation of Rousseau's work from the corrosive influence of his
life and hence a model for the way the benign impulse of the French
Revolution ought to be similarly distinguished from its pragmatic
failures" (p. 151). If the poem ends as a fragment, Duffy concludes,
it is "not so much because of the untimely death of its author as
because a chastened Shelley could no longer either believe in or
perform acts of hope like the final stanzas of 'Adonais'" (p. 151).
While Duffy's evaluation of the final import of "The Triumph of Life"
is not far removed from Bloom's, his conventional historical and bio-
graophical approach would be met by Bloom with the objection that
orthodox historiography cannot hope to capture the revisionary
swerves that constitute deep poetic meaning, since those swerves
operate independently of the poet's conscious intent.
37
See Poetry and Repression, pp. 83-98, for a sustained
discussion of the history of figural interpretation of the Chariot.
The essay on Blake's Jerusalem in The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 65-
79, contains a penetrating analysis of the Chariot in Blake.
Bloom often seems indebted in these discussions to the scholarship
of Scholem on the Kabbalistic reception of the Old Testament Merkabah.
38
Again, see the "Intimations" Ode on the waning of visionary
splendor: "At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into
the light of common day" (1.75-76). We might recall here our
discussion in Chap. 1 of the Blakean perspective into which Bloom
so energetically fits the drear tale of Wordsworth's career.
39
In calling Wordsworth "anti-mythological," Bloom is
repudiating the assessment of Wordsworth provided by Douglas Bush
in Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (1937; rpt. New York:
Pageant Book Co., 1957), pp. 56-70. Arguing that Wordsworth's
"ideas of Greek myth were really rooted in his deepest intuitions,"
Bush advances readings of "Laodamia," The Excursion, and "The world is
too much with us . . ."to show that Wordsworth "the poet of nature
and the humble man was also the fountain-head of nineteenth-century
poetry on mythological themes" (p. 56).
^ Bloom, in fact, now labels Frye disparagingly "the Arnold of
our day" in The Anxiety of Influence (p. 31) and "the Proclus or
Iamblichus of our day" in A Map of Misreading (p. 30).
151
CHAPTER FOUR: INFLUENCE AND THE MAP OF AMERICAN
POETIC HISTORY: THE EMERSONIAN SURVIVAL
From the start of his career, Harold Bloom has regarded canon-
formation as one of the principal duties of the critic. Shelley’s
Mythmaking assesses the achievement of perhaps the greatest pariah
in twentieth-century literary tradition, and alters the critical
verdict by reversing the grounds of judgment; Blake’s Apocalypse
follows Northrop Frye in rescuing a formidable Romantic poet/prophet
from the fog of his own mythological elaborations and in going on to
assert that the greatest of the prophet's pronouncements are, in fact,
those longer poems whose density of visionary inventio already had
earned them a reputation for impenetrability a full century before the
aspersions of the inhospitable Age of Eliot. The Visionary Company
establishes the grounds for selecting such a pantheon of Romantic
immortals and for elevating Blake and Shelley therein to positions
of pre-eminence over the old masters Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Yeats, the crucial transitional volume of 1970, marks the first
excursion into the canon of the modern, an excursion undertaken, as
it turns out, only to assimilate the modern into the vast visionary
drama of an engendering and inescapable Romanticism. It is here,
with this turn to the problematical riches of the twentieth-century,
that Bloom comes to evaluate for the first time the logic in, and the
152
assumptions behind, the fierce canonizing impulse already apparent
in his early work. The consequent self-conscious canon-making in
Bloom's many volumes of the seventies, and in the magisterial
commentary that' he now regularly delivers for publications as prominent
as The New Republic and The Times Literary Supplement, far surpasses
his earlier acts of revisionism in both polemical fervor and theo
retical refinement.
Anyone interested in the pacts and sects of recent literary
history, the ebb and flow of poetic Great Ones advanced by a plethora
of competing critical schools, traditions, schisms, and "-isms" of
all sorts, is aware of the prominence of Bloom's Romantic revisionary
company within the purview of modern poetics. Since the appearance of
The Ringers in the Tower in 1971, with its important essays on
the "Central Men" of our native American poetry— Emerson, Whitman, and
Wallace Stevens— Harold Bloom has displayed an extraordinary critical
energy in his quest to translate all of modern and contemporary poetry
into the idiom of an authentic, if belated, Romanticism, and,
concurrently, to discredit all those critical traditions, especially
the Modernist one, which would pronounce the gods of Romanticism
dead. For Bloom, the most salient feature of "strong" poetry in
the twentieth-century beyond Yeats is that it is almost exclusively
American. While he pays lip service to the poetry of Hardy and
Lawrence, and has recently come to applaud the strength of the English
poet, Geoffrey Hill, and the Irishman, Seamus Heaney, Bloom has
dedicated himself with almost oracular zeal in the last decade to
153
delineating the strands of a modern poetic tradition that he sees as
having veered via the gnomic rhapsodies of Emerson from its origins
in the visionary company of early nineteenth-century England to its
end, so desperate and so glorious, in the harsh religion of a dis
tinctively American Orphism. The Family Romance of American poetry
introduced by Bloom in The Ringers in the Tower in 1971 and portrayed
in imposing depth through all his works of the next six years,
culminating in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, features
Emerson as grand patriarch, both Liberator and Oppressor, before
a host of powerful ephebes, including, most notably, Walt Whitman
and Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth-century, and Stevens, Hart Crane,
A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and Robert Penn Warren in the twentieth.
Conspicuously absent from Bloom's canon are, of course, many of the
great names of modern and Modernist literary history. Pound, Eliot,
Auden, Williams, and Cummings are largely ignored or derided;
among-more recent poets, Roethke, Lowell, Olson, Ginsberg, O'Hara
and Rich seldom receive Bloomian mention, and even more seldom
Bloomian praise.
We have already examined Bloom's conception of Modernism in
Chapter 2. What we need to do now is to characterize the religion
of American Orphism which he offers in its place, and discover for
ourselves why Bloom has become such a relentless proselytizer for his
extremist reading of twentieth-century poetry as Romanticism redux.
The question is not an easy one. Part of the burden of belatedness
as Bloom, sees ,it is agonizing self-consciousness, a self-consciousness
which in Bloom's own case, especially in his recent phase, yields a
154
dialectical sensibility so audacious and resourceful in its blazing
and covering of its many theoretical tracks that we feel justified at
times in wondering if the master has not lost himself— or, at any
rate, us— within the myriad torturous paths of his own visionary
systematizing. Bloom’s discussion of canon-formation is typically
ingenious. First, he establishes the canonizing principle itself,
a principle, as we might expect, thoroughly Romantic in its origins
and thus revisionary in its Bloomian ends. "Canon-formation, for us,
has become a part of Romantic tradition," Bloom observes. Romanticism,
since it "differs vitally from earlier forms of tradition" in being
"consciously late" and "appalled by its own overt continuities"
(MM, pp. 35-36), engenders an acute "psychology of belatedness"
which, in turn, is "the cause ... of the excessively volatile senses-
of-tradition that have made canon-formation so uncertain a process
during the last two centuries, and particularly during the last twenty
years" (MM, p. 36). In this light, the Modernist canon, and the
several post-Modernist ones as well, may best be seen as desperate
attempts to escape the inevitable by lying weakly against their own
essential continuity with the tradition they abhor. There is, of
course, no escaping the act of lying itself; canonization, as "the
most extreme version of what Nietzsche called Interpretation, or the
exercise of the Will-to-Power over texts," is the fitting "final or
transumptive form of literary revisionism" in English and American
literary history (KC, p. 100). Canon-formation, that is, as a final
defense against the oppressive richness of time and tradition, is
155
metaleptic and, like the metaleptic reversals of the culminating
revisionary ratio, apophrades. it is above all an exercise in robbing
Time of its power by making later literary texts seem earlier than
they are, and earlier ones seem later.
If we recall here our discussion of the relation between hyperbole
and metalepsis (daemonization and apophrades) in the previous chapter,
the equations for canonization and metalepsis should become clearer.
The unconscious, Bloom says, troping Freud, is a hyperbole whose ori
gins are in an even deeper trope, the metaleptic or transumptive
trope of our Primal Scene as poets (and as critics), a Scene of
Instruction where Poetical Character is incarnated and from which it
can never escape. One of the implications of this relation between
hyperbole— which, we will remember, "represents" the High Romantic
Sublime— and metalepsis, is that there has been a profound falling
off into psychic darkness from the time of the visionary company to
our own. As Bloom puts it, in an observation perfectly representing
the direction of his own thought from The Visionary Company to The
Anxiety of Influence, "What the Ein-Sof or the Infinite Godhead was
to the Kabbalists, or the Imagination was to the Romantic poets,
tradition is now for us, the one literary sign that is not a sign,
because there is no other sign to which it can refer" (KC, p. 98).
Tradition, then, a "daemonic term" since it is "without a referential
aspect, like the Romantic Imagination or like God," is the Sign-of-
signs, the Trope-of-tropes, toward which all our defenses and our
evasions tend, even as they attempt, savagely and with Satanic cunning,
156
to fight themselves free. Like the belated poet, the canonizing
critic is "strongest" when he dares to confront this darkness of
origins in all its burdening glory, when he sees that tradition is
itself but an emblem or a complex trope for Influence, that "great I _
Am of literary discourse" (KC, p. 101) which is, in turn, synonymous
with its only "apparent opposite, 'Defense'" (KC, p. 104), the great
I Will Not. Armed with knowledge as harsh as this, the critic will
not so easily capitulate to the weak "idealizations" which currently
mar our sense of tradition and our notion of who belongs in that
tradition. He will see that tradition is not, as Eliot and Frye
contend, an ideal order, but, rather, an unending battle, viciously
fought within the shadow of creative death; he will see that, within
tradition, no space can be secured for those who, like Eliot, Auden,
and Lowell, weakly evade their imaginative precursors instead of
confronting them on those dangerous and daemonic grounds of Influence
where poetry necessarily begins.
Perhaps now we can answer the question with which this discussion
began. Why is Emerson, whom Bloom describes as an authentic American
Orpheus, especially important to a literary history with revisionist
aspirations? The logic of canonization gives us the answer: the
Emersonian tradition in American poetry continues to vivify because
the Emersonian tradition is the one which has told and continues to
tell the darkest truths about the lies upon which our poetry is
founded. If all peotry is dependent upon a Primal Scene, and if that
Primal Scene is itself a metaleptic trope designed to guard against
157
the ravages of time, then our American Primal Scene features one of
the grandest tropes in.the history of post-Enlightenment literature.
The "Primal Lie" (PR, p. 287) at the origin of the Transcendental
tradition of American Romanticism is Emerson's magnificent denial of
belatedness and of influence, a denial summed.up in his famous and
thoroughly American prescription for an uncompromising "Self-Reliance"
in the face of all the ties, social,personal, and literary, that might
bind the individual imagination. Bloom, calling Emersonian individu
alism "the Supreme Fiction of our literature" and "our most trouble
some trope" (MM, p. 172), generalizes from Emerson's oracular repudi
ation of anteriority to assert that the strength of all American
poetry after him resides in its paradoxical resistance to influence, a
resistance which, since it is much more vehement than that which
obtains between thepoets in the English Romantic tradition, must also
mask much more powerful defensive anxieties repressed beneath.
Analyzing the "peculiar clinamen," the "swerve or twist away from
British and European study of the nostalgias, that has distinguished
American poetry at least since the Age of Emerson," Bloom, in an
essay on John Hollander appearing in Figures of Capable Imagination,
provides a lucid summary of the paradoxes of the wealthy American
agon of influence:
American psychopoetics are dominated by an American
difference from European patterns of the imagination's
struggle with its own origins. The literary psychology
of America is necessarily a psychology of belatedness,
in which the characteristic anxiety is not so much an
expectation of being flooded by poetic ancestors, as
already having been flooded before one could even begin.
158
Emerson's insistence upon Self-Reliance made Whitman and
Dickinson and Thoreau possible, and doubtless benefited
Hawthorne and Melville despite themselves. But the
Scene of Instruction that Emerson sought to void glows
with a more and more vivid intensity for contemporary
American poets, who enter upon a legacy that paradoxically
has accumulated wealth while continuing to insist that it
has remained poverty-stricken. (PP* 272-73).
Thus the principle is particularized; Any canonizer this late in
Time, living in what Bloom habitually calls, with borrowed hyperbole,
"the great sunset of selfhood in the evening land" (PR, p. 244), must
be especially attracted to a tradition which is characterized by a
more acute sense of belatedness than any other in literature— and which
has accumulated so much "wealth" in working out the anxieties of that
belatedness.
Several obvious points can be made here before we move on to a
closer analysis of Bloom's celebration of the Emersonian "Native
Strain." Bloom's reading of Emersonian individualism as, a desire for
pure vision unencumbered by ties to the past and his placing of that
desire in a central position in American literature have affinities
with a number of eminent earlier attempts by academic critics to
define the quality of American literary language and experience.
Roy Harvey Pearce's treatment of the Adamic poet in The Continuity
of American Poetry engages many of the themes in Whitman and Stevens
which will later preoccupy Bloom.^ R.W.B. Lewis's classic discussion
/
in The American Adam is also pertinent, with its definition of the
archetypal American man as "the poet par excellence, creating language
2
itself by naming the elements of the scene about him." Richard
Poirier's incisive examination in A World Elsewhere of the profound
159
discontinuities of "style" in American literature as our writers
struggle "with already existing literary, social,and historical
3
organizations for power over environment and over language itself"
clearly anticipates some of Bloom's major concerns as well. Poirier
in particular could almost be speaking for Bloom with his central
contention that "Emerson in many respects is^ American literature,
both by virtue of the themes and images of which he is its storehouse
and because of the existing ways in which the impossible ambitions
he has for his writing often fail, but only just barely, of being
realized.
And yet there is good reason why Bloom in his own work very
seldom alludes to any of these significant precursors, why he clearly
feels that his reading of American literature departs radically from
theirs. For Bloom is, as usual, busy translating the tale of
Emersonian individualism into the paradigms of his own rather extreme
critical prophecies. While Pearce, for example, can give equal time
to the "mythic" poets such as Eliot who respond to the unlicensed
freedom of the Adamic figures with a severely classical reliance upon
order and authority,"* Bloom must depose the pretenders to the canon
on the grounds that their orthodoxies are barren and reductive when
taken as counsel by latecomers desperate for what will suffice.
And while Poirier's emphasis on the verbal world of American literature
can provide insight into the liberating visions of our greatest
writers, Bloom's continuing commitment to the Blakean Spiritual Forms
underlying the actual words on the page permits him to examine only
160
those visionary truths— now, of course, dark and repressed— which
alone, .in the Bloomian psychopoetic cosmos, determine and vivify
the otherwise lifeless husks of "mere" language (WS, p. 394).
If Bloom's criticism may be distinguished from the work of other
eminent commentators on American literature precisely by virtue of
its unabashed canonizing impulse and its corollary method of reading
American poetry for "defenses" alone, we are justified in asking the
question that Bloom himself says is crucial to canon-formation:
what is the use of the Emersonian strain as Bloom defines it?
Why do our greatest poets of the last fifty years— Stevens, Ammons
and Ashbery— need to compose their work out of a massive internalized
struggle with a precursor who lived, wrote, and died his creative
death a hundred years before them? Given that, as Bloom acknowledges,
only Ammons among the three is an obvious Emersonian while the other
two are "involuntary," the question might very well be: why does
Bloom need Emerson to initiate and preside over his story of American
poetry? In an essay on Emerson entitled "The Self-Reliance of
American Romanticism," Bloom furnishes an excellent frame for
answering these questions. "Romanticism, even in its most remorseless
antagonists, is centrally a humanism," he observes, a humanism "which
seeks our renewal as makers, which hopes to give us the immodest hope
that we— even we— coming so late in time's injustices can still sing
a song of ourselves" (FC, p. 57).
The first part of this pronouncement could easily have come
from Bloom's "visionary company" years; the second, with its rue over
161
"time’s injustices," is very much a part of the "anxiety of influence"
phase. Bloom's love of Emerson, in fact, seems to combine the
impulses of both stages of his career, the veneration for pure moments
of visionary mythmaking central to early Bloom, and the fear and
trembling over what those moments are revealed finally to be in the
Bloomian work of the seventies. In many ways, Emerson, despite the
fact that he and Blake are said by Bloom to "disagree on most things"
(FC, p. 91), serves as an American version of Blake in Bloom's schema.
To Blake's "Exuberance is Beauty" (CW, p. 152), Emerson responds in
6
kind, "The only sin is limitation." To Blake's celebration of the
"wonders Divine / Of Human Imagination" (Jerusalem, 4.98.31-32),
Emerson answers with his own glorification of the sublime trans
parencies of the "transparent eyeball” (EW, 1, 16), of "Imagination"
as "a very high sort of seeing which does not come by study, but
by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or
cricuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to
others" (EW, 3.2, 30). To Blake's mixture of disappointment over
the fallen state of man and visionary confidence that redemption into
the fully human is possible through the imagination, Emerson delivers
in his early "Nature" what Bloom calls "the closest American equiva
lent to Blakean myth ever hazarded" (RT, p. 223).
A man is a god in ruins . . . Man is the dwarf of
himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit.
He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out
from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun,
from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods
of his actions externalized themselves into day and night,
into the year and the seasons. But, having made for him
self this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer
fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop.
162
He sees that the structure still fits him, but
fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted
him, now it corresponds to him from far and on
high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man
the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of
the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber,
and wonders at himself and his house, and muses
strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. (EW, 1, 74-75)
The famous moral of this story, drawn later in "Nature," expresses
what is for Bloom a thoroughly Blakean conception of the elevating
power of the visionary imagination:
The problem of restoring to the world original and
eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of
the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when
we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of
vision is not coincident with the axis of things,
and so they appear not transparent but opaque.
The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken
and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.
(EW, 1, 77)
And, of course, there is the final and darker parallel between Blake
and Emerson. If Blake posits in Milton an influence relation that
could liberate and not oppress, and is once moved to note, after
reading Wordsworth, "I cannot think that Real Poets have any
competition" (CW, p. 783), then Emerson counsels throughout much of
his work an even more radical Self-Reliance that will gladly dispense
with any kind of influence at all. In both cases, the primal prophetfs
hope for visionary freedom is revealed finally by the drear tale of
literary history to be chimerical; in both cases, the harsh irony
is that the very force of visionary confidence in the powerful
patriarch serves not only to instruct but also to oppress all those
who come after.
163
Perhaps it is already apparent that there is, as Denis Donoghue
has observed, something adventitious about Bloom's highly selective
use of Emerson. Bloom himself, acknowledging that Emerson is "not
our greatest writer but merely our only inescapable one" (RT, p. 301),
sees such inescapability to inhere largely in the "Orphic, primary
Emerson" (RT, p. 226), the Emerson of yea-saying and visionary
expostulation. In "The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace
Stevens," an essay written in 1965 and thus his earliest on these
three key figures, Bloom is quite explicit about his curious use of
the two nineteenth-century poets and about the need for seeing them
in his chosen light if we are to understand their modern ephebe,
Stevens:
. . . there is a universal and inevitable tendency
among us these days to turn most readily to Emerson
at his most apocalyptic and to Whitman at his most
despairing. The Orphic, primary Emerson and the tragic,
antithetical Whitman are what we want and need. The
Emerson who confuses himself and us by reservations that
are not reservations, and the Whitman who will not cease
affirming until we wish never to hear anything affirmed
again— these poets we are done with, and in good time.
If we are to understand Wallace Stevens, if we are indeed
to follow Stevens in the difficult taks of rescuing him
and ourselves from his and our own ironies, then we need
to have these two ancestral poets at their strongest
rather than at their most prevalent. (RT, p. 226)
We will approach Whitman and Stevens shortly. What is interesting
here is Bloom's boldly announced tactic of treating the poets at their
"strongest" rather than their "most prevalent"— the startling as
sumption being that the critic has the right, perhaps the obligation,
to concern himself only with those aspects of any given writer which
most fully engage the critic's sense of his own needs and the needs
164
of his time. Since all of Bloom's criticism of the Emersonian line
of American poets is built upon just this assumption, we will not
be surprised to find that he either ignores or rather too quickly
dismisses all those readings of American poetry which, on the one
hand, would see in the works of the Bloomian Elect something other
than Romanticism or, on the other, would see in such Romanticism
not glorious belatedness but' lustreless puerility. Bloom's version
of : Emerson constitutes a pointed argument agains .the many critics
who have condemned the New England poet and essayist as a questionable
amalgam of Coleridge, Carlyle, Plato, and Lao Tse, or worse, in
Yvor Winters' famous words, a "sentimentalist" and a "fraud.
Bloom hypothesizes that Emerson's development as a poet was stunted
by the oppressive priority of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but this early
defeat as a poet is seen by Bloom to clear the way for the grand
triumph of Emerson's true calling as a lyrical essayist. In the
essay form, Emerson is not, as his detractors claim, merely an orches-
trator of themes given him by others, usually his English betters;
rather, Bloom contends, he is the unfathered Father, the Prime Mover,
of all strong American poetry after him, surpassing even Nietzsche—
and, by implication, Blake— in the depth of his confidence that he
alone is the begetter of his superior, his transcendent, self.
Emerson's Orphism "is very much his own," Bloom argues; "little is to
be apprehended of Emerson by tracking him to any of his precursors,
for no other Post-Enlightenment intellect, not even Nietzsche's,
has set itself quite so strongly against the idea of influence, and
165
done this so successfully, and without anxiety" (FC, p. 69).
Of course, insofar as Bloom simply is repudiating all attempts to
see Emerson as a Platonist, a neo-Platonist, or a Swedenborgian,
the pronouncement is nothing new; ever since Shelley's Mythmaking,
Bloom has passionately decried the reading of poetry as philosophy
writ-into-verse. But Bloom also means here that Emerson is a first
among American poets, a cause of himself, whose self-proclaimings
have, in turn, caused— that is, created— in various complex and
evasive ways, the other strong poetic gods in the shadowy embellish
ment of American Orphism.
Orpheus, man or myth, the poet of the enchanting lyre, became
an oracle in his terrible death, a Thracian skull presiding over a
religion whose frenzies intimate an immortality that Bloom character
istically chooses to see in his oxvn somewhat circumscribed visionary
g
light. Since Emerson for Bloom often seems to be not so much a
writer as a repository of aphoristic wisdom, it is entirely typical
of his method for reading the oracle that he bases his celebration of
Emerson's Orphism on a rather slender garland of references to
Orpheus in Emerson's work, references upon which Bloom is able to
elaborate so resourcefully by virtue of the powerful logic of his
already established theses concerning vision and influence. In
"The Poet," Orpheus heads a list of "the highest minds of the world"
(EW, 3.2,10) who have never ceased to explore the manifold meanings
of sensuous facts (the others: Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato,
Plutarch, Dante, and Swedenborg— an occasionally extra-literary list,
166
this). In a journal entry of 1836, Emerson, distinguishing "Orphic
words" by their ability to "touch the intellect & cause a gush of
emotion," announces that "the Universal Man when he comes, must so
speak" of "the whole nature." Bloom extrapolates from these, and
from several other similar passages scattered throughout Emerson’s
voluminous writings, a definition of Orphic Man as that central man
of the always receding future who will have the power to make of the
mere recurrences of nature a visionary flowing, and who has such
power because he has "priority" and is thus "free of the anxiety of
influence" (FC, p. 71). Emerson's gnomic ecstasies, the many brief
visionary flights which mark both his essays and his poetry, are thus
viewed by Bloom as prophecies of the Orphic Poet, foretellings of an
ultimate Orphic Man who, of course, can exist only as pure potential,
as an American's dream of something evermore about to be. And yet the
creative imagination that could even foresee such grandeur counts for
more than the impossibility of its realization; the religion of
American Orphism, Bloom says, "emphasizes not the potential divinity
of man but the actual divinity already present in the creative spirit"
(FC, p. 94). The Orphic Sublime in Emerson and his ephebes resides,
Bloom affirms, "in that ecstasy when the axis of vision and the axis
of things coincide, and we see into the life of things, we behold a
transparency that is also ourselves” (FC, p. 48). The most famous
passage in all of Emerson presents an instance of such sublimity when
the prophet, crossing "a bare common" at twilight on a New England
winter's day, feels the influx of "a perfect exhilaration" and is
167
transformed into a giant Vision:
Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by
the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent
eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of
the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part or parcel of God. (EW, 1, 16)
Bloom's discussion of this passage in Poetry and Repression
is rather tortured, since he wants to argue that the moment must
feature the repression necessary to his Sublime, while also feeling
obliged to contend that Emerson's greatness inheres in the astonishing
circumstance of his having no father really to repress. Thus, the
metamorphosis into the "transparent eyeball," regarded by most readers
as signaling the absorption of Emerson's individual being into the
Oneness of the universe or the Emersonian "Over-Soul," is seen by
Bloom as a grand instance of "Emerson's bringing-forth a father-god
out of himself" (PR, p. 247)— an observation which saves the "divinity"
in Emerson at the cost of considerable patrimonial hanky-panky.
Having saved the divinity, however, Bloom also saves the Emerson
"who is to our modern poetry what Wordsworth has been to all British
poetry after him; the starting-point, the defining element, the
vexatious father, the shadow and the despair, liberating angel and
blocking-agent, perpetual irritant and solacing glory" (RT, p. 269).
And the particular glory of American poetry is precisely its
Emersonian difference from the less exuberant Wordsworthian tradition
on the issue of visionary divination.
If Wordsworth only hesitantly affirms such divination, if
168
"British High Romanticism was either too commonsensical or too
repressed to attempt" such an "enterprise" (FC, p. 75), then Emerson,
the native American Orpheus who so unabashedly proclaims the sublime,
solipsistic glory of that '/which gives me to myself" (EW, 1, 130),
delivers the distinctively grand American affirmation of the human-
making self willing to dare the crushing burden of anteriority, of
prior priority, in order to seize a share of that visionary space
held out as a sublime possibility to all imaginative men. That such
pure visionary appropriation is not really possible, that the ex
pansiveness of American visionary desires in the Emersonian strain
only reveals an anxiety of influence more crippling than any that
has ever before afflicted poets in the history of literature, does
not deter Bloom from celebrating the impulse. In fact, there is
in such an agon what he seems, above all else, to cherish: the
grandeur of heroic defeat. In.a journal entry made shortly after
the death of his son, Waldo, in early 1842, Emerson provides Bloom
with "the epitome of the glory and sorrows" not only of Emerson
himself, but "of our American Romanticism, wildest and freest at
last, most a giant of the imagination where it most confronts its
own dwarf of disintegration" (FC, p. 63):
In short there ought to be no such thing as Fate.
As long as we use this word, it is a sign of our
impotence & that we are not yet ourselves.
There is now a sublime revelation in each of us
which makes us so strangely aware & certain of
our riches that although I have never since I was
born for so much as one moment expressed the truth,
and although I have never heard the expression of it
169
from any other, I know that the whole is here,—
the wealth of the Universe is for me. Everything
is explicable and practicable for me. And yet
whilst I adore this ineffable life which is at my
heart, it will not condescend to gossip with me,
it will not announce to me any particulars of science,
it will not enter into the details of my biography,
& say to me why I have a son and daughters born to
me, or why my son dies in his sixth year of joy.
Herein, then, I have this latent omniscience coexistent
with omniignorance. Moreover, whilst this Deity glows
at the heart & by his unlimited presentiments gives me
all Power, I know that tomorrow will be as this day, I
am a dwarf, & I remain a dwarf. That is to say, I
believe in Fate. As long as I am weak, I shall talk
of Fate; whenever the God fills me with his fulness,
I shall see the disappearance of Fate.
I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory
I am born.TO
If the Emerson who chants oracularly of visionary victory snatched
from the laws of fated defeat is the only Emerson who intrigues Bloom,
then the Whitman whom he wants and needs is, on the other hand, the
anguished poet of visionary loss and imaginative despair that we see
in "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"— not the more prevalent and
popular Whitman of Song of Myself and many other poems in Leaves of
Grass. Whitman-in-the-affirmative, the multitudinous and all-
embracing "Walt," does receive a sympathetic and discerning analysis
in Poetry and Repression, where Song of Myself is adjudged to present
"the most awesome repression in our literature" (of Emerson, of
course), and thus "the greatest instance yet of the American Sublime"
(PR, p. 259). But the Whitman closest to Bloom's temperament is the
subdued seer who walks the shore of the Atlantic, musing upon his
soul's wreck:
170
As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.
0 baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth
Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have
written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.
1 perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
upon me and sting me, ^
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
This famous second section of the poem, enacting a kenosis, a
"defense of undoing the poetic self" which "is more direct than any
where else in the language" (MM, p. 181), is a microcosm of the
achievement of the poem as a whole; in fact, the whole poem for
Bloom "is remarkable as a version of kenosis, of Whitman undoing the
Whitmanian bardic self of Song of Myself" (MM, p. 180), and thus of
Whitman undoing the source of that bardic self, his father and
adversary, Emerson. But, of course, with Whitman as with Emerson
there is always victory in defeat— and Bloom delivers a profoundly
difficult exegesis to prove so. The final stanza of "As I Ebb’d,"
following Whitman's willful surrender to the father principle in
Stanza 3 and featuring his subsequent injunction, "Ebb, ocean of life,
171
(the flow will return,) / Cease not your moaning you fierce old
mother" (1.51-52), delivers, in Bloom’s terms, "a grand scheme of
transumption" (MM, p. 182) which undoes all the earlier undoings in
the poem, and restitutes a saving visionary power via the "Me and
mine, loose windrows, little corpses" (1.57) of the poet's curtailed
but still unvanquished self. The father principle with which Whitman
reconciles himself is, says Bloom without substantiation, that of the
biological father, Walt Whitman, Sr.; the object of the repression
throughout is the Primal Scene of Instruction, "the covenant with
Emerson" (MM, p. 182), where young Whitman confronted a conception
of nature from which the bleak opening lines of his poem now fiercely
swerve. And just "as the covenant with Emerson that begat the poetic
self ebbs" in Stanza 3, so does it get ultimately transumed in
Stanza 4, where the latecomer poet announces his allegiance to the
ebb rather than to the Orphic Emersonian flow, and does so in such
a way as to make a metaleptic earliness out of Emerson's apocalyptic
counsel at the conclusion of "Nature": "Know then that the world
exists for you . . . What we are, that only can we see" (EW, 1, 79).
Whitman's "Just as much for us" (1.67-68), as a trope on the reductions
of "Me and mine, loose windrows," and, in turn, a misprision of
Emerson's "for you," redefines the Emersonian Orphic Poet made great
by the spirit's influx, and thus, in Bloom's reading, secures for
Whitman a triumph-by-defeat over the transparency and the transport
of Emersonian optimism.
There is obviously something stubborn and perilously opaque
172
about an anlysis such as this, with its private language, its many
unsubstantiated assertions, its seemingly arbitrary connections
between various poetic texts, and its refusal to consider the writer's
own experience as a key to the meaning of his work. And yet, Bloom's
point, in one sense, is simple enough— and predictable, given our exe
gesis in Chapter 3. Emerson, in what is to Bloom his central
incarnation as a poet of shamanistic frenzy, provides the "thesis"
within "the.historical dialectic of American poetry," to which
Whitman, in his "tragic" mode, provides the "authentic antithesis"
'(RT, p. 226). Emerson as the father of the visionary strain in
American poetry initiates an internalized Orphic drama, a drama in
which all subsequent major poets must participate as they seek the
divinity or liberating god-like priority that would counter the
ravages of Time and thus save them for the true life of unfettered
poetic vision. They must all, however, finally fail in this quest,
since even to seek such creative influx is to return inevitably to
that visionary origin (that is, the Scene of Instruction) which
contains the seeds of all the quest's possible meanings. The paradox
of Poetical Character sketched in Chapter 3, with its illusory god
like freedom masking a fundamental visionary imprisonment, is once
again worked out in the dialectic of American poetry; what is
different— and the source of Bloom's pronounced preference for American
wars of influence since 1850 over the English— is the ferocity of
Orphic passion with which American poets, afflicted by an especially
acute psychology of belatedness, aspire to godhood, and necessarily
173
\
then, too, the unparalleled ferocity and the savagery with which
they struggle to "rebeget" themselves at the expense of the Orphic
fathers who remain always prior to them in the darkness of poetic
origins.
And thus we come to Wallace Stevens, the "largest" of the
"Orphic inheritors in modern American poetry" (FC, p. 84). It seems
rather odd to speak about the Orphic passion of a poet who has
appeared to so many of his critics to be an elegant, even detached,
ironist of the austere fictions of our imaginative lives; so too did
it seem odd to speak of the echo chamber that is Emerson as a
fatherless father, a cause of himself. Yet such polemical audacity
is at the heart of the massive revision of literary history being
attempted by Bloom, an enterprise whose main emphasis, since the
publication of Figures of Capable Imagination in 1976, has been on
securing for Stevens, and for A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery after him,
their rightful places of pre-eminence within an Emersonian and
Whitmanian tradition that many other critics have been hesitant to
see as directly pertinent to their work. Nowhere is Bloom's
adversary relation to the body of received critical opinion more
pronounced than in his treatment of Wallace Stevens as "the authentic
twentieth-century poet of the Sublime" (PR, p. 282), as "uniquely
the twentieth century poet of that solitary and inward glory we can
none of us share with others" (FC, p. 109). Dismissing most academic
criticism of Stevens as inept and beside the point— that is, "weak"—
Bloom enacts his own self-conscious clinamen away from a stultifying
critical tradition by identifying as Stevens' greatest work the poems
174
of his often neglected later years and by observing of these major
poems, especially the triad, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
"The Auroras of Autumn," and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,"
that they are "themselves more advanced aa interpretation than our
criticism as yet has gotten to be" (WS, p. 168).
The Wallace Stevens favored by Harold Bloom, then, is not the
sensuous and witty Stevens of Harmonium, but the more difficult and
elliptical Stevens of the later and longer poems. For an especially
sensitive expression of the traditional view of Stevens against which
Bloom is responding, we might turn to Randall Jarrell, who admired
the lush imagery and the sensuous tones and timbres of the meditative
sensibility in Harmonium but was disappointed enough with The Auroras
of Autumn in 1950 to complain, "As one reads Stevens* later poetry
one keeps thinking that he needs to be possessed by subjects, to be
shaken out of himself, to have his subject individualize his poem;
one remembers longingly how much more individuation there was in
12
Harmonium." Jarrell’s conclusion— "the habit of philosophizing in
poetry— or of seeming to philosophize, of using a philosophical tone,
images, constructions, of having quasi-philosophical daydreams, has
13
been unfortunate for Stevens" — represents the conclusion of many
readers of poetry from the thirties through the early sixties, as
they tried to unravel the aberrant ambiguities of the later
Stevensian vision, often with the inappropriate exegetical tools of
the New Criticism.. Perhaps the first major break in this tradition
of what Bloom perceives as genteel misunderstanding of Stevens came
175
in 1961 with the publication of Roy Harvey Pearce's The Continuity
of American Poetry. To those who had complained of the abstractness
and the desiccation of the later "philosophical" Stevens, Pearce
answered with the famous argument that Stevens, unlike Eliot, was
compelled to write in an "egocentric tradition" which, in effect,
denied itself as tradition, and which, because it was egocentric,
forced the poet as an "ultimate Adam" to justify the demarcations
of his poetry without having recourse to the a . priori guides of
religion, history, and culture, which Eliot and the other "mythic"
14
poets were privileged to use. If the later poems of Stevens, as
"elaborate apologies for poetry," sometimes escape the bounds of
poetry altogether, if in "looking so compulsively toward the
decreative, they fail to be creative, fail to sustain themselves as
self-contained works of art," nonetheless, Pearce asserts, in a
curious tone mixing one part wistful concession with an equal part
contentious approval, "we must attend closely to them," to the wisdom
achieved by their passage "beyond poetry" into that exalted region
which Emerson foresaw as the meeting ground of poet, philosopher, and
priest. In Pearce's view, then, Stevens' mature poetry is valuable
precisely because it is philosophical, because it does present
"ideas"— ideas about poetry, ideas about order— which:"demand of
us . . . that we absolutely believe or disbelieve in them"; Stevens
is thus rescued from his detractors by the elegantly direct expedient
of celebrating, albeit with grave qualifications, what they had
typically lamented.
176
While it is predictable that Bloom's reading of Stevens as the
foremost modern ephebe of Emerson and Whitman would routinely. •
dismiss Jarrell, it is perhaps surprising, at least at first glance,
that his reading also dismisses the type of approval of Stevens
represented by Pearce. In. Bloom's view, Stevens is not what either
his detractors nr his admirers have claimed him to be. The Stevens
of Harmonium is not a Symbolist, a dilettante, a painter manque,
or any other kind of Frenchman-in-disguise; "French colorings in
Stevens," Bloom observes, "invariably are evasions of more em
barrassing obligations to Anglo-American literary tradition" (WS,
p. 51). More important, Stevens beyond Harmonium is neither the
"desiccated and mock-philosophical" poet lamented by Jarrell (WS,
p. 104) nor the profound metaphysician of the Adamic imagination
celebrated by Pearce. To propound either view of Stevens is, for
Bloom, to endorse a theory of poetry which in effect denies the true
power and integrity of the creative poetic act. Strong poets, Bloom
never tires of asserting, write poetry, not philosophy, and Stevens
is for him the strongest poet of the twentieth-century. Stevens
then also cannot be the essentially comic poet that other critics
15
have described ; the good humor, acceptance, and final serenity
that mark comic modes of perception can only guarantee premature
poetic demise in the belated and increasingly baleful poetic cosmos
envisioned by Bloom. The poetry of Wallace Stevens belongs fully to
just such a world, Bloom contends, for Stevens, early or late, is
above all the poet of "the solitude at our center" (FC, p. 109) where
177
we feel ourselves to be "mortal gods," not only unable but unwilling
to reduce our solipsistic glory by finding "companionship in one
another" (FC, p. 119).
Of course, we have characterized so far only a part of the
context for Bloom's response to other critics of Stevens. In the
years since the publication of The Continuity of American Poetry, a
*
huge Stevens industry has developed. As the Age of Eliot and of
monolithic Modernism has waned, the countering Age of Stevens has been
erected, codified, and often fashioned into constricting dogma.
Bloom's work on Wallace Stevens falls within this new age insofar
as it too celebrates Stevens at the expense of Eliotic orthodoxies
and sees in Stevens' poetry of the imagination and reality a fit
emblem for the obsessions of our time. Yet Bloom's reading of
Stevens over a twelve-year period, from the essays in The Ringers
in the Tower which originally appeared in 1965 to the massive
Wallace Stevens of 1977, departs from other powerful recent commen
taries on the poet in a fashion so self-conscious and so extreme
that we might profitably use it as a cutting edge to help define
Bloom's whole enterprise as a "belated" critical prophet.
Basically, and at risk of oversimplification, post-Modernist
readings have taken two related forms, both based upon a repudiation
of the view of Stevens as a sort of philosopher-in-verse which, for
good or ill, had influenced the reception of his work for much of
this century. The first, brilliantly represented by Helen Vendler
in On Extended Wings, seeks to examine closely the language of Stevens'
178
manifold hesitancies and qualifications, and finds in that language
the ironies of a poet whose vision tends toward the minimalist extreme
17
of the ’ ’ total leaflessness" seen by an old man in an ordinary
evening amid the world's poverty of New Haven. Such a Stevens is a
master of the bare minima of what we— our minds and the rock of our
lives— are, transmuting the austerities and "dilapidations" (CP,
p. 476) of imagination's reality into a profound and sophisticated
protean rhetoric of what will suffice. The second Stevens, the
Stevens of J. Hillis Miller in his phenomenological Poets of Reality
and of Miller and several others in the deconstructionist readings
of the seventies, shares with the first a preoccupation with the
metamorphic flux of Stevens' rhetoric, but goes beyond the first
in identifying that flux with the virtual nihilism of either
consciousness or language in "decreation," returning always upon the
origins of utterance in search of a Being which, as the logic of
deconstruction ultimately would have it, is available only as an
abyss promising the richness of other and endless abysses. In this
view, Stevens,with his remarkably persistent equivocations and
improvisations, becomes the presiding American master of the
problematics of poetic origins as those problems and their fertile
non-solutions have been elucidated in recent years by a host of
theorists gifted in the difficult ascetic arts of Derridean linguistic
1 18
play.
I shall examine the revealing quarrel between Bloom and the
School of Deconstruction in Chapter 6. For the moment it is important
179
only to note that Bloom's dispute with the Vendler and Miller readings
of Stevens is at heart a dispute over how to read poetry— over, that
is, the value and the use of poetry in our time. If Bloom repudiates
the Pearce position on the grounds that poetry is demeaned when read
in a naively straightforward manner as philosophy, he counters Vendler
and Miller, opponents whom he regards as much more formidable, on
the grounds that poetry also is undermined when viewed as entirely an
exercise in reductive ironizing, or as an enterprise which relinquishes
all truth-claims whatsoever through the force of its self-consuming
rhetoric. Whether the ironies of poetry feature the careful per-
spectivization of reference— thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird—
or whether they be the virtuoso ironies of the prisonhouse of
language-bound rhetoric, to limit poetry solely to their world of
hesitancies and qualifications is for Bloom to condemn the imagination
to the endless perspectivist regress that we have seen him associate
with all the revisionary movements of limitation, but most strongly
with the metaphoric confusions of the final limiting ratio, askesis.
Perspectivizing is no country for visionary men, Bloom warns; the
imagination in search of its proper glory cannot long abide in a
region where it feels itself abased before either the dull, inert
dross of reality or the frustrating, elusive absences of its
figurations apart from that reality.
Bloom's obvious problem in making his case for the redemptive
Emersonian humanism of Stevens is that Stevens' poetry seems to be
pervaded by exactly the sort of qualifications which should, in
180
Bloom's schema, rob it of its visionary authority. Indeed,
in The Anxiety of Influence Bloom is moved to label the sum of
Stevens' poetry "an askesis of the entire Romantic tradition"
(p. 134)— an observation which, were it abstracted from the idiom
of Bloom's dramatic Freudian agon, might very well amount to saying
what Vendler and Miller, in their own ways, have so often asserted:
that Stevens, as the most distinctive modern poet of our being in
"a place / That is not our own" (CP, p. 383), leaves us with many
more qualifications than he does visionary assertions. Bloom's
dialogue with Vendler and Miller in his many essays on Stevens is
characterized by this curious tactic of conceding what finally, by
virtue of his Freudian and his Orphic paradigms, he will not allow
to be lost. Thus, we are told that Stevens, or, rather, that "the
Idiot Questioner in Stevens" (FC, p. 108), "developed a tendency
to speak more reductively than he himself could bear to accept,'' but
the reductions are redeemed, at least partially, when we learn that
they are the issue of the anxiety of influence, which "malformed"
Stevens' "primary passion," the "Orphic aspiration of Emerson and
Whitman, the quest for an American Sublime" (AI, p. 134). We are
told that Stevens does feature "endless ironies" (RT, p. 220), that
he does "endlessly" qualify "his sense of his own greatness" (FC,
p. 113), but that nonetheless "he still endlessly returns" us to
just such a sublime and near-solipsistic sense. We are told that,
despite "the constant irony of diction and syntax" in Stevens' poetry
"as well as the more obvious irony of Stevens's personae and of his
181
imagery," his rhetoric delivers affirmations which are visionary,
which not only survive, but prevail over their manifold qualifications.
"A qualified assertion remains an assertion," Bloom instructs in
The Ringers in the Tower, responding specifically to Vendler and
Miller; "it is not an asserted qualification" (p. 228). "There is
indeed a Stevens" as seen by his two prominent critical adversaries,
Bloom acknowledges, a Stevens who is "a venerable ironist" and a
poet "of a cyclic near-nihilism returning always upon itself" (FC,
p. 110). But these are "aspects only," he goes on to affirm, "darker
saliences that surround the central man, shadows flickering beyond
that crucial light cast by the single candle of Stevens' self-joying
imagination."
From the standpoint of the Bloomian logic of canonization that
we sketched earlier, Bloom's determination "to follow Stevens in the
difficult task of rescuing him and ourselves from his and our own
ironies" is a sign of his own strong desire to appropriate— that is,
to canonize— a somewhat recalcitrant poet by using the only method
that Bloom himself thinks to be available to a critic this late in
Romantic tradition: that most cunning of revisionary ratios,
transumption. A metaleptic troping of Stevens' own.tropes battles
the adversary, Time, to an uneasy stand-off by casting the
unsettlingly pervasive ironies of the Stevens canon into a new and
restorative light, which is really the old light of the Romantic
Sublime as that Sublime in turn has its source in the deeper daemonic
grounds of Emersonian Tradition. Such is the complicated formula
182
for Bloom's canonization of Stevens in his several studies of that
poet since 1965, studies which, not surprisingly, present many and
serious obstacles to the reader untutored in the mature Bloomian
terminology and critical method. In particular, readers of Wallace
Stevens who approach that volume with no background in Bloom's
theory or who are interested only in quick illuminations on individual
poems, will find that the exegesis of Stevens granted Bloom by the
"strength" of his critical principles and paradigms is an especially
arduous and elliptical one, often more "difficult" and self-referential
than the poetic corpus it seeks to explain. If Bloom's analysis of
Emerson suffers from the logical conundrum of the Founding Father's
own singularly fatherless state, then his examination of Stevens'
poetry as "an askesis of the entire Romantic tradition" must confront
a patrimonial embarrassment, a plethora of fathers which includes
not only the central American patriarchs, Emerson and Whitman, but
all the other beloved Romantics of Bloom's past, Blake, Shelley,
Wordsworth, and Keats.
Wallace Stevens presents the same sort of difficulty that we
saw Robert Preyer note in The Visionary Company, only now the
difficulty is amplified, perhaps at times to a state beyond the
bounds of intelligibility, by the increasing sweep of the literary
history which Bloom endeavors to tell, and by the increasing theo
retical resourcefulness of his elaboration of an intricate map out
of the logic of Romantic revisionism. Preyer, remarking in 1961
183
on the "tissue of correspondencies, analogies, analogues, and
similarities" preoccupying Bloom during the selection of his visionary
company, is left with the exasperated feeling "that all these works
are simultaneously present to the author's consciousness at any given
meoment— and that he is incapable of forgetting." The mixed
"astonishment," "admiration," and "claustrophobia" that Preyer
confesses before the "suffocating House of Art" erected by Bloom in
his central early work could very well stand as an emblem, of course,
for the response of many readers to Bloom's work over the years.
If Wallace Stevens is any more difficult than Bloom's other works
of the seventies— and even Bloom himself is impelled to acknowledge,
in the midst of one especially forbidding disquisition early on, that
"this multiplication of terms is more than a little maddening"
(p. 4)— it is only because the volume represents an apex of Bloom's
analogizing sensibility, of his ability (to use Preyer's words again)
to "throw down on the page hot slabs of melded relationships rather,
than paragraphs." And since the meld of relationships that Bloom is
trying definitively to establish in this most ambitious of his studies
is the complex Family Pv.omance of American Orphism as that tradition
finds its modern locus in Stevens, we must return to Emerson for a mo
ment as a necessary preliminary to the thorny matter of his poetic
descendant.
The crucial first and last chapters in Wallace Stevens, "American
Poetic Stances: Emerson to Stevens" and "Coda: Poetic Crossing,"
rename much of what we have already discussed in Emersonian Orphism,
and thereby establish the conceptual basis for a framework of almost
184
programmatic equations that Bloom uses to connect the works of
Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens in the middle chapters of the volume.
The situation which Bloom needs to explain in one sense is fairly
simple: his great Orphic yea-sayer and prophet of the Central Man,
Emerson, is, at other times and in other moods, the chastened
proponent of a reconciliation with things-as-they-are who denies
the visionary impulse and seeks to make a dishonorable peace with the
cruel laws of experience and of fate. As early as The Ringers in the
Tower, with its important essay, "Bacchus and Merlin: The Dialectic
of Romantic Poetry in America," Bloom had attempted to map the
many moods of Emerson, seeing the two key poems of Emerson's collection
of 1846.,. "Bacchus" and "Merlin," as visionary poles staking out the
contours not only of Emerson's work but of the entire tradition to
which he is father. According to Bloom, "Bacchus" is the great chant
of the central Orphic in Emerson, a frenzied gnomic appeal "for a
renovation as absolute as Blake's vision sought," a renovation which
would "free man from his own ruins, and restore him as the being
Blake called Tharmas, instinctual innocence triumphantly at home in
his own place" (RT, p. 301). "Merlin," on the other hand, represents
Emerson's departure from "Blakean affinities when, in his extra
ordinary impatience, most fatedly American of qualities, he seeks
terms with his Reality Principle only by subsuming it." The
Emersonian worship of Merlin, whose "Blows are strokes of fate" (EW,
9, 107), signals for Bloom the dark side of American poetic vision,
the "American poetic disaster" wherein the poet is duped by a "Muse"
185
who masks herself "as Necessity" (RT, pp. 302-03).
In the essays on American Orphism in Figures of Capable
Imagination, Bloom designates presiding deities for this dialectic
of Bacchus and Merlin. Eros is the latent divinity within us, the
godhood at our origins "who brings us our souls by literal inspiration,
by prevailing winds" (p. 81). To reach this "Time's firstborn,"
however, "we need" the "dionysiac enthusiasm" invoked by Emerson
in his central Orphic mood, the "influx" or frenzy which can propel
us into Vision. When influx fails us— and fail it must, as the
generally downward curve of Emerson's own career as a prophet
suggests— "when we are left with only the sinful Titanic elements
in ourselves, then truly we fall into Time, and finally into Hades."
In the "intervals left" to us as "failed Orphics," Bloom concludes,
"our religious sense grants us visions of only one deity: Ananke,"
or the "bodiless" serpent (CP, p. 411) of necessity and of death whose
formless figure quite appropriately looms before Stevens in "The
Auroras of Autumn," an aging poet at the end of a tradition.
The intricate mythography of the opening chapter of Wallace
Stevens performs four important operations. First, it explicitly
and elaborately correlates the dialectic of Bacchus and Merlin and its
accompanying Orphic deities with the rhythm of Lurianic creation
presented by Bloom in A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism,
and Poetry and Repression. Thus, Bloom's favorite Emerson, the Emerson
of "Bacchus" and of the exuberant moments in "Nature," "Circles," and
"The Poet," is now called a prophet of visionary restoration-through-
186
substitution. Eros is now aligned with the restitution of the
second, fourth, and sixth revisionary ratios in the map of misreading,
while Dionysius becomes the deity of that breaking-of-the-vessels
which marks divine creative influx. The Emerson who frightens and
appalls Bloom, the subdued seer who so often invokes, in essays
such as "Experience" and "Fate," the dread serpent Ananke, the
Reality Principle which Emerson as Merlin calls "Justice" and "the
rhyme of things" (EW, 9, 110), is now identified with the ratios of
limitation or contraction, the initiating clinamen, kenosis, and
askesis.
This first operation marks a significant expansion in Bloom’s
use of the Lurianic theory of creation. If previously it had been
employed largely as a barometer of the revisionary rhythm of given
poems in the tradition of the Romantic crisis-lyric, now its
paradigmatic power is generalized to apply to visionary development
over entire careers and to the structure of the visionary psyche
at any point within a career. While.both these applications were
implicit in Bloom’s earlier theorizing on the anxiety of influence
and had occasionally been broached by him, his use of them in
Wallace Stevens to chart not only the Emersonian psyche and career
but also then the entire visionary mode which is Emersonian tradition,
is much more precise and fully realized than it had ever been before,
indicating the seriousness of Bloom’s desire to construct a thorough
going rhetoric of Romanticism in which the synchronic is completely
subsumed by the diachronic, in which the timeless forms of vision
187
manifest on any level of poem, psyche, or career, are revealed finally
to be engendered by the temporal struggles of re-visioning that
combined constitute tradition.
The second operation in Wallace Stevens involves imposing yet
another paradigm upon the mixed Kabbalistic^Freudian-Emersonian-
Orphic model already established. As part of his effort to deliver
a complete rhetoric of the Romantic vision, Bloom now attempts to
tie the tropology of the Romantic crisis-poem to the traditional
appeals and topics of Aristotelian and Ciceronian rhetorical theory.
Thus he aligns his own terminology for describing the visionary strife
in the Romantic crisis-poem, psyche, and career, with the conventional
language of the rhetorician who speaks of the appeals of logos, ethos,
and pathos in an oration, and of the commonplaces, or topoi, which
that oration employs. As usual, little is to be learned by comparing
Bloom to his originals; his "misreading" of Aristotle and Cicero is
characteristically deliberate and audacious. Ethos, used by Aristotle
to describe the"character" of the orator as he presents himself to an
19
audience, is translated by Bloom, via a complicated analysis of the
20
role of recollection in Wordsworth, into "the spirit of place
revealing its character, with or without incident, through images
of voice" (WS, p. 383). Since, in Bloom's reading, the spirit of
natural place in Wordsworth serves as "a contraction or withdrawal
of meaning, that opens the way for a rethinking that is necessarily
a remeaning" (WS, p. 385), then ethos might be said, "in more
Freudian terms," to result from that "successful translation of the
188
will into an act" (WS, p. 382) which Bloom already has offered as
definition for the revisionary ratios of limitation. And if "ethos
or character or natural action is converted into a poet's fate,"
then necessarily, by the logic of Luria, there will follow the
"re-cognition" or breaking-of-the vessels of fate which signifies
"imaginative freedom," and this leap, in turn, will allow the
restitution of meaning now called by Bloom "the power of self
recognition" and "the ultimate pathos of wonder" (p. 385). Pathos,
used in traditional rhetoric to denote the arousing of transient
emotions in the audience by the orator, thus becomes for Bloom the
Power of the poetic psyche in its representations of what, after all,
cannot be represented: pure vision. And logos, often translated
in traditional rhetoric as "logic':' but encompassing all the means
of presenting the proof proper of an argument, is, in Bloom's rhetoric
of Romanticism, the gap between the two modes of poetical thinking
where the psyche breaks from one type of figuration to another.
If this were all Bloom hoped to accomplish with his introduction
of the terms of traditional rhetoric into his map of misreading, we
would certainly be justified in regarding it as one of his weakest
discussions— a .strained and entirely nugatory elaboration of termi
nology for terminology's own sake. But Bloom is maneuvering into
position to present one of the most charged concepts of his career,
a concept which might be regarded as delivering a culmination of
several of the central strains of his theorizing over the last twenty
189
years on the nature of poetic meaning. For Bloom’s appropriation
of the ethos-logos-pathos paradigm is inextricably bound to his
redefinition of the Aristotelian and Ciceronian topos, or topic,
a redefinition which allows him to assess more fully the nature of
the process of substitution or breaking-of-the-vessels which has
figured so prominently in his work since the publication of A Map
of Misreading in 1975. For Aristotle, a topos is a commonplace
or line of argument— a conceptual place where arguments, either
universal or particular, may be found. For Bloom, again pondering
the relation between memory and voice in Wordsworth, a topos is
conceived as "not so much a commonplace or a memory place as more
nearly the place of a voice, the place from which the voice of the
dead breaks through" (WS, p. 399). "Hence," Bloom says, " a topos
is an image of voice or of speech, or the place where such an image
is stored." These places can be charted, of course, and Bloom goes
on to incorporate sixteen classical topoi into his map of misreading,
citing as most important those topics of representation— definition
and division, comparison, and temporal effect-and-cause— which may be
associated with synecdoche, hyperbole, and metalepsis, respectively.
Even more salient than this marshalling of topoi is what
Bloom does with the leap between the places and the figures of poetry,
for it is here, in this nomad's land between the contractions and
the restorations of desire, that Bloom finally locates the "meaning"
of a poem, or a psyche, or a career. This meaning or logos he now
calls a "Crossing"; the three Crossings in the rhythm of Romantic
190
creation are labeled crisis-points of Election, Solipsism, and
21
Identification, respectively. The Crossing of Election in a poem
occurs between the ratios of clinamen and tessera. In it the
aspiring poet confronts "the death of the creative gift," and seeks
an answer to the crucial question, "Am I still a poet, or,perhaps, am
I truly a poet?" (WS, p. 403). The Crisis of Solipsism moves between
the reductions of kenosis and the great expansion of the Romantic
Sublime, as the poet "struggles with the death of love, and tries to
answer the fearful query Am I capable of loving another besides
myself?" The final Crisis of Identification, addressing the
"dilemma" of "death" itself, chooses introjection over the weaker
psychic defense of sublimation, and thereby identifies so strongly
"with something or someone outside the self that time seems to stand
still or to roll back or forward." All three Crossings indicate a
movement from "mimetic" to "expressive" modes of representation, Bloom
says (WS, p. 404), using the language of M.H. Abrams to authorize his
own passage beyond the subject-object dualisms of Romanticism as
seen by the author of The Mirror and the Lamp. Each of the three
Crossings also then marks "an even greater degree of internalization
of the self," as the poet moves from astriving to correct or complete
the dead to an attempt at repressing them, and finally to the match
proper over the laurels of Time.
Why is this theory of the Crossing so important? And what
explanatory power does it have when applied to Emerson and Stevens?
The concept of the Crossing accomplishes several crucial tasks for
191
Bloom. First, it helps to make sense of the conflicting demands
of writing and speech in poetry. Bloom's theory of poetic vision
has always valued "eloquence, the inspired voice" (MM, p. 176), over
the figures of writing, a predisposition evident in Bloom's own
perhaps excessive use of the orotund tonalities of prophecy. The
logical problem which then presents itself— that poetry typically
exists as figures on a page— is now ameliorated by the importation
of the topoi into poetic "argument," and by Bloom's oxymoronic
definition of these topics as images of the voice of the dead. The
logos of the Crossing, the "dynamism of the substituting process . . .
which tells us that meaning in a poem is itself liminal, transgressive,
a breaking as much as a making" (WS, p. 401), necessarily then is
"tropological and topological"; as such, it is "always a crisis because
it is a kind of judgment or criticism between images of voice and
between the different kinds of thinking that opposed topics generate"
(WS, p. 399).
The consequent definition of poetry as "a debate between voicing
and writing, an endless crossing between topics _or tropes, but also
22
an endless shuttling between topics and tropes" (WS, p. 401),
subtly expands longstanding Bloomian conceptions of the nature of
poetic "argument" and poetic vision by first conceding the quiddity
of the tropes of language, but by then identifying the ruling or
generating essence of vision as those topoi whose power as voices
of the dead sets into motion the patternings of the poem and the
poetic psyche. "Crossing" is an especially apt term for the creation-
192
by-catastrophe of poetic meaning insofar as its connotation again
reminds us of what Bloom’s Lurianic paradigm implies: that all of
poetic meaning is at the same time a quest and a wandering _in exile
from a visionary Godhood, a Godhood which can never exist in language
and which can be incarnated by humankind only through the grim
Spiritual Forms of frustrated desire burdening the belated visionary
psyche. A crossing in ordinary usage is an attempt to get somewhere,
often at great peril and against great odds; in Bloom, that somewhere
is the origins of tradition, and since those origins can no more
fully be recaptured than they can ever finally be escaped, the quest
is doomed from the start, its only possible victory the perilous
triumph of continuing to achieve the anxiety necessary to cross again.
It is precisely because the Crossing is such a strong emblem—
at once capacious and appropriately dramatic— of Bloomian preoccu
pations that it serves him so well as a tool for investigating the
tradition which Emerson inaugurates and Stevens massively redefines.
For the idea of a Crossing, like the rest of Bloom's terminology in
this latest stage of his work, is applicable not only to specific
poems but to the structure of a psyche, a career, and indeed an
entire tradition. Bloom's last major operation, then, in the crucial
opening and closing chapters of Wallace Stevens is to chart the
psyche and the career of Emerson in a far more elaborate way than his
previous master terms, "Bacchus" and "Merlin," would allow, and to
map the dialectical rhythm of the Crossings in Emerson's work as a
basis for establishing the visionary contours of Stevens' own poetry.
Emerson, as the greatest American prophet of the stubbornly . . .
193
logocentric" Voice of Vision (MM, p. 176), reveals through his
dialectic of limitation-substitution-restoration the movement of
imaginative need to imaginative - re-creation which Bloom says to be
central to Stevens. If the most, famous "crossing" in Emerson’s work
is that on the "bare" and wintry "common" (EW, 1, 15) which yields
the Dionysiac rhapsody of the "transparent eyeball," then perhaps
the most profound Emersonian wisdom about the nature of intensely
private vision thereby gained is delivered in an essay much bleaker
than the blithe "Nature," the rumination of the early forties called
"Experience." Bloom does not deny the very real skepticism in
"Experience," but sees Emerson's "power over us" in this "grandest"
of his essays (MM, p. 169) to reside in the "astonishing recovery
from skepticism that suddenly illuminates" the anguished oracle late
in his meditation (MM, p. 171):
And we cannot say too little of our constitutional
necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or
saturated with our humors. And yet is the God the
native of these bleak rocks . . . We must hold hard
to this poverty, however scandalous, and by more
vigorous self-recoveries, after the sallies of action,
possess our axis more firmly. (EW, 3.2, 81-82).
The crucial term for Bloom in this passage is "poverty," which
he says is "one of the most dialectical of tropes" in Emerson (WS,
p. 9) in that it signifies "imaginative need" while at the same time
establishing the dynamic for that imaginative re-conception which is
poetic power and vision. In other words, "poverty" is the Emersonian
master trope for limitation, for that Ananke which, in the form of
Fate or Necessity, Emerson sometimes worships. The temptation "to
194
join" the "natural process" that one has "failed to assert his power
over" is great, Bloom acknowledges (WS, p. 10). But the seduction of
cyclic process can be mastered through influx, which redresses
imaginative need by crossing into a realm that seems momentarily
beyond the stutifying imperatives of all that is merely natural within
and around us. According to Bloom, the key word in Emerson for such
visionary moments is "surprise," which connotes the proper Orphic
23
ecstasy at feeling temporarily free of the ties of anteriority.
"Surprise" is only one term, however, from an almost embarrassing
bounty of terminological counters staking out the lineaments of
Emersonian vision in Bloom's most elaborate map. The remarkable
tissue of correspondences and equivalences offered by Bloom in
Wallace Stevens as a synoptic representation of Emerson's life and
poetic vision displays in especially graphic form the final logic
of Bloom's historicism, a logic which, despite its diachronic
trappings, is directly opposed to conventional notions of history and
psychobiography. Here is the "full list" for Emerson as "father of
us all," a list that we are justified in seeing as a sort of echo
chamber of most of Bloom's own ideas, themes, and values as he has
elucidated them in his work since Shelley's Mythmaking in 1959:
Ethos: Fate, Destiny, Necessity, Fortune, Race,
Powerlessness, Experience, Limitation, and Nature, but
Nature only in its most alienated or estranged aspect.
Logos: Freedom, Wildness, Nature (in its humanized or
redeemed aspect), Vocation, Temperament, Self-Reliance,
Solitude, Reason, Transcendentalism, Thought, Subjective
ness, Wholeness. Pathos: Power, Potential, Will,
Vitality, God, Greatness, Salvation, Vital Force,
Victory, Inspiration, Surprise, Mastery, Ecstasy. (WS, p. 5)
195
When we remember that this list is meant to serve not only as
a description of Emerson, but as a skeletal summary of the entire
tradition of American Romantic poetics culminating in Emerson's
visionary ancestor, Wallace Stevens, a hundred years later, we can
then see that Bloom's "history" of American poetry, like his previous
history of the visionary company, does not constitute history as we
commonly speak of it, but, rather, represents an especially thorough
going Romantic structuralism, a temporal and entirely deterministic
unfolding of -essentialized Romantic "principles," formulated a priori
by the critic and seen by him to individuate themselves in quite
predictable patterns over the span of our culture's poetic history.
Bloom's interest does not focus, in the manner of the orthodox
historical critic, on the meeting of local quiddities of language,
culture, and personal experience in the imagination of the poet;
rather, for Bloom, as we have seen time and again, the imagination
exists only in the depths of its internalized relations to itself—
exists, that is, only as that which remains after all the local
accidents of personality, language, and culture have been burned away.
It is this conception of the creative moment as an essentially
timeless incarnation of deep Romantic topoi which allows Bloom to
furnish a central formula for all of American poetry, a formula not
only for the individual "strong" poems of American poetic history,
but for all the psyches and careers which comprise that history.
"Emerson wanted Freedom, reconciled himself to Fate, but loved only
Power, from first to last," Bloom asserts, "and I believe this to be
196
true also of the central line of American poets coming after him"
(WS, p. 8). In the remaining few pages of this essay, I would like
to examine Harold Bloom's canonization of Wallace Stevens according
to this formula, a canonization which is notable for the fearfully
symmetric network of analogies, correspondences, and visionary
parallels that it establishes between two poets a century apart in
order to save the authentic if diminished American Romantic humanism
represented by the later writer. To begin with, Stevens' career
divides fairly neatly for Bloom into the three Crossings of Poetic
Vision, with the Crisis of Election falling in 1915 when Stevens
wrote his first strong poems, the Crisis of Solipsism coming to a
crux in 1921-22 but not resolving itself until 1934-36, and the
Crossing of Identification occurring in 1942 and determining the
vision of Stevens' poetry for the last thirteen years of his life.
We have noted earlier that Bloom does not value the poems of
Harmonium as highly as he does those of the older poet's confrontation
with mortality in the final phase initiated by "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction" in 1942. Since the early edition of Harmonium, covering
poems written from 1915 to 1923, represents not only the complete
negotiation of the first Crossing in Stevens' career but also a crux
of the second, we might very well ask: what has been crossed in the
earlier poems, and what remains for the later period to resolve?
Bloom's handling of this question is a key to his entire
discussion of Stevens, and, as we might expect, it involves yet another
transformation of terms, this one from the Emersonian dialectic of
197
Fate, Freedom, .and Power to Stevens' paradigm for the First Idea.
Emersonian Fate becomes in Stevens the "metonymic reduction" of the
First Idea itself; Emerson's Transcendental Freedom becomes the
later poet's "refusal to bear so dehumanizing a reduction"; Power
or Will in Stevens' "mature poetry is the reimagining of a First
Idea," and the "pleasure" that only such a supremely reimagined fiction
can give (WS, p. 27). For Bloom, there is an "impasse" at the end
of Stevens' luxuriant "poetry of earth" in "Sunday Morning" and
"Peter Quince at the Clavier," a "dilemma" (WS, p. 47) which the poems
of the crisis years, 1921-22, must confront. Stevens has found his
Muse, but she presents herself to him as both "mother and fatal woman,"
and he must answer this confusion by turning for the first time to
those metonymic reductions of the spirit and the place which were
to engage his vision for the rest of his life. Although Stevens
himself does not introduce the term "first idea" until the composition
of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" twenty years later, Bloom contends
that this is precisely what the poet is formulating in his important
poem of 1921, "The Snow Man," and precisely what he transcends, in
a manner paradigmatic for all his later poetry, in the sublime counter
to "The Snow Man" of that same year, "Tea at the Palaz of the Hoon."
Between the two poems, Bloom asserts, between the reduction to the
First Idea in the wintry vision of the first and reimagining of
that idea through the self's compassing of the sea in the second,
there lies a Crossing or a Freedom which is exactly the Freedom of
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Stevens' great poem of the
198
Emersonian and Whitmanian Orphic center, and the poem whose Crossing
of Identification establishes the "imaginative formulations" (WS,
p. 3) for all of Stevens’ profound crisis-poetry in his final volumes,
The Auroras of Autumn and The Rock.
Bloom's concern with the poems "central" to the Stevens canon,
especially with "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," reveals the same
almost obsessive quality that we have seen in his readings and
relentless rereadings of Shelley's "The Triumph of Life." Bloom
devotes 21 pages of explication to "Notes" in his essay of 1965
in The Ringers in the Tower, 5 more in Poetry and Repression, and
an imposing 52 pages of revision of his earlier emphases in
Wallace Stevens. "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" receives 5 pages in
Wallace Stevens, while the one sentence of "The Snow Man," already
the beneficiary of a lengthy analysis in Poetry and Represssion, is
given 10 pages of explanation in terms of its many precursors.
Fortunately, we do not need to rehearse the exhaustive details of
these discussions in order to capture the Bloomian logic of canoni
zation operating within them. Whatever his subject may be, Emerson
or Stevens,. Freud or the Kabbalah, influence or vision, Bloom's
message in the later phase of his career is essentially the same.
The symbology and the hot slabs of influence-relations which he offers
by way of reading any given poem do not exist horizontally as
explorations across a fluid or inductive conceptual horizon, but,
rather, vertically, as self-conscious., and theoretically resourceful
exfoliations of the rather rigid central principles that we have seen
199
to catalyze his work from the start.
"I think that what Blake and Wordsworth do for their readers,
or can do, is closely related to what Freud does or can do for his,"
Bloom says in a straightforward moment at the beginning of his decade-
long rumination on the anxiety of influence, and that "is to provide
both a map of the mind and a profound faith that the map can be put to
a saving use" (RT, p. 13). In Bloom’s analysis of "The Snow Man,"
"Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
the mind of the poet who is to him the greatest of our century becomes
a battleground for visionary priority within a tradition whose ruling
symbols, patterns, and visionary arguments already have been over
determined by the great patriarchs of the century past. Thus, "The
Snow Man," as "a lyric monument to belatedness" and "Stevens' most
crucial poem" (PR, p. 269), presents a "bare place" and a wintry
"nothing" (CP, p. 10) which trope against the main empty place in
American literature, the "bare common" of Emerson's metamorphosis into
a "transparent eyeball," by reducing the transcendent nothing of the
all-seeing Emersonian Sublime into the bleak metonyms of the wintry
mind living amid the poverty of barest figuration. Thus, "Tea at the
Palaz of Hoon," with its picture of the sea-change of the poet into
something "more truly and more strange" (CP, p. 65), represents
a sublime and saving transumption of the already powerful Whitman
of "Song of Myself," who chants of his ability to "encompass worlds
and volumes of worlds" with the "twirl" of his tongue (LG, p. 55,
1.565). Thus, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," as an audacious
200
modern version of an earlier Central Man’s "Song of Myself," must
be seen as a massive and appropriately exuberant fulfillment of
Emersonian Orphic prophecy, a promise kept, and a world redeemed, by
an "ephebe" (CP, p. 380) of the visionary center whose work en
compasses and clarifies an entire tradition.
Behind such a revisionary mapping of the "central" poems of
our "central" poet is the powerful Bloomian position that the
First Idea in Stevens’ dialectic of the imagination is itself a
necessary fiction, a swerve away from the dross of mere reality which
enables the imaginative act of Stevens' poetry to begin. And if the
First Idea is a fiction, then necessarily, according to the immutable
laws of influence, it is a fictional idea not of nature or of language
but of a precursor— a precursor whose prior visionary achievement
menaces the latecomer poet and thus determines his acts of belated
vision. Bloom is well aware of the audacity of this argument when
advanced within a contemporary critical tradition which has tended
to follow Stevens himself in seeing a poem such as "The Snow Man"
as a meditation on "reality" or "mere being" which not only forsakes
but implicitly repudiates the vision at the heart of Romantic tra- .
dition. Bloom knows that if his map of Stevens is to be put to a
"saving use," then at the very least it must save Stevens from him
self, from pronouncements of the sort that he makes on "The Snow Man,"
which he cites, contra his later critic, "as an example of the
necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand
24
it and enjoy it." If the poem were only this, if early Stevens
201
were authentically the poet of the nothingness of pure being that
25
J. Hillis Miller describes in Poets of Reality, then there would be
for Bloom no possibility of saving the rest of the canon, with its
magnificent assertions, "however self-qualified, of the imaginative
fable of the Central Man" (RT, p. 228). Bloom is willing to concede
that Stevens at the very last gives himself over to the "Sublime
chill" (WS, p. 374) of the abyss "Of Mere Being," albeit still as
26
a poet of the vision that tropes "fire-fangled feathers" into
transumptive power. But the First Idea of Stevens' formative vision is
not and cannot be for Bloom a concession to the rock of mere desiccated
and recalcitrant reality; the Snow Man cannot be what a critic as
acute as J. Hillis Miller (in his phenomenological phase) says he is:
27
a being totally "free of mental fictions." The First Idea, however
it "dehumanizes" (WS, p. 374), must itself be seen as what Stevens
at one point in "Notes" calls it: an "imagined thing" (CP, p, 387);
the "nothing" that the Snow Man is and that he "beholds,” while it
may be "the most minimal or abstracted of fictions," nonetheless
must be a "fiction" itself (WS, p. 63). In Poetry and Repression,
Bloom summarizes "this difficult matter in Stevens" by saying that
"the reductive act of wintry vision, the Snow Man stance, is not
imaginative in its impulse and yet is imaginative in its effect"
(p. 287). And the effect of the poverty of the imaginative need of
the Snow Man, Bloom goes on to say in Wallace Stevens, is to catalyze
that Crossing into the Power of the Supreme Fiction upon which all
strong poetry in our only tradition depends.
202
The "saving use" that Bloom has in mind for Stevens, the use
that will rescue the poet from his own more skeptical moods and secure
his poetry from the deprecations of many of his best critics in our
profoundly skeptical time, is nowhere better stated than in the final
sections of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." Here Bloom sees Stevens
himself, as the Supreme Creator of his supreme poem, vaulting over
his own creation, the Canon Aspirin, a "High Romantic fallen angel"
(WS, p. 205) whose leap into the transcendent has degenerated into
the bane of the Romantic mind, the imposition of arbitrary "orders"
and the meaningless frenzied building of Mcapitols" and "corridors"
(CP, p. 403).. Against the visionary lapse of the Canon Aspirin,
Stevens poses a series of questions which are their own answers,
culminating in a question that takes him to the center of Emersonian
prophecy:
Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour
Filled with expressible bliss, in which I have*
No need, am happy, forget need's golden hand,
Am satisfied without solacing majesty,
And if there is an hour there is a day,
There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am. (CP, pp. 404-05)
In this, in what is for Bloom the "greatest moment" of Stevens'
poetry (WS, p. 206) and "the supreme achievement of post-Romanticism"
(RT, p. 254), Stevens overpowers a host of visionary precursors
throughout the Romantic tradition, Wordsworth as well as Emerson,
Coleridge as well as Whitman, "in order to proclaim his own momentary
203
incarnation of a supreme fiction, which will turn out not to be
poetry or a poem but, as in Emerson and Whitman (and Wordsworth), to
be a poet, to be a fiction of the self, or the poetic self as a
transumption, an audacious trope undoing all previous tropes" (WS,
p. 206). Thus, the tradition begotten by Emerson with his sublime
trope of the "transparent eyeball" which is "nothing" and yet sees
"all," receives a glorious final embellishment in the proclamation
of a belated Orphic seer who has "not" and who yet rebegets within
himself that God-like power which is the "majesty" of the Central Man.
Of course, Stevens1 poetry does not end with this assertive and
Romantic moment; for thirteen years afterward, he continued to write
other, often less confident, poems, poems which confronted the
auroras of autumn and the rocks of being in the bleaker moods of the
poe^s own encroaching mortality. In one of the most serenely
chastened of these final meditations in the shadow of death, there
is a passage, ushered by our mapmaker through now predictable crossings
into the central sublimity of the map of misreading, which might yet
have a chilling resonance that Bloom could not admit, both for the
vision of Stevens within the world of its own making, and for the
"saving use" to which Bloom puts this most celebrated of modern poets:
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,
In the predicate that there is nothing else. (CP, p. 527)
When Wallace Stevens was published in 1977 to a reception whose
extremes of praise and censure fittingly fulfilled Bloom1s own
204
prescription for a critical language of hyperbolic intensity, it
seemed that the real issue was whether, indeed, there was anything
else, any way of reading Stevens beyond Bloom’s own, which could
"cure" the ground of our conception of this now most celebrated of
modern poets, and thereby cure ourselves of the skepticism
engendered by our culture's wintry post-?-Romantic self-reflexiveness.
To a surprising extent, even^critics unpersuaded by Bloom's oracular
style and put off by his incessant proliferation of paradigms were
moved to accept his definition of Stevens as an embattled inheritor
of the Emersonian strain in American poetry. Frank Kermode, for
instance, while complaining of the "horrible and ugly obstacles"
presented by Bloom's excessive allusiveness, nonetheless championed
Bloom’s "placing" of Stevens in relation to his "great predecessors,"
28
Emerson and Whitman, as "extremely authoritative." Phoebe
Pettingell acclaimed Bloom's study as "the largest and most generous
interpretation we have had yet" of Stevens, an interpretation— and
a "contribution to poetics"— so rich that it could stand as "the
29
greatest tribute to Stevens's inspiration." It remained for the
most provocative reading of Bloom's summarizing volume to be offered
not by an enthusiast but by an ideological opponent, a newly
converted deconstructionist whose own earlier canonical treatment
of Stevens Bloom's book implicitly repudiated. Joseph Riddel, the
author of The Clairvoyant Eye, one of the most.influential studies
of Stevens appearing in the sixties, published two different reviews
Wallace Stevens, one in The Wallace Stevens Journal and the other
205
30
in Diacritics, both of which argued that the real drama in Bloom's
often highly dramatic rescue of Stevens from the nothingness of mere
language and being resided not so much in the saving of Stevens him
self as in the larger attempt to salvage an enduring meaning for
the language of modern poetry, even if that meaning appeared to have
as predicate only the groundless grounds of our modern linguistic
faithlessness.
Dissenting from his previous explication of Stevens as a poet
whose polar terms of "imagination" and "reality" participated in a
31
"coherent" post-Kantian "system of aesthetics and philosophy,"
Riddel now advanced in response to Bloom the notion that Stevens,
especially the late Stevens prized by Bloom, was a poet singularly
preoccupied with the figurality of all language, including the deep
language of Romanticism which Bloom had endeavored to secure against
all assault through his assimilation of Stevens' crucial First Idea
into the dialectic of Emersonian creation. For Riddel, the character
istic Stevensian poem would now have to be seen as "a fictional
fold, a new construct to house an old fiction of presence," a construct,:
that is, endlessly imagining and relentlessly pursuing what it just
as endlessly deferred via the language of the poem's own "arche-
32
tectonics." Thus, Riddel argued, the featured Crossings of Bloom's
map could never actually fight free of their exile to arrive at the
ground of determinate and determining Romantic meaning so passionately
envisioned by Bloom; according to the logic of deconstruction, such
Crossings would necessarily remain in transit forever.
206
We do not need to endorse Riddel's own critical position in
order to appreciate his concluding assessment of the significance
of Bloom's work. Above all, Riddel observes, Bloom's canonizing
project, with its remarkable accretions of terminology, is an attempt
to "recuperate, perhaps for a final time, the primordial power that
33
western poetry and criticism celebrates in the form of loss."
And above all, he says, what we cannot do, if we wish to counter the
manifold assertions and appropriations of that operation, is to
settle for offering a simple "point-by-point refutation" of Bloom's
34
treatment of any given poem or poems. Such a tactic will not work,
Riddel cautions, in the face of a critical fable designed precisely
35
to resist "anyone's reading or breaking it." What will work, then?
What can we do, if we wish to penetrate the carefully contrived
tautologies of Bloom's audacious map? In the next two chapters, we
shall try to approach Bloom's contribution to poetics and to the
rhetoric of Romanticism in perhaps the only way really possible—
through a direct confrontation with the assumptions about poetry,
language, and culture that govern his radical revision of our
literary history.
207
Notes for Chapter Four
See Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961). In particular,
Pearce's chapters on the American Renaissance (pp. 137-91) and
on Wallace Stevens (pp. 376-419) are concerned with many of the
questions of priority and contextlessness in the Adamic tradition
of American poetry which will later be treated by Bloom via the
theory of the anxiety of influence.
2
R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and
Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1955), p. 5.
3
Richard Poirier, A . World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in
American Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. ix.
4 Ibid., p. 69.
The distinction between mythic and Adamic poets is at the
heart of Pearce's book. For his assessment of the achievements
and the failures of both traditions as makers of a more human
imaginative world, see pp. 420-34>.
£
See "Circles," in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Standard
Library Edition, with General Index and a Memoir by James Eliot Cabot,
14 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., Riverside Press,
1883), 2.1, 287. All subsequent quotations from this edition of
Emerson's essays, poems, and miscellany will be documented in
parentheses in the text as (EW).
^ Yvor Winters, "Jones Very: A New England Mystic," American
Review, 7 (1936), 176. The essay is reprinted under the title
"Jones Very and R.W. Emerson: Aspects of New England Mysticism" in
Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism
(Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938), pp. 125-46, and in In Defense
of Reason (New York: Swallow Press and William Morrow and Co., 1947),
pp. 262-82.
g
Bloom's brief discussion in Figures of Capable Imagination
(pp. 69-71) of the Orphic religious rituals in ancient Greece seems
to be mediated by Jane Harrison's seminal scholarship in the field,
just as his knowledge of the Kabbalah often derives from a close
reading of Gershom Scholem. For Harrison's most extensive analysis
of the origins, eschatology, and cosmogony of the Orphic cults, see
208
Prologemena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922; rpt. New York: World Publishing Co.,
Meridian Books, 1966), pp. 454-658. As usual, comparing Bloom with
his sources reveals little more than the remarkable consistency of
his deliberate "misreadings."
For a completely different approach to the Emersonian Orphic
tradition, see R.A. Yoder, Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978). Yoder provides a
much closer— and less polemical— reading of Emerson's expression of
the Orphic strain. He also devotes a chapter to the Emersonian
tradition in modern poetry, covering both Stevens and A.R. Ammons
(see pp. 171-205).
9
See The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 14 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1960- ), 5, ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr.
(1965), 253-54.
^ Journals, 8, ed. Gilman and J.E. Parsons (1970), 228.
^ See Leaves of Grass, ed. Scully Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1973), p. 254. All subsequent
quotations from this volume will be documented in parentheses in the
text.
12
Randall Jarrell, "Reflections on Wallace Stevens," in Poetry
and the Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953; rpt. New York: Random
House, Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 121-34.
13 Ibid., p. 127.
14
For the Pearce discussion from which I quote in this paragraph,
see pp. 423-24.
For the most impressive treatment of Stevens as an essentially
comic poet, see Daniel Fuchs, The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens
(Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1963).
^ See Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens1 Longer
Poems (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969). Noting that Stevens'
themes, "abstractly considered . . . are familiar, not to say, banal,
ones," Vendler locates his crucial difference from the Romantics
in the "new form" and "elaborately mannered movement of thought" in
which these themes are expressed (p. 13). Needless to say, Bloom
sees nothing banal in Stevens' Romantic themes.
See The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954; New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 477. All subsequent quotations from this
volume will be documented in parentheses in the text.
209
For Miller’s phenomenological reading of Stevens, see Chap. 6
of Poets of Reality (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965). For
his deconstructionist analysis of Stevens' "The Rock," see "Stevens'
Rock and Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review, 30 (1976), 5-31, and
"Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," Georgia Review, 30 (1976),
330-48.
19
For this definition, see The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans.
Lane Cooper (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960), 1.2. For a
full discussion of the types of character as they pertain to oratory,
see 2:12.
20
Bloom acknowledges his profound indebtedness to Geoffrey
Hartman's notion of the "after-image" in Wordsworth's poetry.
"The after-image could be defined as a re-cognition that leads to
recognition," Hartman observes in Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 270. With the help of Freud
and Luria, Bloom easily assimilates Hartman's theory into his own
paradigms of misprision.
21
Bloom notes in his essay, "The Breaking of Form," in
Deconstruction and Criticism, that he is indebted to Angus Fletcher
for his notion of the "crossing" (p. 25), especially to Fletcher's
essay "'Positive Negation': Threshold, Sequence and Personification
in Coleridge" in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth:
Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Geoffrey Hartman
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 133-64. Fletcher reads
Coleridge's avowed love of "method" as a desperate defense against
the greater anxieties of the "diachronic" imagination, an imagination
which he sees at the heart of Coleridge's greatest work. According
to Fletcher, the diachronic imagination works through "thresholds,"
where "both sight and sound create a sense of time" that is finally
"enigmatic" (p. 137). The threshold itself is aligned with "the
prophetic speech that marks its liminal apprehension" (p. 137); thus
poetry in a Coleridgean effort such as "Ne Plus Ultra" emerges into
a vision whose perception of a higher.order is only enhanced by the
enigmatic nature of its temporal impetus. Fletcher summarizes the
concept of threshold in The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971):
Thresholds are openings or doorways between two spaces
or places. Moments are doorways between two spaces of
time. These metaphors diagram the emergence of vision.
At the theoretical meeting place between the temple and
the labyrinth there bursts forth a higher order, which,
the great syncretist of ancient allegory, Philo Judaeus,
would call "the Immanent Logos" (pp. 45-46).
22
Bloom's quarrel here is with Paul de Man. While Bloom
announces his own debt to de Man's audacious redefinition of "poetic
210
thinking as the process of rhetorical substitution rather than as a
thinking by particular trope" (WS, p. 392), he cannot accept
the other's overly ascetic conception of logos as the negative
moments which collect in Language reft of origin, essence, and end—
a conception which, Bloom cautions, "isolates too purifyingly the
trope from the topos or commonplace that generates it" (WS, p. 393).
For Bloom, as a belated Romantic humanist, the tropes and errors
of language presuppose an essential and engendering visionary ill;
for de Man, as a deconstructionist, the tropes and errors of language
are language in its endless deferring of itself. The essay by de Man
to which Bloom often refers in the final chapter of Wallace Stevens
is "Action and Identity in Nietzsche," Yale French Studies, No. 52
(1975), pp. 16-30; rpt. in de Man's Allegories of Reading (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 119-31. Bloom's reconceiving of de Man's
"aporia " or "figuration of doubt" as a "crossing" or "crisis-point" is
entirely representative of the differing epistemological and linguistic
choices made by these two prominent literary theorists. Chap. 6 of
this study will examine in some depth the lessons of the powerful
de Man-Bloom dialogue.
23
Bloom's reading of Emersonian "surprise" as "the pathos of
Power, the sudden manifestation of the vital will" (WS, p. 5), is
based on Emerson's use of the word in several essays, most notably
in "Experience," "History," and the late effort, "Poetry and the
Imagination." "Surprise" is one of the seven "lords of life" in
"Experience" (EW, 3.2, 47). In "History," Emerson praises the
second part of Goethe's Faust for its "wild freedom" of design and
"the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise" which awaken
"the reader's invention and fancy" (EW, 2.1, 37). In "Poetry and
the Imagination," the poet's use of the tropes of Nature for their
"ulterior" significance is seen to produce "a shock of agreeable
surprise" (EW, 8, 20). From these instances and a few others of
Emersonian praise of "surprise," Bloom eventually draws the formidable
conclusion that "surprise" is at the heart not only of Emerson's own
work but of the entire American poetic tradition. "For surprise is
the American poetic stance, in the peculiar sense of surprise as the
poet's Will-to-Power over anteriority and over the interpretation
of his own poem" (WS, p. 6).
24
See The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 464.
25
See Miller's Poets of Reality, pp. 277-79, for a discussion
of the nothingness of being presented in "The Snow Man."
26
See Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind:
Selected Poems and a . Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1971; rpt. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1972),
p. 398.
211
27
Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 277.
28
Kermode, "Notes Toward a Supreme Poetry," New York Times
Book Review, 12 June 1977, p. 9.
29
Pettingell, "A Text That Is an Answer," Poetry, 131 (1977),
169.
30
See "Bloom— A Commentary— Stevens," Wallace Stevens Journal, 1
(1977), 111-19, and "Juda Becomes New Haven," Diacritics, 10, No. 2
(Summer 1980), 17-34.
31
"Bloom— A Commentary— Stevens," p. 117.
32
"Juda Becomes New Haven," p. 31.
33
"Bloom— A Commentary— Stevens," p. 115.
34 Ibid. , p. ’ 119'.
35 Ibid., p.. 117.
212
CHAPTER FIVE: THE POEMS AT THE END OF THE ROMANTIC MIND:
A.R. AMMONS AND JOHN ASHBERY
I
The previous four chapters have concentrated almost exclusively
on providing an exegesis of Harold Bloom's theories of visionary
Romanticism and the anxiety of influence, and the crucial principles
and assumptions behind those theories. We have examined closely what
might be called the internal logic guiding Bloom's development as a
self-conscious and self-consciously extreme critical prophet for our
"belated" time. Our analysis of Bloom's many determined "mis
readings," not only of poets but of other critics and literary
theorists, has taken shape largely and perhaps inevitably as an ex
pository mapping of Bloom's own maps. While such a charting opera
tion is certainly necessary when dealing with a theorist of Bloom's
almost uncanny resourcefulness and methodological excess, it also
must be seen as just a beginning, a necessary prerequisite to the
larger project of assessing the significance and the appeal of Bloom's
theories of vision and literary influence within our contemporary
intellectual climate.
That Bloom's theories are not only appealing to many but trans
late their appeal into critical "power" we can hardly doubt. The
Bloomian desire to arbitrate in matters of poetic canonization has
213
earned him fame both in the academy and in the popular press (witness
the recent Newsweek essay on the Yale School^). On the other hand,
Bloom has also received his share of criticism, even ridicule, for
everything from his Romantic nostalgia to his elliptical and some-
2
times rather sententious oratorical style. He has been condemned as
a false prophet, a solipsist, a determinist, a wilful obfuscator, a
male chauvinist, and, worst of all, a poor reader. His canon-making
has been denounced as an egregious abuse of the role of the critic,
while the canon thereby made has been excoriated by competing canon-
izers as wrong-headed, reductive, narrow, and foolish.
It is no doubt a mark of Bloom’s own uncompromising claims for
the act of criticism as he conceives it that work as difficult and
as erudite as his has been met with such passionate approbation and
censure not only by critics of Romanticism but by rhetoricians,
scholars of Jewish theology, readers of modern literature, and poets
themselves. The fierce polemics of Bloom’s own position and the
extreme critical response that his project has inspired suggest by
their very extremity that any assessment of Bloom’s significance and
appeal necessarily will involve a probing of the ways in which his
fundamental principles and assumptions either meet, or fail to meet,
the needs of our time. Mining the extremes of critical censure for
the deep clash of conceptions about the nature of reading, of poetic
meaning, and of literary history, that they imply, we might play
devil's advocate for a moment to Bloom's own demonic/daemonic
allegories, and ask questions such as these about the import of his
214
entire enterprise:
1) Why is a theory which sees all the poetry of our time as
a progressive and inexorable falling-away from the riches of past
poetic tradition so appealing to so many readers? Why does Bloom
as "kakangelist" (MM, p. 39) to the Evening Land of Western culture
command so much allegiance when his tidings reveal so little hope for
"a cultural situation of such belatedness that literary survival
itself seems fairly questionable" (MM, p. 38)?
2) What is the appeal of a theory which holds that all poets
must fight for meaning within an internalized tradition never allowing
them to escape? If Bloom is the bearer of a "Gospel of Gloom" about
our cultural situation (MM, p. 39), then that gloom has its source in
the source of culture, the psyches of our Shelleyan cultural emis
saries, the poets and prophets, where all the battles for vision are
fought. Since these battles necessarily become losing efforts as the
shadows of literary history lengthen and the carnage mounts, what
appeal can we possibly find in a theory which features them to the
exclusion of all else? What sort of exigency is there within our
cultural situation to recommend Bloom's Freudian and Gnostic deter
minism as a style fit for our despair?
3) Is the "vision" featured by Bloom's conception of poetry
as a relentless agon a vision and a sublimity that we want or need?
Bloom's cherished Romantic Sublime is a strange and empty darkness
at the heart of this vision, a darkness which exists only by virtue
of the psyche having grappled savagely and, for a brief moment,
215
successfully, with the grim phantasms of the regenerate and non-
ref erential Romantic mind. What is there in such a Sublime that
captures the spirit of our age? Bloomian vision in turn is wed to
Bloomian ethics, as in the trenchant observation of Wallace Stevens
that the use of strong poetry is to "strengthen us by teaching us
how to talk to ourselves, rather than how to talk to others" (p. 387).
What is there in Bloom's forthright praise of poetry as a "restitution
of narcissism" (DC, p. 17) that speaks to us rather than merely, as
its own logic might suggest, to its author? Why should we need to be
what all strong poets and readers, according to Bloom, are: solip
sists, albeit imperfect solipsists living with and within the miserable
dualisms of the everyday world?
4) Finally, what sort of "necessity" resides in the method of
reading that Bloom gives us? Since a poem has meaning for Bloom only
insofar as it is not itself, only insofar as it engages, twists askew,
and attempts to replace other poems, and since poetry and criticism
are for Bloom activities different only in "degree" and not in "kind"
(AI, p. 95), then Bloom's method for "misreading" in his mature phase
is really a method for fashioning his own "defensive" tropes in order
to combat the endless and debilitating swerving of significations that
he calls "tradition." The ruling tropes of Bloom's system, "tradition"
and "influence," master the wanderings of poetic meaning by mapping
them into highly determined poetic ratios, thereby allowing Bloom
to furnish a mythographic chart of what, by definition, is unchartable:
the mythopoeia of visionary desire. The implication of this manner
216
of mastery is the Nietzschean one that the strong reader must exercise
a Will-to-Power over his chosen text (or the text that has chosen him)
3
if he is to survive and flourish. The implication of this in turn is
the thoroughly uncommonsensical one that when we are reading Bloom
on Blake, or Bloom on Yeats, or Bloom on Stevens, what we really are
reading in some final sense is Bloom on Bloom, Bloom going about the
savage and sublime business of troping toward a restoration of his
own imperfectly solipsistic imagination.
On a practical level, Bloom*s hermeneutic encircling of texts
within himself results in readings dense with details— analogues,
correspondences, parallels— which purport to chart what is "there" in
the poem, while recognizing at the same time that the poem, as a
convenient "defensive" starting-point into the manifold swervings of
poets and other readers that constitutes tradition, really is not
"there" at all. Thus, while we may quarrel with the many seemingly
arbitrary connections and perceptions of visionary resemblance con
tributing to a typical Bloomian "misreading"— a reading of the sort
that we have seen him give Emerson, for example, or Whitman's "As
I Ebb'd," or Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, or Shelley's "The Triumph
of Life"— we will find it very difficult, if not impossible, to refute
Bloom on his own terms, since those terms are designed precisely to
present the irrefutable circle of Bloom's own highly self-conscious
solipsism. What is the appeal of a critical method such as this, a
method which claims to follow Emerson in its logic of the "deep
tautology— of the solipsist who knows that what he means is right,
217
yet that what he says is wrong” (AI, p. 96)? And how can we cope with
a critic who tells us portentously that he reads only for the deep
Romantic essences that can be used by his belated Romantic Will, and
then goes on to intimidate us with the "power" and the "strength" of
such an exercise in apparent extremity?
The four sets of questions in this lengthy roster obviously are
interrelated. The first set is dependent on the second, while those
two together concern the ends of the "uses" of reading when guided
by the visionary and finally ethical precepts advanced in the third
set. We will consider at great length in Chapter 6 the issues raised
by Bloom's philosophy of rhetoric and Romanticism. In this chapter,
howeverj we would do well to prepare for that discussion by exploring
more thoroughly the questions in the fourth set, the questions con
cerning Bloom's method for arriving at his avowed goals. The advan
tage to examining the "means" of Bloom's misreading of Romanticism
at this time is that in taking us to the drama of choice necessarily
underlying any rhetoric, it will take us also to vantage points from
which we will be able to map more precisely not only the featured
"triumphs" of Bloom's revisionist reading of poetic history but the
final costs and effects of that enterprise as well. As Kenneth Burke,
a rhetorician with considerable "influence" over Bloom, has observed,
a rhetoric, or a "terministic screen," necessarily "selects" and
"deflects" as it spins out the possibilities inherent in its terminolo-
4
gical structure. The canonizing project operated by Harold Bloom
under the related master principles of "vision" and "influence" is
218
so brilliantly aware of the entelechial nature of its own system
atizing logic that those interested in criticizing the project often
are left feeling defenseless before it, hurling charges of reductive
Bloomian selections and solipsistic Bloomian deflections which say as
much for their own principles as they do for the difficulties of
Bloom's map.
And yet, one of the services of Bloom's critical prophecy has
been to remind us forcibly that the reading of criticism as well as the
reading of literature is not and cannot be a value-free activity, what
ever the ruses we employ to convince ourselves otherwise. As Bloom
instructs by both precept and example, all reading, including the most
impersonal decoding stratagems of the most grimly ascetic semiotician
or linguist, is fully fraught with human meaning (in Bloom's own case,
peril), and charged with the passionate morality of selection, of
human-making choice. Therefore, while it may not do much good to
engage in the typical detractor's gambit of calling Bloom names—
"solipsist," "determinist," "misreader"— that he has already called
himself, nonetheless the fact that these names can be summoned, and
in the spirit of ill will, indicates that Bloom's choices might be
examined profitably for what they fail to do in the very act of
accomplishing their nearly perfect solipsistic symmetry. What is
left out of a typical Bloomian "misreading"? What choices does
Bloom make as a self-conscious proselytizer for the "psychology of
belatedness" when he confronts a poem or a poetic career? Is there
any price to be paid for the Romantic "Freedom" (WS, p. 5) of
219
agonistic visionary desire that Bloom values above all else in post-
Enlightenment poetry?
Obviously, these questions will involve us in a consideration of
Bloom's ends and assumptions; just as obviously, since they are value
laden questions, they will entail as well a presentation of conceptions
of poetic . meaning and the role of criticism in culture different from
Bloom's own. In the final part of this dissertation I would like
first to present a counter-reading to Bloom on two of the most impor
tant poets in his revisionary canon, and then in Chapter 6 to use the
questions raised by that conflict of readings to probe the larger
issues of the significance of Bloom's entire enterprise as a Romantic
humanist living in a fragmented and faithless age.
The one crucial appropriation of Bloom's as a canonizing critic
that we have not yet examined is his selection and subsequent mis
reading of A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery as the greatest of our con
temporary poets. The canonization of Ammons and Ashbery within the
Emersonian line of American poetry is an especially intriguing
Bloomian maneuver for several reasons. First, it represents the
only instance in Bloom's personal history of revisionism where he
is not so much revising earlier canonizing "errors" of others as
he is staking out new and relatively uncharted territory for the
fatherland of his belated Romanticism. Past Bloomian readings of
Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Emerson, and Stevens have relied for much of
their impact on the audacity of their repudiation of an adversary
literary tradition, usually that associated with T.S. Eliot, Modernism,
220
and the New Criticism. With Ashbery and Ammons, on the other hand,
Bloom is writing the literary history of figures of his own generation,
of men who, like him, began their publishing careers in the fifties
and did not rise to real prominence until the mid to late sixties.
The consequences of Bloom's characteristically hyperbolic evaluation
of these two poets cannot easily be dismissed. In particular, the
developing interest in Ammons through the late sixties and into the
mid-seventies, culminating in the presenting of the National Book
Award for his Collected Poems in 1973, is inextricably tied to Bloom's
powerful championing of him as "the most Emersonian poet we have had
since Whitman's petering out after 1860" (FC, p. 160). Although Bloom
did not come to Ashbery until several years after a tentative repu
tation already had been established, his authoritative placing of the
author of Some Trees, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring,
and Three Poems as an authentic inheritor of the vision of Wallace
Stevens quickly subsumed other, less concentrated readings, and brought
many readers to Ashbery who might otherwise have dismissed him as just
another poet of the New York School.
If Bloom's largely successful canonization of two key contemporary
poets as. belated American Romantics represents a striking display of
his considerable power as a cultural commentator, it is intriguing
also for the way in which it crystallizes the issues implicit all
along in the Bloomian logic of misreading. Precisely because Ammons
and Ashbery are contemporaries and thus are at a further remove from
Romantic origins than any other major figures previously placed
221
within the map of misreading, Bloom's attempt to rescue them via the
metaleptic reversals of time that constitute canonization is an
especially bold one, and especially revealing, too, then, of the
costs necessarily accompanying the map's indubitable visionary
"triumphs." The contours of Bloom's mapping of Ammons and Ashbery
that I want now briefly to sketch should be quite familiar in
principle, if not particulars. Both poets are seen as spent seers,
fruitfully burdened by the ineluctable belatedness of their visionary
desires. Ammons, "the wisest," and, according to Bloomian prophecy,
the "most enduring" poet of his generation (FC, p. 137), is described
as directly Emersonian in his quest to come to a unity of being where
he will "be possessed fully by the Transcendental Self" (RT, p. 259).
In Bloom's reading, the Emersonian dialectic of Fate, Freedom, and
Power governs the entire career of his visionary descendant, ranging
from the "transcendental waste places" (RT, p. 263) of Ommateum in
1955 through the grand Romantic crisis-poems of the crucial Gorsons
Inlet period in the mid-sixties to the mature achievement of
Briefings, Sphere, and Diversifications in the early and mid-seventies.
Ammons' "largest flaw" (RT,, p. 270) as a poe.t, Bloom says, is his
Emersonian tendency to identify himself with Ananke, with that
natural process from which he is estranged simply by being human;
Ammons' proper power and greater glory reside in his equally
Emersonian desire to overcome the fated temptations of nature, and
to transcend the limitations of vision recognized in the most famous
line of his most celebrated poem, "Corsons Inlet": "Overall is
222
c
beyond me." (CP, p. 148).
Against the "stoic acceptance of bafflement" (RT, p. 276) in
"Corsons Inlet," Bloom offers as central to Ammons at his best what
he calls the "imaginative reassurance" of the poem’s companion-piece,
"Saliences," a poem that returns to the other’s littoral "'field’ of
action" (CP, p. 150) driven by, Bloom says, "the need not to abide
in a necessity, however beautiful." The vision in "Saliences" of the
"mind feeding out" (CP, p. 151) over the lines of Atlantic dunes and
moving toward the solacing wisdom that "where not a single thing
endures / the overall reassures" (CP, p. 153) is praised by Bloom as
a "renovative fresh start" (RT, p. 277) for the imagination which
breaks the ground for all of Ammons' great poetry of the seventies,
a poetry in which Ammons' "obsessive . . . longing for unity" is
transformed into a more patient and profitable "assertion of the mind's
power over the particulars of being, the universe of death." Of
course, the bafflement of earlier visionary aspiration implied by such
a turn to the "saliences" and "radiances" along the "periphery" of
being marks Ammons' belatedness, his distance from originating
Emersonian strength. Ammons has discovered very early in "Guide"
that "you cannot come to unity and remain / material" (CP, p. 79);
this "primordial romancing after unity" (RT, p. 283) must give way,
according to Bloom, to the "more possible quest" of an unmediated
telling" of the mind's out-leapings over particulars, a telling
realized with rarest perfection in the many poems "small and easy"
of Ammons' volume of 1971, Briefings. "Emersonianism, the most
223
impatient and American of perceptual traditions, has learned patience"
in the latest phase of Ammons’ career, Bloom asserts (FC, p. 163).
If such a patience is centered in a visionary area which Ammons him
self calls "transcendental only by its bottomless entropy" (CP,
p. 316), and if the transcendental moment is for Ammons a "destruction"
to be "blessed by" (CP, p. 161), a visionary "Purgatory" (FC, p. 229)
rather than an Emersonian Eden, nonetheless that patience and that
radiant evanescent vision remain worthwhile— remain, that is, a
compensating "residue" of the "primordial strength" of the American
Sublime (FC, p. 147).
While Ammons is seen by Bloom as primarily an Emersonian,
Ashbery's "true precursor" is said to be "the composite father,
Whitman-Stevens" (FC, p. 131), though in the actual working out of his
thesis Bloom tends to emphasize Stevens more than Whitman. The
Stevensian dialectic of the First Idea has its analogue, Bloom con
tends, in the muted reductions and equally muted restitutions of
visionary power featured in Ashbery’s "self-curtailing" poetry of
"visionary sublimation" (FC, p. 199); Stevens reduces to the First
Idea, "an imagined thing" (CP, p. 387), and "then equates the poet's
act of the mind with the re-imagining of the First Idea"; Ashbery,
his chastened ephebe, "reduces to a First Idea of himself, and then
re-imagines himself” (FC, pp. 200-01). From Bloom's perspective,
Ashbery in his first volume is too intimately an ephebe of Stevens.
He has found already his "largest aesthetic principle, the notion
that every day the world consented to be shaped into a poem" (FC,
224
p.; 170), but this "antithetical completion" of the wisdom of Stevens’
Adagia proves oppressive.^ Not knowing yet how to re-imagine his
father fruitfully, he is impelled to the dead-end and "fearful dis
aster" (FC, p. 172) of his second volume of poems, The Tennis Court
Oath in 1962. The "egregious disjunctiveness" (FC, p. 174) and
outrageous ellipticality characterizing most of the poems of this
volume, poems such as "Leaving the Atocha Station" and the long
collage, "Europe," signify for Bloom "too massive a swerve away from
the ruminative continuities of Stevens and Whitman" (FC, p. 171).
But Ashbery returns to the mainstream of his imaginative inheritance
with Rivers and Mountains, whose long masterpiece, "The Skaters," is
said by Bloom to be Ashbery's most Whitmanian poem and "the largest
instance in him of the revisionary movement of daemonization, or the
onset of his personalized Counter-Sublime, as against the American
Sublime of Whitman and Stevens" (FC, p. 180). "The Skaters" inaugu
rates what is in Bloom's reading the most brilliant phase of Ashbery's
career, a phase marked by the production of scintillant long poems
such as "Fragment," the prose meditations of Three Poems, "Fantasia
on 'The Nut-Brown Maid,'" and Ashbery's greatest achievement, "Self-
Portrait in a Convex Mirror." All of these, Bloom says, are like
Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "versions or revisions" of
"Song of Myself" (DC, p. 22)‘ , , whose ecstatic internalized romance
of consummated Self and Soul is troped by Ashbery via Stevens as
"the imagination of a later self questing for accommodation not so
much with an earlier glory (as in Wordsworth) but with a possible
225
sublimity that can never be borne, if it should yet arrive" (FC, p.
175). While Ashbery thus is doomed to write "the history of someone
who came too late," as his poem, "As You Came from the Holy Land"
puts it (SP, p. 7 ),^ the great "resource" of his poetry is his
ability "to make a music of the poignance of withdrawal," and thereby
to transform what should be a "perpetual self-defeat" into an alto
gether "heroic" resistance of the lengthening shadows of Time
(MM, pp. 205-06).,,
Even this skeletal a summary of Bloom's reading of Ammons and
Ashbery sufficiently demonstrates the internal coherence of his
extension of the religion of American Orphism into the realm of the
contemporary. But what price does Bloom pay for such an extension?
Perhaps the most common charge against Bloom since the very start
of his career has been, in the diplomatic words of James Benziger on
The Visionary Company, that he displays "a certain onesidedness"
g
in his treatment of literary texts. The onesidedness already
apparent in Bloom's reading of the early nineteenth-century English
Romantics was only intensified in Yeats, where all those aspects of
the multiform Yeatsian poetic project not amenable to the Bloomian
thesis were either ignored or derided, including Yeats as Irishman,
Modernist, satirist, and Dublin theosophist. Beyond Yeats, the
visionary gaze becomes even more unflinching as it is mapped under
the new banner of "influence," until finally, in Wallace Stevens, we
have not only a dismissal of Stevens as French-style Symboliste,
dilettante, and comedian, but also, and much more precariously, a
226
repudiation of the powerful critics Helen Vendler and J. Hillis Miller
on the charged questions of Stevens as masterful modern ironist of
the thoroughly modern imagination.
Now, even deeper into the wilderness of modernity with his
readings of Ammons and Ashbery, Bloom at the very least is paying
the price of an even more circumscribed selection of the works that
"will suffice" to prove his theories of poetry and of life, and
consequently, is forced into an even more intractable denial of all
that which would not be open to a "saving use" in the poet's vision,
Bloom's campaign to save Ammons from himself involves ignoring the
wide range of subjects, tones, and activities in Ammons' work, the
language games, the bouncy humor, the tales of home and hearth and
heartburn, the Cornellish ambiance of poet-as-professor. It involves
slighting the influences of Pound's metric and of Williams' voice on
Ammons, Bloom claiming not to hear the latter "anywhere in Ammons's
work, despite the judgments of several reviewers" (RT, p. 257). And
even more importantly, it involves neglecting the influence of
Coleridge's theories of the imagination and poetic creation on the
central visionary Ammons, even though Ammons himself pronounces just
such an indebtedness.
The rescue operation for Ashbery is similarly strenuous and,
not surprisingly, quite reminiscent of the operation to save Stevens.
Ashbery too cannot properly be described as a painterly poet, despite
his avocation as eminent art critic and his many personal and pro
fessional ties to the Abstract Expressionists in particular.
227
Ashbery too is no "French poet writing in English" (FC, p. 183),
despite his years in France and his obvious fondness for avant-garde
French writers and artists such as Pierre Reverdy. The Ashbery
volume with the heaviest connection to the French and to the world
of avant-garde music and painting, The Tennis Court Oath, is dismissed
by Bloom as "calculated incoherence" lacking any real "necessity."
"Poems may be like pictures, or like music, or like what you will,"
Bloom instructs, "but if they are paintings or musical works, they
will not be poems" (FC, p. 174). Finally, too, Ashbery is the bene
ficiary of the same intriguing Bloomian rhetoric of near-concession
that we saw applied to Stevens; in Ashbery this rhetoric takes the
form of statements as puzzling as the one on Ashbery’s Sublime, which,
we are told, exists, and yet can never "be borne," even "if it should
yet arrive."
In my own analysis of Ammons and Ashbery, I would like to follow
up on what I see as the most important "deflections" in Bloom's mis
reading of the two poets—-the lack of interest in Ammons' borrowings
from Coleridge, and the postulating of a strangely self-effaced quest
in Ashbery— in-order to probe the consequences of Bloom's visionary
Romanticism for reading and the role of poetry in the intellectual
climate of our time. If in the process it becomes clear that my
analysis is based on principles and assumptions about the nature of
poetic meaning somewhat different from Bloom's own, it should be
apparent also that the purpose of the analysis is not to refute Bloom
as such, but rather, to place or to "locate" the powerful Bloomian
228
conception of Romanticism by suggesting qualifications and "modera
tions" that, in my reading, need not be and should not be so estranged
from the visionary intensities and the agonistic extremes of Bloom’s
9
eloquent map. My analysis is not intended to suggest that Bloom is
simply "wrong" o.n the poetry of Ammons and Ashbery; again, even if
one wanted to make that judgment, it has been rendered already nuga
tory by Bloom’s featured contention that critical "strength" inheres
precisely in the savagery and the cunning of the critic’s "misreading."
Rather, what I intend to address are questions which I think to be
implicit in Bloom's powerful but claustrophobic narrowing of focus on
the work of two of our most important contemporary poets. How far can
such narrowing go before it admits, in effect, that the terrain not
mapped and seldom even acknowledged by the critic also offers strong
poetic "argument" to our "belated" time? And what perspectives does
that uncharted land suggest on Bloom’s own work and on the visionary
logic of misreading behind it?
II
Geoffrey Hartman furnishes a suitable framework for our discussion
of the laudatory reception afforded the poetry of A.R. Ammons when
in his essay, "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness," from Beyond
Formalism, he wonders if "the modern poet, whom Schiller called
’sentimental’ (reflective) and whom we would describe as alienated,"
can "achieve the immediacy of all great verse, whatever its personal
or historical dilemma. The question with which Hartman concludes
229
his broodings on Romantic art and the problem of self-consciousness,
"Is visionary poetry a thing of the past, or can it coexist with the
modern temper?" has been answered in the affirmative by a formidable
body of commentators on Ammons, all of whom see a precarious "vision
ary strain" (FC, p. 123) as indeed still available to poets strong
enough to grapple with the many burdens of the Romantic visionary lode.
Bloom praises Ammons for being a poet of true Emersonian Power, a
seer whose greatest "ambition ... is an unmediated telling, a purely
visionary poetry" (RT, p. 283). A similar thirst for the unmediated
may be seen to animate Richard Howard's celebration of Ammons in
Alone with America' * ' ^ as well as the many enthusiastic reviews of
Ammons' poetry which appeared in the special issue of Diacritics
12
devoted to his work in 1973. Even Hyatt Waggoner, a critic quite
removed from the Bloomian pale, cannot resist praising the poet of
"Corsons Inlet," "Raft," and "Poetics" as a kind of Emerson for the
modern man, a poet of ultimately "religious vision" whose poems
13
transcend the solid realities of earth from which they spring.
The analyses given Ammons by Bloom, Howard, Waggoner, and others,
consitute a rich and rigorous placing of his poetry within the tradi
tion of American Romanticism. It seems almost churlish to note in
such distinguished critical activity, with its approbation of the work
of an obviously estimable poet, a particularly intriguing operation
of the hermeneutic circle. And yet, reading the poetry, one must
account for one's feeling— a feeling voiced by Denis Donoghue and
Alicia Ostriker, too— that Ammons, as impressive as he is, is curiously
230
unmoving. One must explain how poems whose intent, as Ammons himself
pqts it in Sphere, is to refresh and release "energies of the deeper
self" through a rendered flux of "organized motion" (p. 40), strike
one frequently as not refreshing, but stale and "relentlessly dry,
14
bloodless,’ unemotional." And, ultimately, one must confront the
possibility that Ammons’ poetry is particularly appealing to critics,
especially to critics of Romanticism, precisely because the world it
provides an engagingly ossified Romantic universe, a verbal world
hardened into often self-conscious and determinedly belated posturings
vis-a-vis the dialectics of a distinctively Romantic, and, by now, in
the last quarter of the twentiethr-century, distinctively conventional
cosmogony.
Virtuosity in handling the counters of Romantic dialectic is
central to the poetry of Ammons. Overt allegiance is affirmed to the
theories of Coleridge, whose conception of the creative imagination
in the Biographia Literaria as "the reconciliation of opposite or
discordant qualities" has been said by Ammons in a rare prose piece
to be the "greatest statement in our language" about poetry.^ One
of the chief attributes of Ammons' poetry is precisely the relentless
ness with which dialectical opposites are rehearsed in quest of
reconciliation. One:Many is the central opposition; others are
motion-permanence, center-periphery, peak-base, mind-nature, and
line-sphere. Here are the first two stanzas of the poem called
"One:Many":
To maintain balance
between one and many by
231
keeping in operation both one and many:
fear a too great consistency, an arbitrary
imposition
from the abstract one
downward into the realities of manyness
this makes unity
not deriving from the balance of manyness
but by destruction of diversity:
it is unity
unavailable to change,
cut off from the reordering possibilities of
variety: (CP, p. 138)
This passage is quite characteristic of Ammons. It is a lecture,
really, a disquisition on Coleridgean metaphysics. Bloom speaks of
the visionary intensity of Ammons as his poetry tries "the impossible
task, beyond a limit of art, in which language seeks its own end to
the one:many problem" (FC, p. 215). Yet others may find it difficult
to see anything visionary in lines such as these, though we may be
tempted, indeed, to view the passage as a prologomenon towards a
vision. It is perhaps unfair to describe Ammons in this passage as
endeavoring to fulfill the Coleridgean prescription, from a letter to
Sotheby in 1802, that "a great Poet must be, implicite if not expli-
« » 16
cite, a profound Metaphysician." Much twentieth-century criticism,
including and especially the New Criticism based on some of Coleridge's
own definitions, has tied itself in knots trying to demonstrate why
a formulation such as this is naive and ill-advised. But perhaps a
comparison to the theories of Coleridge can help explain why Ammons
is so given to producing poetry like this, and why then, too, there
is such an unproductive tension in his work between the claims of
abstraction and the imperatives of the concrete.
232
"I know / . . . that I am / holy in amness," Ammons announces
in "Come Prima" (CP, p. 52), and the echo of Coleridge's famous
definition of the Primary Imagination is obviously quite deliberate,
another one of Ammons' self-conscious ploys. Besides being deliber
ate, however, it is troubled also, for there is one essential dis
tinction between Coleridge and Ammons, a distinction that has con
siderable consequences for the enterprise of Ammons' dialectic. It
may very well be articulated as the distinction between the metaphysics
of Kant and the anti-metaphysics introduced by the Nietzschean palace
revolt. Coleridge's theory of the dialectical imagination is founded
firmly on what Jacques Derrida would call a "transcendental signi
fied," an absolute One that stands outside of language as the
chimerical origin and end of all linguistic desires.^ Ammons, on
the other hand, is extremely equivocal in his treatment of "finite
mind" in relation to "the eternal act of creation in the infinite
I AM." He affirms in "Hibernaculum" that "there is one mind and
one earth" (CP, p. 367), but this is as elegantly tentative as Stevens,
and the following evasion, couched like much of Stevens in the
passive, determinedly and rather coyly obscures the epistemological
issues: "and yet it is / completely unknown until made out." In
Sphere, Ammons announces that "the highest god / we never meet,
essence out of essence, motion without motion" (p. 17), and this too
refuses to take a stand on the ontological status of such "essence."
Later in the same poem, Ammons is explicit in his equivocation: "but
the gods have come and gone / (or we have made them come and go)
233
so long among us that / they have communicated something of the sky
to us . . . " (p. 49). Yet the passage immediately preceding this
is not at all equivocal, seeing "god" or "essence" as a function of
the transcendental mountings of our symbol systems. "Only the foolish
think" the "gods have gone away," Ammons says; "they will return,"
he assures us, and then he tells us why and how:
. . . the mechanics of this have to do with
the way our minds work, the concrete, the overinvested concrete,
the symbol, the seedless radiance, the giving up into meaning
lessness
and the return of meaning . . . (pp- 48-49)
If we have to recycle metaphysical commonplaces here, it is be
cause Ammons is so much preoccupied with them— and not without reason.
For an epistemological strategy obviously has great consequences for
the linguistic and rhetorical strategies of its presentation. With
his belief in a transcendent One, Coleridge could present a theory
of language based firmly on one kind of Romantic dilemma of "multeity
in unity." The basis is firm because Coleridge's brand of Romantic
18
frustration, his restless "scheming to apprehend the absolute," is
focused with synechdochal singlemindedness on the impossibility of
words ever being able to say the originating and now endlessly de
ferred Word. As Coleridge observes, "A fall of some sort or other—
the creation, as it were, of the non-absolute," is the "fundamental
19
postulate" before us. A telling view of the language of philosophy
is engendered from this. It is "the business of the philosopher,"
Coleridge says in the Philosophical Lectures, "to desynonymize words
originally equivalent, therein following and impelling the natural
234
o 0
progress of language in civilized societies." Philosophy starts
with sameness and establishes differences through the traditional
metaphysical operation of deducing distinct dialectical counters, and
the familiar Romantic sentiment has it that this is, in fact, an
emblem for the development of language in general.
The situation is frustrating because the initiating Word cannot
be put back together again with all the little words, the mere
metonyms and opposites of mortal meaning; it is comforting because
there is, after all, an essence to aspire to— and the fact that this
essence jls there confers upon language, for all its inadequacies, the
power of a stable dialectical hierarchy. Thus, synecdoche, related
to but much more powerful than metonymy, becomes the central figure
in Coleridge's theory of poetry. Like metonymy, synecdoche presupposes
a gulf between our temporal situation and the inaccessible language-
less Word, but synecdoche at the same time provides a hope not apparent
in metonymy, a hope that his gulf can be mediated through a represen
tation of our fragmented and perspectivist "parts" for the greater
21
unified whole of Logos. At the heart of the synecdochal represen
tations of poetry for Coleridge is, of course, the symbol, which, to
reiterate the famous definition, "is characterized . . . above all by
the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal." The
symbol, says Coleridge, "always partakes of the reality which it
renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself
22
as a living part in that unity of which it is the representation."
According to Coleridge's theory of the poetic imagination, the
235
23
evocation of the Logos, or "divine energy," by the poetic symbol,
2 A
is supposed to be "magical," a germination of the potential of
25
words as "living Things." And yet the danger of defining the symbol
in this fashion is that it blurs the distinction that Coleridge would
still like to maintain between poetry as a synthetic or "esemplastic,"
and philosophy as an analytic mode of verbal procedure. For the
divine energy remains an essence, an essence which has dominant within
it the potential not only for rich imaginative union but for a meta
physics of stable dialectical mountings. Poetry, with its recon
ciliation of discretely enumerated "opposites," seems to differ from
philosophy only by virtue of its countering direction on the ladder
of absolute synonymy, with philosophy descending while poetry ascends.
While at its best the Romantic symbol in the Coleridge line perhaps
enacts what Murray Krieger has called, in frankly metaphorical . .
2 6
language, a "miracle" of imaginative fusion, it also seems to invite,
in the hands of a poet such as Ammons, the intrusion of the program
matic, the abstract, the formulaic counters of dialectical logomachy,
into a poetry which is actually meant to feature the appeal of the
intuitive, the immediate, the natural.
fear a too great consistency, an arbitrary
imposition
from the abstract one
The great failing of the poetry of A.R. Ammons is, I think, that
it falls into the traps which it recognizes, and habitually discusses.
For, although Ammons has generally removed from his poetry the possi
bility of a transcendental signified, although he tells us time and
236
again that he is the poet of process, the singer of a reality "abob"
with not just one but many Emersonian "centers" (CP, p. 299), he
finally is impelled to use as a strategy for his presentation of
process all the tired conventions and by now stale formulas of an
essentializing Romanticism appropriated directly from Coleridge.
This tension in Ammons’ work can result in quite unintentional
comedy. "Look: it's snowing: / without theory / & beyond help,"
he announces in Tape for the Turn of the Year (p. 99). By the time
of The Snow Poems, however, it seems to have begun snowing theory,
as we are given descriptions of snow like this: "histories of past /
motions thawing away into motions, / runlets and trickles, /
histories of redispositions . . . " (p. 164). Ammons at his most .
tiresome barrages us with 'natural' descriptions of this sort, despite
the fact that in his "Poetics" he has announced his task in this
manner:
I look for the forms
things want to come as
from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:
not the shape on paper— though
that, too— but the
uninterfering means on paper:
not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through- me
from the self not mine but ours. (CP, p. 199)
This presents itself as a poetics of process, of the poet
237
attempting to disperse himself among the burgeonings of things-in-
the-world. And surely there is often a solid excellence in Ammons
based on his talent for nicely observed natural detail, for capturing
in the rhythms of poetry the "lowly" things he prizes (CP, p. 140),
the "mold under the leaf" (Sphere, p. 65). But there is also the
seemingly relentless compulsion to see in nature the world all too
programmatically according to Coleridge and Emerson— with, perhaps,
a touch of the latest in post-Einsteinian scientific thought. So,
although Ammons says "the symbol won’t do," that "it differentiates
flat / into muffling fact it tried to stabilize beyond" (CP, p. 329),
his poetry is, in fact, full of symbols, as the world is quite
consciously read as a book— "nature's message . . . for / the special
reader" (SP, p. 241)-— as an exercise in the dialectical problems of
One-Many. And the natural phenomena subjected to the troping "shapes"
of this "too great consistency” that Ammons has warned himself against
tend to be, predictably, all the musty old Romantic symbols: ocean,
shore, mountains, wind.
Wind predominates in the early poetry— -"My subject's / still the
wind" (CP, p. 214)— where it is seen as a "guide," because it has
"given up everything to eternal being but / direction" (CP, p. 80).
Ammons uses the pathetic fallacy— again, as he has said in an
27
interview, quite consciously — as the wind constantly lectures
him "to stop not-being and break / off from j i s ; to flowing." The pun
on "flowing" is typical of Ammons' symbol-mongering, and effectively
undercuts whatever visionary power the passage might otherwise have
238
had. By the time of the crucial Corsons Inlet period, Ammons has
apparently started his readings in science, for the wind now is a
"variable," making "variables / of position and direction and sound"
(CP, p. 152) amid the dunes of the New Jersey shore. "Guide" or
"variable," the "message" of the wind is the same; it preaches flux,
"leaves no two moments / on the dunes the same" (CP, pp. 152-53).
Wind, in other words, is a symbol of process, of the dispersed Many.
It is, as "Saliences" tells us, a symbol of "the open, / the
unexpected ..." (CP, p. 153)— and a most predictable symbol it
. 28
is.
Mountains figure heavily in Ammons' early poetry as well, and
like the wind, they tend to talk a lot. Bloom notes acutely the
place of Ammons' garrulous peaks within a tradition of talkative
29
mountains in Blake, Shelley, and Emerson, without remarking at the
same time that the advantage in the comparison seems to belong
entirely to the precursors. Emerson's Monadnoc, "Anchored fast for
many an age," awaits "the bard and sage / Who, in large thoughts,
like fair pear1-seed, /Shall string Monadnoc like a bead" (EW, 9,
66). What in Emerson is quiet dignity and unpretentious invention
becomes in Ammons coyness and unintentional bathos on the one hand,
and pompous metaphysical posturing on the other. For an example of
the first, here is a poem called "Mountain Liar":
The mountains said they were
tired of lying down
and wanted to know what
I could do about
getting them off the ground
239
Well close your eyes I said
and I'll see if I can
by seeing into your nature
tell where you've been wronged
What do you think you want to do
They said Oh fly
My hands are old
and crippled keep no lyre
but if that is your true desire
and conforms roughly
with your nature I said
I don't see why
we shouldn't try
to see something along that line
Hurry they said and snapped shut
with rocky sounds their eyes
I closed mine and sure enough
the whole range flew
gliding on interstellar ice
They shrieked with joy and peeked
as if to see below
but saw me as before there
foolish without my lyre
We haven't budged they said
You wood (CP, pp. 54-55)
For an example of the other kind of miscarriage of Ammons' tone
we may turn to "Whose Timeless Reach," in which Ammons as Ezra, the
favored persona of his early poetry, climbs once again to the top
of the mountain, this time to discourse on Eastern wisdom and on
death. The dialogue between prophet and mountain is rendered with
near Biblical solemnity:
I Ezra the dying
portage of these deathless thoughts
stood on a hill in
the presence of the mountain
and said wisdom is
too wise for man it
is for gods and gods have little
use for it so I do not know what
to do with it
240
and animals use it only when
their teeth start to fall and it
is too late to do anything
else but b£ wise and stay
out of the way
The eternal will not lie
down on any temporal hill
The frozen mountain rose and broke
its tireless lecture of repose
and said death does
not take away it
ends giving halts bounty and
Bounty I said thinking of ships
that I might take and helm right
out through space
dwarfing these safe harbors and
their values
taking the Way in whose timeless reach
cool thought unpunishable
by bones eternally glides (CP, p. 33)
In both instances of Ammons’ peaking, the mountain as a familiar
"place" of Romantic invention poses a problem for a poet too self-
conscious really to be able to believe in his "vision," his symbol.
Wanting to present deep wisdom drawn from the, wells of the imagination,
Ammons himself is yet unable to accept his invention as anything other
than an instance of "the overinvested concrete"— proof of the
"mechanics" of our minds' workings. With what seems like almost
deliberate self-destructiveness, he then endeavors to solve his
personal problem of imaginative belief by presenting his visions in
tones so alternately arch and melodramatic that no.one else could
possibly embrace them either.
The ocean and its shore become the dominant symbols of Ammons'
poetry from Corsons Inlet through Sphere, and they too are invested
almost programmatically with significance. The ocean, "multiple to
241
a blinding / oneness," is for Ammons a "total expression," a wordless
statement far superior to any of man’s mediated knowing (CP, p. 288).
"Essay on Poetics" explicates:
. . . genius, and
the greatest poetry, is the sea, settled, contained before the
first
current stirs but implying in its every motion adjustments
throughout the measure : one recognizes an ocean even from
a dune and
the very first actions of contact with an ocean say ocean over and
over: read a few lines along the periphery of any of the truly
great and the knowledge delineates an open shore:
what is to be gained from the immortal person except the
experience
of ocean: take any line as skiff, break the breakers, and go out
into the landless, orientationless, but perfectly contained, try
the suasions, brief dips and rises, and the general circulations,
the wind, the abundant reductions, the stars, and the experience
is
obtained . . . (CP, p. 309)
These lines from Ammons could be viewed easily enough' as a
workmanlike disquisition— indeed, an "essay"— on the obverse, or -
redemptive, side of the great passage from Whitman cited in Chapter 4:
0 baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,
Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
•Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd . . .
1 perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single
object, and that no man ever can,
Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart
upon me and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.
Thus, "As I .Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life" delivers, with
enormous power and feeling, the anguished Romantic acknowledgment of
242
the failure of man's song before the "total expression" of nature
(troped by Bloom, of course, as the Emersonian precursor). Ammons,
who constantly reminds us of this old lesson that "everything but
our understanding / is flawless" (SP, p. 205), turns the expansive
anguish of Whitman into a tired text— ocean as book, ocean as clever
conceit with a predictable "message," man as ocean on the model of
the hoary metaphor. As Bloom notes, what Ammons presents here is an
expression of "Emersonian Self-Reliance . . . severely mitigated by
the consciousness of latecoming" (FC, p. 142). Yet the mitigation
perhaps derives from a failing that Bloom, with his valuation of
deep Romantic topoi at the expense of the mere significances of language
on the page, cannot afford to notice. It is Ammons' strategy which
lapses here, and it lapses because Ammons' reliance on symbols, on
oceanic equations, lacks conviction within a verbal context character
ized above all by prosy discursiveness, not by Romantic feeling.
Arguing eloquently that the "central American poems are houses
founded on the sea" (MM, p. 177), Bloom sees Ammons' "visionary
strain" taking its power from its intimate relation to Whitman's
littoral tradition. But what is powerful or visionary about a
passage such as our ocean essay? Is it not but a mechanical and
irritatingly self-conscious working out of a Romantic terminology
already brittle with age? Isn't Ammons in a passage such as this
merely writing a belated essay on old Romantic topics, an essay
filled, as academic essays often are, but poems presumably are not
supposed to be, with a meta-language peculiar to the topic at hand?
243
"Motion" is here, and "adjustments" and "periphery," and "suasions"
and "circulations" are riding on the waves too. Even casual readers
of Ammons know these words well by now, for they have seen at least
one of these phrases, or their brethren, in virtually every poem that
Ammons has ever written, and they have seen that these counters of
Ammons' terminology are always introduced vis-a-vis the same old
conundrums of dialectical philosophy— the One-Many problem and its
various epigones. Indeed, by the time of Sphere, Ammons is so awash
in the jargon his poems have generated that he is forced to render
explicit the programmatic relations of his dialectical thought:
"Actually," he confesses, "the imagination works pretty / diagram-
matically into paradigm," and we feel that, for once, Ammons has
given us an accurate accounting of the actual practice of his poetics,
as opposed to its theory. An exegesis of paradigms follows:
. . . for me, for example, the one-many problem figures
out as an isoceles triangle (base:diversity and peak:unity)
or, even, equilateral, some rigor of rising: and this is
not to be distinguished from the center-periphery thing, in
that if you cut out a piece of pie from the center-periphery
circle, you have a triangle, a little rocky, but if you
cut off the arc, it sits up good, as (peak:center:unity) .
and (base:periphery:diversity): actually, one could go even
so far as (peak:center:symbol:abstraction), etc. . . ..
(Sphere, p. 12)
In this intimidating passage, which reads like a philosopher’s
notes to himself, Ammons succeeds finally in realizing one of the
essential directions of his work— that of rendering academic criticism
of his poetry supererogatory (well, almost!) by, in effect, writing
that criticism himself. Forced to be a "profound philosopher" by his
244
definition of his enterprise in the not entirely applicable terms of
Coleridge, Ammons in a passage such as this delivers neither interest
ing philosophy nor the fresh poetry of unmediated reality that both
he and his critics have announced as the destination of his work.
Instead, what we have here is a sort of exercise, an earnest charting
of virtually the entire "geometry" of Ammons' ossified Romantic
universe in something like Bloomian fashion, performed with an almost
painful awareness of the potential for mechanical symbolic equations
therein.
And yet Ammons does make one crucial split with Coleridgean
strategies, a split forced on him by his recognition that, whatever
the stable mountings of his poetic thought, he cannot, as we have
seen, have recourse to that transcendental signified which is the
Coleridgean Logos. This split is important, for it will show us why
Ammons, despite his consciousness of the place of his xvork within the
Romantic tradition, is finally not liberated by his belatedness, as
Bloom has argued, but imprisoned by sets of strategies and modes of
perception that are simply incongruent with the poetry of "possibili
ties" he feels he should be presenting. For Ammons, trying to dedicate
himself to presenting the "motions" of a "reality abob with centers"
through the "motions" of his language, is moved to say in Sphere:
I don't know about you,
but I'm sick of good poems, all those little rondures
splendidly brought off, painted gourds on a shelf: give me
the dumb, debilitated, nasty, and massive, if that's the
alternative ... (p. 72)
245
Having discovered in "Corsons Inlet" that "Overall is beyond me,"
the poet, then, is presumably free to discard as well the equivalent
of "Overall" in poetry— that organic wholeness of form that makes of
the poem its own tidy, self-contained universe. Hence, the longer,
linear poems of the mature Ammons. Hence, too, all the talk about
openness to "black wells of possibility."
But what results from the collision of process with essence is a
tension, and an effect of insincerity, that Ammons simply cannot ex
plain away. His long linear poems, for all their exuberance and
cleverness, fail, and they fail because their openness is finally a
sham. They fail because the poet finally is not training strategi
cally "for inadvertency" (SP, p. 286) in them, but, rather, is
constantly battling, and generally succumbing to, the imperatives
of his essentializing, paradigmatic imagination. Ammons' art, in
peoms such as Sphere and "Hibernaculum," is still congealing into
abstractions and formulaic symbols; it is still reading nature
like a grand Book of dialectical philosophy. His art in these poems
is still running incessantly through the quasi-narrative formula of
the Wordsworthian/Coleridgean crisis-poem format as defined by
M.H. Abrams, a format wherein the presentation of a natural scene
is followed by a moral derived from that scene. Why can't Ammons
resist these tendencies? Perhaps a passage from Sphere reveals an
answer:
one terror mind brings on
itself is that anything can be made of anything: if there are
no boundaries that hold firm, everything can be ground into
246
everything else: the mind making things up, making nothing
of what things are made of: scary to those who need prisons,
liberating to those already in . . . (p. 61)
For all his announced love of process, of flux, Ammons' secret
terror, a terror which actuates the strategies of much of his poetry,
is indeed that things can collapse into each other, that the mind
cannot sustain the flux of its "motions" that are somehow correlative
with the "motions" of reality. "Hell is the meaninglessness of
stringing out / events in unrelated, undirected sequences," Ammons
says in "Hibernaculum" (CP, p. 361), thereby telling us why he needs
the "prisons" of his essentializing strategies: the undissected
flux that is the dark destination of his epistemology and his announced
poetics of process simply frightens him too greatly. It is this fear
of unbounded flux that gives Ammons not only his tired Romantic
strategies, but also the irritatingly pervasive stylistic tic of his
poetry, the colon. Sphere, for instance, is punctuated entirely
by colons and commas, with but one period at its end. As Alan Holder
' 30
and Linda Orr have noted, Ammons' colons sustain movement, they
sustain the "motion" of the poem. But, it must be added, colons at
the same time provide Ammons * verse a kind of visual and grammatical
"geometry" that is perhaps best seen as the typographical analogue
to the self-conscious symbolic schemes of the poet. Colons furnish
little "prisons" for a poet fearful of the "motion" his poems
threaten to engender. That the colon tends to be most licentiously
employed in Ammons' longer poems is no accident, for it is in these
poems that the dangers of unbridled "motion" are particularly acute.
247
Ammons may cry, "give me / the dumb, debilitated, nasty, and massive,"
but the very strategies of his punctuation in Sphere give the lie
to his brave posturing.
For, in fact, empty Romantic posturing, the expressive correlate
to formulaic symbolism, lies finally at the heart of Ammons' work.
Sometimes it is brave, in the Whitman manner:
oh I will be addled and easy and move
over this prairie in the wind's keep,
long-lying sierras blue-low in the distance:
I will glide and say little
(what would you have me say? I know nothing;
still, I cannot help singing)
and after much grace
I will pause
and break cactus water to your lips: (CP, p. 83)
Sometimes it is coy and apologetic about its own pretensions:
"my idealism's as thin as the sprinkled / sky and nearly as expansive:
I don't love anybody much," the poet of Sphere proclaims, moments
after a Whitmanian apostrophe to the stragglers of society— " ... I
know them: I love them: I am theirs" (pp. 18-19).
Sometimes the posturing is just silly, as in the strained up-beat
ending of Sphere:
... a united, capable poem, a united capable mind, a united
capable
nation, and a united nations! capable, flexible, yielding,
accommodating, seeking the good of all in the good of each . . .
(p. 79)
Why so much critical praise for a poetry so compromised in its
intentions, so frequently tired in its effects? Perhaps J. Hillis
Miller's famous discussion, in the introductory chapter to Poets of
Reality, of the three stages of growth in and beyond Romanticism, is
248
instructive here. Romanticism proper gives us, Miller says, a
Cartesian dualism wherein "man as subjective ego opposes himself
31
to everything else." This dualism can only fall in upon itself
until man "the murderer of God and drinker of the sea of creation
32
wanders through the infinite nothingness of his own ego." But
a relinquishing of the strenuous Romantic ego can transmute nothing
ness into the feast of the world, as "the mind is dispersed every-
33
where in things and forms one with them."
The poetry of A.R. Ammons seems to me to be important— and to
be appealing to so many sophisticated readers— precisely as an emblem
of the attempt to negotiate this three-stage progression from
Romanticism to the "poetry of reality." It is a poetry not of process,
of "motion," of unmediated vision— a poetry not of stage three,
as the poet would have us believe— but, rather, a poetry about at
tempting to leap from dualism into visionary immanence. At its most
powerful, as in "Corsons Inlet," it remains a poetry that serves
largely to remind us of characteristic Romantic frustrations, of the
impossibility of seeing into the life of the Other through language.
It remains a poetry of the assertive and frustrated Romantic 'I',
the wanderer, the solitary consciousness confronting nature. The
wooded glens in Ammons’ poetry may be of Ithaca, not Cumberland;
the landscapes may be suburban backyards and meadows, not lonely
English valleys; the littoral imagination may be founded on a
different shore of the Atlantic. But the crises eventuating from
the poetfe egoistic recognition of his limitations as a seer in
249
language are the same old crises; they come to us from 1798, and so
do many of the strategies for their presentation. We should not be
misled by the new flavor to the poetry, by its sophisticated science
derived from the physicists and Whitehead, by the marriage of this
science to the counters of dialectical philosophy. The dialectic
bears the aegis of Coleridge; the science, as Ammons himself has
34
noted, has the blessing of Wordsworth, and is, at any rate, the
logical culmination of a dualistic Romantic cosmogony rendered imma-
35
nent, not transcendent. The poetry of A.R. Ammons is simply belated,
often determinedly so. This is the source of its appeal to those who
are inclined to see the world as the great Romantics saw it; this
belatedness is also the source of its failure for those who do not
choose to feel bound by shapings of the now unregenerate Romantic mind.
If we are now in a position to see that the poetry of A.R. Ammons
perhaps is praised beyond all reason by Bloom precisely because it
yields such a resourceful review of the essences and the symbology of
the isolate Romantic imagination that Bloom so values, then we are able
to see also then that the cost of Bloom's narrow focus on the "deep
meanings" of language-less Romantic Will and transcendental Romantic
desire is a reluctance to engage the language-bound conventions of
a poem which necessarily constitute a significant part of the reading
process. In some sense, Bloom "reads" Ammons quite correctly in
the manner of the more orthodox literary critic; he sees Emerson
where demonstrably there is Emerson, Whitman where Whitman is "posed,"
and symbols where the translucence of the symbolic transparently
250
is offered. And yet Bloom is not bothered by the frequent tiredness
of Ammons' language and strategies, just as he is not concerned with
those aspects of Ammons— humorist, linguist-at-play— that are undeni
ably dependent upon the quiddity of verbal forces on a page. Ammons'
many trite, jargon-drenched lectures on dialectical metaphysics in
Sphere, for instance, are said by Bloom only to deliver "a curiously
discursive Sublime" (FC, p. 220); the larger Ammons propensity for
quickly wresting pregnant theory out of the most cursory observation
is summarized— but not criticized— as the issue of "a Transcendental
belief" shared with Emerson "that one can come to unity, at least in
the pure good of theory" (FC, p. 177). Ammons in his central incar
nation as a visionary quester in the American vein ultimately is seen
by Bloom to remain, "somewhat despite himself, the least spent of
seers" (FC, p. 149).
If against such narrowness and deflection, it seems necessary
to invoke another great Romantic scholar, M.H. Abrams, whose descrip
tion of the structure of the Romantic crisis-poem as an alternation of
natural scene with moral reflection defines perfectly the character
istic movement of Ammons' work, the point is not to favor Abrams'
"map" over Bloom's, but to argue that Ammons' quest really does not
appear "internalized" in the proper Bloomian fashion except through
the fail-safe lens of Bloom's own logic of misreading. The strain in
Ammons that is closest to Bloom's desires presents us with a time-
honored and now rather weary Romantic poetry of the isolate Romantic
'I' wandering about Nature's '"field' of action" in search of vision,
251
somber and sublime, into the life of things. Bloom sees the empty
posturings and the stale strategies marking the language of this most
conscious and coy of belated Romantic poets, but, true to the terms
and the needs of his Romantic prophecy, he reads beyond such language-
bound failings to the language-less Vision that alone, he argues,
gives us life.
Ill
We may point to the cost of this Bloomian logic of misreading,
and yet, of course, we are faced with the question that Bloom's work
poses. Is there a way out of Romanticism as Bloom conceives it, a
way to break beyond the circumference of the Romantic circle? Or must
we agree with Bloom when he tells us that "the vitality of Romantic
tradition appears to inhere in its universality," that "we are, all
of us, largely involuntary Romantics, however intensely we proclaim
our overt beliefs to be anti-Romantic" (RT, p. 324)? Given his
assumptions, Bloom naturally enough sees the work of the poet to whom
we now turn, John Ashbery, as constituting another extension of
Romanticism. Ashbery, Bloom instructs, is "the most legitimate of
the sons of Stevens" (AI, p. 143), a major poet in the tradition of
the American Sublime whose poems tend, "like Stevens," to follow the
"Wordsworthian-Whitmanian" "crisis-poem paradigm" at the heart of
Romantic revisionism (MM, p. 205). However, there are, indeed, all
kinds of evasions and veiled concessions in the Bloomian critical
universe on the question of Ashbery, just as there were on Ashbery's
252
poetic father. Ashbery is "at his best," Bloom cautions, only "when
he dares to write most directly in the idiom of Stevens" (FC, p. 172).
Ashbery "attempts a profound and beautiful misinterpretation of all
his precursors" only "in his own best poetry" (FC, p. 185— emphasis
Bloom's), only, that is, when he is "most himself . . . most ruefully
and intensely Transcendental" (FC, p. 131). And if Ashbery's domain
is narrowed considerably by strictures such as these, the poetry
still is not saved entirely, for even within this diminished realm
there is much that remains problematic, as evidenced by the rueful
nature of Ashbery's transcendence, and the subdued, self-effacing
quality of his quest for a Stevensian "beyond." Ashbery, like Stevens,
tends to write and rewrite his own versions of "Song of Myself," but
Ashbery's versions, Bloom notes, are even more prone to qualifications
and vanishing or thwarted epiphanies than "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction" and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Ashbery's songs of
himself are all self-curtailing versions of the Central Manner of our
poetry; Ashbery may be summed, in fact, as "a kind of invalid of
American Orphism, perpetually convalescing from the strenuous worship
of that dread Orphic trinity of draining gods" who preside over the
American Native Strain (FC, p. 131). Thus, "The Skaters," for example,
despite its Whitmanian affirmative expansiveness, is seen by Bloom to
accept "a reduction of Whitmanian ecstasy" (FC, p. 181) in its
celebration of "the intensity of minor acts" (RM, p. 37). "Mild
effects are the result" of his aesthetic program, the poet of
"The Skaters" announces, mild effects and "fundamental absences
253
struggling to / get up and be off themselves” (p. 39). Striving
to transform such effects into the Wordsworthian wisdom that there is
still "a substance in us that prevails,” Bloom nonetheless must
acknowledge that "Ashbery tends to know" this substance "only by
knowing also his absence from it" (FC, p. 181).
Bloom’s treatment of Ashbery's most famous poem, "Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror," provides an even more telling example of a
critical rhetoric seeming to grant as much to its opponents as it
takes for itself. The language of Ashbery's long meditation on the
self-portrait of Parmigianino "engages, however covertly and evasively,
the central or Emersonian tradition of our poetry ,1 1 Bloom observes
(DC, p. 23); the breakings of form in the poem also reveal, he says,
the sixfold structure of revision featured in his map of misreading.
And yet the redeeming glories of the map, its three ratios of the
"representation" of visionary power, are served very oddly in the
Bloomian analysis of "Self-Portrait." The. initial restituting ratio
known as tessera is located by Bloom in the second verse paragraph
of the poem, but the "antithetical completion" thereby offered is a
curious one in that it "fails all completion" (DC, p. 28). The
triumph of daemonization, with its active repression of the poetic
father and consequent Romantic Sublime, is mapped with apparent ease
by Bloom, but is revealed in the mapping also to be an empty, self
cancelling victory. Here is the passage in which Bloom finds
Ashbery's Sublime:
254
We have surprised him
At work, but no, he has surprised us
As he works. The picture is almost finished,
The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,
Startled by a snowfall which even now is
Ending in specks and sparkles of snow.
It happened while you were inside, asleep,
And there is no reason why you should have
Been awake for it, except that the day
Is ending and it will be hard for- you
To get to sleep tonight, at least until late. (SP, pp. 74-75)
Not surprisingly, the key word in these lines is "surprise,"
which Bloom reads as a troping of various images of visionary power
in Emerson and late Stevens. But instead of the primal power of
Emerson or even the refreshing transparency of Stevens, Ashbery gives
us, Bloom reports, "a lesser pathos ... an uneasiness, however
Sublime, rather than a transcendence" (DC, p. 31). This uneasiness
Bloom relates to the "evenness of tone" marking virtually all of
Ashbery’s work, a "mild effect" whose reason for being is to serve as
"one of Ashbery’s defense mechanisms against his anxiety of poetic
influences" (FC, p. 180). In the "spooky Sublime" (DC, p. 32) of
"Self-Portrait," the defense involves Ashbery's repression of not
only his precursors but "his own strength," a repression enacted in
order "to avoid climax-impressions" which would bring the world of the
poem to a cataclysmic end. Through the strength of its repression,
the poem enables itself to continue, and concludes with the celebrated
injunction of poet to painter to "withdraw that hand" and "offer it
no longer as shield or greeting" (SP, p. 82), an injunction whose
union of the'defensive with the communicative Bloom sees as an
oxymoronic emblem of the visionary restoration of apophrades.
255
"Ashbery's poem too is. the shield of a greeting, its defensive and
communicative functions inextricably mixed," Bloom observes; "yet
Ashbery's reading of his tradition of utterance, and my reading of
Ashbery, are gestures of restitution" (DC, p. 37). Since this
restitution, however, features only an "achieved dearth" of meaning
(DC, p. 37), and since this curious emptiness is achieved through
an Influx that, by Bloom's own admission, has grown exceedingly
weary, pale, and diffident with age in the latest of the great
American poets, we are left wondering if the habitual Bloomian
rhetoric of visionary battle has not undercut itself completely in
this, its final attempt at saving poetry from itself, and for our
time. And again, the question is suggested: how far can a rhetoric
of near-concession go before, in fact, it does concede important
issues to its opponents?
Bloom's problems do not end here, either. Saving Ashbery from
himself is made even more difficult by the fact that Ashbery, some
what like Ammons, "wishes to be more of an anomaly than he is,
rather than the 'central1 kind of a poet he is fated to become, in the
line of Emerson, Whitman, Stevens" (FC, p. 206). This perversity is
discovered by Bloom not only in the "fearful disaster" of Ashbery's
elliptical mode, but also in the opposite pole of his defense against
tradition, the "dialectical extreme" (FC, p. 171) of his "re-vitalizing
of proverbial wisdom" (FC, p. 172). Both rhetorics are meant to
defend primarily against the ellipses, the proverbial knowing, and
the central Sublime of Stevens; both rhetorics, according to Bloom,
256
feature Ashbery at much less than his best, risking the "disasters"
(FC, p. 172) of the totally disjunctive on the one hand and the
blandly truistic on the other.
Considering the pervasiveness, frequently noted by other commen
tators, . of the elliptical and proverbial poles of discourse in the
work of Ashbery, perhaps we are justified in wondering about the
appropriateness of Bloom’s decision to leave them largely unexamined.
But this is a question of "use," and a very large one, since it
involves the internal logic of Bloom’s entire enterprise. The final
uses of Bloomian Romanticism will be assessed in Chapter 6; by way of
preparation in this chapter, I would like to use Ashbery in a fashion
different from Bloom in order to determine the complete cost of
Bloom's circumscribed selection of this most protean of contemporary
poets. In particular, I want to concentrate on those areas excised
strategically from Ashbery's poetry by Bloom, the elliptical and the
proverbial poles, and to see if there is in Bloom’s selectiveness a
revealing relation to the crucial deflections we have noted already
in his reading of Ammons. For if Ammons, from the perspective of the
36
particular Coleridgean theories that he admires, is revealed to be
in his own designs a highly conventional and decidedly mediated poet of
ostensibly unmediated and intensely private vision, then Ashbery
from the standpoint of his propensity for the proverbial can be seen
only as a determined practitioner of the "low" arts of culturally
engendered and entangled mediacy, and thus a proponent of a solacing
communal wisdom whose serene sharings implicitly repudiate the darkly
257
assertive vision of the solitary Romantic quester. An examination
of the fascinating interplay in Ashbery's work between the exigencies
of the proverbial as these triumph in his mature poetry over the almost
equally powerful forces of ellipticality thus may show a way out of
the solipsistic circle of Bloom's belated Romantic strategies, and
may deliver to us then, as well, a helpful way of assessing the
quality of the choices that Bloom has made.
A serious reader of Ashbery must sooner or later confront the
apparent anomaly of the poet's second volume, The Tennis Court Oath.
The book is a grotesquerie, an elaborate exercise in unreclaimed neo-
Surrealistic pandemonium whose most celebrated and characteristic
efforts, "Europe" and "Leaving the Atocha Station," succeed only
in pushing language completely beyond the bounds of any kind of
intelligibility. Here is a brief passage from "Leaving the Atocha
Station":
The worn stool blazing pigeons from the roof
driving tractor to squash
Leaving the Atocha Station steel
infected bumps the screws
everywhere wells
abolished top ill-lit
scarecrow falls Time, progress and good sense
strike of shopkeepers dark blood
no forest you can name drunk scrolls
the completely new Italian hair...
Baby... ice falling off the port
The centennial Before we can (TCO, p. 33)
These twelve lines yield an indeterminate number of constituent
phrases, most nominal, some adjectival, some finally ambiguous.
And, of course, we cannot be certain of connections between any of
the phrases. They collide with each other in a baffling array of
258
possible syntactic combinations, most of which will not mesh
completely. And then we are confronted, too, with the frustrations of
the variegate semantic field, which deliberately mocks our attempts
to formulate a comprehensible equivalence chain that would give the
passage coherence. We are forced to agree with Bloom that what we
have here is indeed "calculated incoherence," but perhaps we can dis
cern a "necessity" in this spectacularly perverse extreme of Ashbery's
elliptical art that Bloom is loath to acknowledge.
The Tennis Court Oath represents Ashbery's attempt to pass
beyond the dialectic of language altogether. In the Coleridgean
terminology of Ammons, Ashbery's second volume is an emblem of the
poet's desire to wed himself entirely to diversity, to the Many,
while ignoring the unity that diversity, no matter how much it is
emphasized as a matter of strategy, demands, if we are to make our
world intelligible by naming it. That Ashbery's aesthetic in Some
Trees would.take him to the cul-de-sac of The Tennis Court Oath was
predictable by principles other than Bloom's logic of influence, and
was in fact predicted by W.H. Auden in his equivocal introduction to
the earlier volume. "The danger for a poet working with the subjective
life," Auden cautions, is that "he is tempted to manufacture calculated
oddities, as if the subjectively sacred were necessarily and on all
37
accounts odd."
"Calculated oddities" abound in The Tennis Court Oath because
Ashbery in his first two books is forcing himself to face what
38
Ernst Cassirer eloquently calls the "curse of mediacy" afflicting
259
modern writers, while not having fully marshalled the strategic
resources to contend with it. Implicit in the elegant Stevensian
evasions of the best poems of Some Trees,— the title poem, "Two
Scenes," "Le Livre Est sur la Table,"— is an acknowledgment that
the poet cannot and, furthermore, should not attempt to name an
essentialized Romantic One, a point Bloom himself makes of Ashbery’s
poetry as a whole in another of his puzzling near-forfeitures of his
39
own position. But there is also in Ashbery's poetry from the start
an even more important move beyond Stevens. As Marjorie Perloff has
noted, Ashbery "turns" his inherited "Stevens mode on its head by
40
cutting off the referential dimension." That is, Ashbery's poetry,
even as early as Some Trees, "doesn't have subjects," as Ashbery
himself puts it, and it does not have subjects because it has given
up already, as a matter of strategy, that quest to pin down, and to
wrest significance from, the discretely other things-of-the-world
which so perplexes an isolate Romantic wanderer of the Ammons variety.
In a review of Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation appearing in
Poetry in 1957, the year following the publication of Some Trees,
Ashbery praises Stein for offering "a general, all-purpose model which
41
each reader can adapt to fit his own sense of particulars."
Such a description applies very well to Ashbery's own poetry, a
poetry whose elusive arguments and fractured tales deliver what Bloom
rightly calls "a ravishing simplicity that seems largely lacking in
any referential quality" (FC, p. 193).
Ashbery's rhetoric of the flux of consciousness and of our lives
260
involves from the start a strategic acceptance of the loss of that
Absolute upon which seers customarily predicate their visions of
either multeity or the One. Bloom sees this loss, of course, as
a function of the encroaching shadows of visionary history. Remarking
on the "difficult serenity" (FC, p. 176) often apparent in the work
of Stevens and Ashbery, he suggests that while "perhaps Stevens was
addicted to loss," his disciple Ashbery "scarcely knows how to proceed
42
except by acknowledging it." But Ashbery’s loss, and the loss of
the late Stevens with his poetry "in the predicate that there is
nothing else," also might be said to eventuate from defeats other
than Bloom’s agonistic and Oedipal ones. If Stevens' poetry features
the scrupulous epistemological hesitance that Bloom's prime critical
adversary, Helen Vendler, says it does, then we might see in
Ashbery's poetry a culmination of such hesitance, as the poet effaces
from his vision even the possibility of that essentialized naming
of flux xtfhich could confer a symbolical mounting into peaks of vision.
Stevens' "qualified assertions" lose assertiveness altogether in
Ashbery, and become simply qualifications; that is, they become
assertions-about-things that, deliberately lacking the force of
referential propositionality, exist as propositional "truth-claims"
only within the protean, endlessly shifting world of their own making.
To believe in a transcendental signified— even if that belief takes
the characteristically modern form, as it does in Ammons, of an
avowal (time and again!) that "Overall is beyond me"— is to confer
a stability,-a coherent progression, on one's arranging of the world
261
through language. Strategically forsaking such a stability, Ashbery
thus builds his entire enterprise upon what Charles Altieri, one of
his best critics, calls a "distrust of any dialectical progress,"
a distrust necessarily involving then, too, a rejection of the "dream
43
of synthesis" at the heart of much Romantic desire.
The question Ashbery was forced to contend with in The Tennis
Court Oath by his fundamental strategy of loss was simply this: What
is left for poetry, if signification of the Other is eliminated? That
the answer of The Tennis Court Oath is inadequate, and that Ashbery
quickly enough recognized it to be so, is the key to our understanding
of the importance of his work. For, having rent from his poetry the
possibilities of a referential or an essentialized naming, Ashbery, in
his second volume, made a fierce effort to ground the expressions of
his art'in the only area seemingly left it: the flux of his solip-
sistic consciousness. Poems like "Leaving the Atocha Station" and
"Europe" are attempts to circumvent the curse of mediacy altogether by
the daringly simple exercise of communing with, err naming, only them
selves and the vagaries of their randomness as they are created.
Thus, "Atocha" determinedly blocks all attempts to fit its particulars
within any kind of hierarchy, syntactic or semantic. Thus, "Europe"
is not so much written as whimsically collected from snippets of
44
American magazines, odds and ends of children s books.
Poetry, in the characteristic poems of The Tennis Court Oath,
has given up its very reason for being, for it succeeds finally in
erecting a wall between itself and any attempt to understand it,
262
a wall composed of the many ob.jets trouve of the poet's willfully
dispersed and dispersing consciousness. As Paul Carroll, who professes
to enjoy "Atocha," has noticed, Ashbery is not even a successful
Dadaist or Surrealist, for the poems are too calculated, they are
45
"too studied," to capture the distinguishing wit or surprise of
a rambunctious Surrealist dream. Carroll goes on to celebrate the
46
"final freedom" of our reading of "Atocha" (while insisting some
what paradoxically that "Atocha" "isn't a poem which means anything
47
or nothing" ). Perhaps we can better use his observation to secure
for Ashbery an escape out of the frenzied Many, and back into that
world which, since the disaster of The Tennis Court Oath, has been
his unflagging object of attention: the world of our humanness,
of the flux of our lives, our tales together. For the final lesson
of Ashbery's neo-Surrealistic rambling, of his determined frolicking
in the randomness of the Many, is that it too is compromised by a
mediacy of its own, it too, like all expression, is calculated and
strategic, caught within a prison of its own device. A simple
point to make, of course, yet the direction of Ashbery's aesthetics
forced him _to need to find it out for himself— and to find out its
corollary wisdom as well. From the fearful but necessary disaster
of The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery learned that all our human knowing
and naming is a telling, and that this telling is a telling together
whose genesis in the ineluctably mediated ground of our sharings as
48
symbol-using animals cannot and need not ever be denied.
And thus we move from the impasse of the elliptical in Ashbery's
263
work to the liberation of the proverbial. From Rivers and Mountains
through As We Know, this proverbial strain has come to occupy a
position at the center of Ashbery’s vision, as the poet, in his strange
and quietly revolutionary way, has discarded the conventions of
anguished, solitary Romantic posturing to speak to us as a man among
men, to remind us, as "Litany” says:
How big and forceful some of our ideas can be—
Not giants or titans, but strong, firm
Human beings with a . good sense of humor
And a grasp of a certain level of reality that
Is going to be enough... (AWK, p. 36)
Thus, we are given a determinedly modest epistemology— an
epistemology that is determined to obliterate itself, actually.
The point in this passage is not to pin down what "level of reality"
we "grasp" in any given situation; Ashbery, with his disdain for the
easy answers of dialectic, will not slice things up for us precisely
because whatever is there is "going to be enough." "The Wrong Kind of
Insurance," in Houseboat Days, might be said to provide the paradigm
for all of Ashbery’s mature work:
We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many
different things,
Too many to make sense to anybody.
We straggle on as quotients, hard-to-combine
Ingredients, and what contiues
Does so with our participation and consent. (p. 50)
With cunning honesty, Ashbery’s mature poetics begin with loss,
with a rejection of the dream of essence, of dialectic, of synecdoche,
"I wish to keep my differences,"- Ashbery says in "Litany" (AWK, p. 3),
and, .unlike Ammons, who constantly tells us this but just as constantly
264
forces his "differences" into the tidy hierarchies of his Coleridgean
dialectic, Ashbery remains insistent upon providing us what he calls
"a ride in common variety" (AWK, p. 107). If the mistake of The
Tennis Court Oath was to deliver a journey through a distinctly
barren and impenetrable private "variety," the mark of Ashbery's
mature mode is to render his vision open to our "participation and
consent" by granting from the start, as a loss that we all share—
a "common" loss— the mediacy of our tales. Ashbery's insistence
that we are a conversation— "We are all talkers / It is true," says
"Soonest Mended" (DDS, p. 18)— before we are a knowing, and that our
knowing is thus a telling, should remind us of thinkers as different
as Heidegger and Kenneth Burke, both of whom feature as their primary
mission a quest to move beyond what Burke would call "scientistic"
49
modes of perception. For Heidegger, this quest involves a radical
re-definition of the Heraclitean Logos as a gathering, not an
essence.^ Ashbery's ground of verbal being likewise is a gathering
beyond conventional dualisms, although we may note here as well a
crucial distinction from the Heideggerian metaphysics in that
Heidegger finally claims ontological status for his Logos as gather
ing— hence, the Derridean critique"^— while Ashbery's strategy: of
loss dictates that he will not make a truth-claim even for the
cosmogony that the crafted flux of his poems seems to presuppose.
For Ashbery, it is important only that, as "Litany" puts it,
"...the tales / Live now, and we live as part of them / Caring for
them and for ourselves, warm at last" (AWK, p. 37).
265
Ashbery's strategy of loss gives us the absences of his poetry,
the subdued, often melancholy tone, the empty horizons and empty
afternoons, the broad expanses which are his characteristic images,
the "interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling" where, as
"Saying It To Keep It from Happening" reminds us, "we live" (HD,
p. 29). To forsake the dream of essence means to forsake the hope
of ever naming anything exactly. Thus, Ashbery does not deliver
peaks of synecdochal Romantic knowing, where an ecstatic or gnomic
naming of the One— whether Bloomian or Coleridgean— is sought.
Such an inspiration by design is not even there in Ashbery's work.
And, similarly, a quest to name the Many is discarded, because such
a species of "scientistic" knowing is also for Ashbery spurious and
unwarranted— an irrelevant and finally oppresssive abstraction from
the flux of mind-in—the-world. The poetry of A.R. Ammons, of course,
is full of just this kind of knowledge, of detailed and precise obser
vation of the streaks on the postmodern tulip:
the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change:
a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals
and ate
to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,
picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy
turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits: (CP, p. 149)
In such a poetry, a solitary 'I' walks, observes and renders the
processes of nature, then draws from the inspirited life around him
a lesson, in Ammons' case usually obtrusively dialectical; the scene
266
here, we are told, is evidence of "an order held / in constant
change" (CP, p. 150).
Ashbery's mode of loss, on the other hand, leaves us with neither
this discrete a knowable nature nor this defined a separate knower.
Such distinctions have no place within what Ashbery calls the "greater
52
naturalism", of his poetry, a quixotic naturalism based on the
mature poet's fundamental premise "that we are somehow all aspects
of a consciousness giving rise to the poem." The remarkable diffidence
of the begging of epistemological questions here— "somehow"— should
not be overlooked. The point is not really that Ashbery 'disagrees
with' the dualisms which would create a gulf between subject and
object in all our knowing and our being. T\fhat the strategies of his
poetry tell us is that he does not even care to be exercised by such
quandaries— or, rather, that these conundrums of knowing, by now grown
conventional through over-use, will figure in his poetry only insofar
as they too are part of the "tales" we live in. "I guess I don't
have a very strong sense of my own identity," Ashbery observes while
53
explaining the "polyphony" of pronouns in his characteristic poetry,
and our wonder at the sweeping unpretentiousness of his pronouncements
is exceeded only by surprise that the strategies of his poems actually
do seek to realize such a modesty beyond the ken of the Romantic mind.
Here is a poem, and, I think, a representative one, from Ashbery's
recent volume, As We Know:
267
THE WINE
It keeps a large supply of personal pronouns
On hand. They awaken to see
Themselves being used as it grows up,
Confused, in a rush of fluidity.
Once men came back here to rot.
Now the salt banners only interrupt the sky—
Black crystals, quartzite. The balm of not
Knowing living filters to the bottom of each eye.
The telephone was involved in it. And bored
Glances, boring questions about the hem no
One wanted to look at, or would admit having seen.
These things came back after it was a place to go.
Yet nothing was its essence. The core
Remained as elusive as ever. Until the day you
Fitted the unlikely halves together, and they clicked.
So its wholeness was an order. But it had seemed not to
Be part of the original blueprint, the way
It had appeared in intermittent dreams, stretching
Over several nights, like that. But that was okay,
Providing the noise factor didn’t suddenly loom
Too large, as was precisely happening just now.
Where have I seen that face before? And I see
Just what it means to itself, and how it came
Down to me. And so, in like manner, it came to be. (p. 100)
We need first to note that this poem makes sense in ways that
"Leaving the Atocha Station" does not; in Ammons’ rather too tidy
terms, there ia a "unity" here. While the strategies of the poem
obviously do not make it available as a synecdochal Romantic whole
or a quest, nonetheless we are not barred from a "participation" in
the world of "The Wine." How so? Ashbery, the determined begger
of epistemological questions, might very well take as the origin of
his art a cryptic remark of the later Wittgenstein: "What has to be
268
accepted, the given, is— so one could say— forms of life."~^
Poems like "The Wine" are accessible to us because Ashbery bases his
explorations of the flux of consciousness firmly on the "forms of life"
in which consciousness comes to us, already mediated. The poet's own
typically laconic characterization of his mature art aptly summarizes
the presuppositions governing this curious conjoining: "In the last
few years, I have been attempting to keep meaningfulness up to the
pace of randomness . . . but I really think that meaningfulness can't
get along without randomness and that they somehow have to be brought
55
together."
Randomness in "The Wine," as always in Ashbery, is realized
through the flux of personal pronouns, often indeterminate, through
the strange shifts in narrative logic, through the bizarre juxta
positions of semantic counters, of images. This last and very
important point first: we notice that there is not a difference in
kind between the semantic field of "Leaving the Atocha Station" and that
of "The Wine." The images still do not refer to a stable and discrete
otherness beyond the poem, they still bounce crazily off each other.
But, whereas "Atocha" had foregrounded the very disjunctiveness of
the semantic field by thwarting our attempts to place the phrases
of the poem in any syntactic frame, "The Wine," assuming as a form
of life the authority of a reasonable and eminently coherent syntax,
allows us to^ feel we are making sense of the various scenes, images,
and gestures we encounter, and thereby permits us to participate in
the "tale" of the poem, although, of course, we may never be entirely
269
certain what the tale is about. The forms of "The Wine," as in
most of the later Ashbery's poetry, are conventional: six quatrains,
a loose decasyllabic line, a relentlessly ordinary syntax. The quiet,
unflamboyant forms the poem comes in to serve to convince us, as a
matter of calculated effect, that although "we know we can never
be anything but parallel / And proximate in our relations" (AWK,
p. 117), nonetheless we are justified in granting as a basis for the
poet's vision his hope, from "The One Thing That Can Save America,"
that he may tell us of "the quirky things that happen to me.../ And you
instantly know what I mean" (SP, p. 45).
Increasingly in Ashbery's work, as he has learned to exploit
the tactical weapons released by his fundamental refusal to attempt
a naming of the perceptual other, he has chosen an all-purpose pro
noun as a sort of shorthand representation for the "quirky things" and
the flux of his tales: "it." The uniquitous "its" of Ashbery's poetry
crystallize the basic concerns of his vision in the proverbial mode
in as telling a way as the colon points to the center of Ammons.
An indeterminate "it" is an implied argument against the tyranny of
lyric description, against the epistemological arrogance that the quest
for a conventional exactitude of lyric observation presupposes.
Of course, Ashbery is interested in, and has a great facility for,
delivering stock descriptions of scenes, but the interest is in the
telling as a tale, not as a knowing, and the facility derives from
a remarkable ear for the forms and the formulas of the convention-
bound tales of our culture. At the core of the elusive narratives
270
and the disjointed, opaque arguments of Ashbery's mature poetry
remains an "it" which, as "Litany" tells us, "emerges as a firm /
Enigma, burnished, filled in" (AWK, p. 15). Since such an "it"
deliberately exists without a referent, "it" might be said to stand
at that place in Ashbery's vision where randomness and meaningfulness
meet. The details in which we see "it" manifest itself in any given
poem are all metaphoric machinations for saying what is unsayable—
unsayable not because transcendent, but because immanent and ongoing
through multifoliate particulars. The naming of this flux, of this
"doing" which, in the words of "As We Know," involves "the whole
fabric" (AWK, p. 74), must be indefinite, must itself represent a
turning away from essence, because the implicit recognition is that
any attempt to say "it," to give expression to the ongoingness of
things, necessarily is inadequate— -at worst, as the title of one of
Ashbery's canniest poems puts "it," a "Saying It To Keep It from
Happening."
And so, in "The Wine," we begin with an "it" that is enigmatic
indeed. Ashbery has said that we should treat his bizarre titles' as
56
ways "into the poem," so perhaps the "it" moving through this first
stanza with a "rush of fluidity" has a Bacchanalian cast. But such
a "literal" way in will not get us far. Certainly the "it" provides
a tongue-in-cheek description of Ashbery's own method, which unchari
table critics often have called "confused"— too rushed a "fluidity."
Fittingly tentative speculations, for the second stanza changes the
scene of the poem entirely: "Once men came back here to rot."
271
Where is "here"? Customarily, writers feel obligated to ground a
scene in noun-substantives before hazarding a "here." Not so with
Ashbery. The origin and the place of "here" remain mysterious,
although we do receive an imagistic sketch: surrealistic "salt
banners," a typically empty sky, some unexplained and unexplainable
rock formations. The humor of the first stanza has taken a dark turn
indeed, into something quite like a lunar waste land. And we should
note that, just as the first sentence of the first stanza set the
scene for "it" with a stock phrase from the economic life of our
culture with its large supplies always on hand, so the second stanza
too is catalyzed by a cliche, this a formula from melodramatic fiction,
or perhaps from bad films. "Once" men did this— a "once" which sets
up an expectation, almost a stock response in itself, of a "now" that
will be different. Ashbery's mature poetry is full of such cliches,
such stock phrases, such readily recognizable patterns of discourse.
They are forms of life in which consciousness comes to us, to all
of us, and Ashberyfs use of them, his probing of them, his purposeful
dissolving of them one into the other, constitutes an integral
part of his poetic, of his attempt to give us that "living, vibrant
turntable" of tantalizingly unspecified but somehow common "events"
that "Litany" sees as the mark of good art (AWK, p. 36). The scene
in the second stanza is unspecified not because its details are sloppy,
but because we do not know the context of "here." The scene is common
because it has been elucidated in terms of a stock pattern of res
ponse— and the culmination of the pattern is in the peculiarly content-
272
less moral observation appended to it: "The balm of not / Knowing
living filters to the bottom of each eye."
Stanza three attempts a clarification, and in the process
returns us to "it." Is "it" the same "it" of the first stanza?
The nature of "it" in Ashbery*s poetry should tell us that the
question is irrelevant. Since "it" is the sign of the spot where
randomness and meaningfulness meet, the meaningfulness is itself not
referential in intent but, rather, is derived from the forms of life
amid the flux of the poem. We do know here that boredom has set in,
that it has done so "after it was a place to go." But we do not know,
and do not need to know, what the "it" is.
The fourth stanza, with as bold a proposition on the character
istic divagations of Ashbery*s art as we will ever see, informs us
of the requisite manner of our not-knowing. Like .many of Ashbery*s
propositions, this one begins with a coordinating conjunction that
implies a logical continuity not discursively merited by the poem.
"Yet" is an argumentative gambit; it tells us that a differentiation
is about to be established, a distinction made vis-a-vis a previously
established proposition. But what is the previous proposition?
Ashbery has likened the movement of his poems to that of an argument
57
"suddenly derailed" and "opaque." Sometimes, as in "Saying It To
Keep It from Happening" and "Blue Sonata," the argument is conducted
as a sustained exercise in the propositions of a foregrounded "it."
Here in "The Wine" the "it" is more elusive, more inviting in its
opacity. Ashbery's "yet" seeks to assert, apparently, that the
273
clarifications of the previous stanza: — the telephone's involvement,
the boring questions about the "hem"— were unsatisfactory, not because
they did not arrive at the "essence" of the matter, but because the
"essence" of the matter was not there to be arrived at. "The core
remained as elusive as ever," we are wisely told, and there is a
sort of serene power in that summation, although we do not, of
course, know what the "core" is a "core" of.
Ashbery's poems since The Tennis Court Oath tend to arrive at
wisdom of this kind, they tend to settle into domestic aphorism and
- proverbial knowing as forms of life that are available in a world
where "we are somehow all aspects of a consciousness giving rise
to the poem." Presenting proverbial wisdom is a way of affirming
"as we know"; it is a way, as Kenneth Burke has said, of naming
58
"situations" that are "typical and recurrent" amid a group of men.
But, of course, by virtue of their participation within the crafted
flux of his poems, Ashbery's proverbs are shorn of their referential
substance. The situations that they name are left unspecified, so
that, while we are comforted in some way by the gravity of their
knowing, we do not really know ourselves what that knowing is about.
And so we are left, at this culmination of Ashbery's mature art,
with the appeal, indeed the solace, of proverbs as epideictic
gestures, as central among our many gestures together that "have taken
us farther into the day / Than tomorrow will understand" (HD, p. 35).
And, as "All Kinds of Caresses" goes on to tell us, the central power
of such gestures as forms of life, as ways we have lived, is that
274
they, come finally to be the given— they come, from our having lived
them so often, to "live us."
The rest of "The Wine" crafts gestures upon the proverbial
knowing of "wholeness" as "an order," one which is unsatisfactory
and yet "okay" at the same time, so long as the conditions which,
it seems, do obtain, don't. Ashbery's rehearsal of paradoxes would
be exasperating if it were not for the calming effect of his reasoned
and regular syntax, the appeal of the first and only turning in the
poem to an unspecified "you," the very ordinariness of the language—
"blueprint," "noise factor," "loom...large"— as it moves amid the
forms of our culture. "Where have I seen that face before?"
is another stock phrase, a counter for bewilderment on the edge of
mystery, and it seems that the issue of our knowing returns us to
the confusions of "fluidity." But the poem swerves again, it
saves itself— or, rather, it returns us to the effect of what we
know, and by now we know the comfort of the gesture of that knowing:
"And so, in like manner, it came to be." That is, in a "manner"
like its meaning "to itself" "it" "came to be" "it"— and we have
now come to see that this "it" continues, as the forms of Ashbery's
poems serve to tell us, with our"participation and consent."
Thus, Ashbery's poetics predicated upon loss, upon the only
apparent truth that, as "Late Echo" puts it, "there really is nothing
left to write about" (AWK, p. 88), succeed finally in delivering
what the poet, perhaps quixotically, calls "love." "It is necessary,"
"Late Echo" amends, "to write about the same old things / In the
275
same way" for "love to continue and be gradually different." This
"love"inheres in our participation together in the tales of our lives,
as those tales live, and as "we live as part of them / Caring for
them and for ourselves, warm at last." With the boldness of his
sweeping strategic modesty, Ashbery returns us, and returns our
poetry, to that ground where we all have our lives, to the situations
and the "forms of life" of our acting together in irreducible
difficulty, to the talk on talk which, as Kenneth Burke has affirmed,
59
is the most real and the most realistic knowing that we have.
Ashbery's mature utterance, of course, is in a way too extreme, as
many of his critics have charged, too difficult a talking on amid
the accepted indeterminacies of time, language, and culture. But,
while acknowledging this extremity and conceding the very real
difficulty of Ashbery*s work, nonetheless we may use his poetry to
secure a perspective that will free us from the increasingly narrow
circle of critical perceptions advanced by Bloom’s map of revisionary
Romanticism as that map attempts to absorb modern and contemporary
poetry into its saga of the inexorable diminishings of the Romantic
vision.
For Bloom's reading of Ashbery, like his reading of Ammons,
manages to be both acute and selectively myopic at the same time.
Occasionally he shows himself profoundly aware of the drama of mediated
vision that'is crucial to Stevens and Ashbery, and to whatever common
ground they do possess:
276
For Ashbery, the privileged moments, like their
images, are on the dump, and he wants to purify
them by clearly placing them there. Say of what
you see in the dark, Stevens urges, that it is
this or that it is that, but do not use the rotted
names. Use the rotted names, Ashbery urges, but
cleanse them by seeing that you cannot be apart
from them, and are partly redeemed by consciously
suffering with them. (FC, p. 190)
Although we have Bloom's typical rhetoric of Romantic suffering
applied inappropriately to Ashbery here, his observations of the
dilemma of mediacy in the two poets, and on Ashbery's more radical
response to it, are incisive— and uncharacteristically free of
Oedipal jargon. Bloom similarly makes a nice distinction between
Stevens and Ashbery on the crucial question of transcendence when
in an analysis of a late stanza of "Fragment" he observes that
Ashbery, "in his moment most akin" to the "sublime self-revelation"
of Stevens' "I have not but I am and as I am, I am," does not affirm
"the Emersonian-Whitmanian Transcendental Self, as Stevens most
certainly (and heroically) does, but rather 'the secret of what goes
on'" (FG, p. 200). While we may quarrel in this case with the too-
quick absorption of Stevens into the Transcendental agon, we must
admire as well the acuity of Bloom's description of Ashbery's muted
affirmativeness, a description which could take us to the heart of
Ashbery's celebration of the ongoingness of the world.
And yet, having made observations as penetrating as these,
Bloom does not and indeed cannot go beyond them to assess their
implications for his intensely self-conscious and solipsistic
Romanticism. Just as the circular logic of his map for misreading has
277
compelled him to ignore the strained, hackneyed, and unintentional
conventionality that mars so much of Ammons’ avidly Romantic verse,
so Bloom must ignore in Ashbery's-profound and witty manipulation of
the conventions of our tales together the final lesson that such an
enterprise has to offer him about the "ends" of his own Romantic
vision. "Yet nothing was its essence," Ashbery says, which is to
say that since "essence," or Ammons’ "Overall," is describable only
in terms of the language of things, it is thus, in effect, abolished
as "essence," for we know— and can be content with— only what our
ineluctably mediated tales tell us. Ashbery's mature art is character
ized, then, by the expansiveness of its voyaging through a flux of
epideictic gestures, a voyaging whose ethical center finally is that:
. . . we are ordinary people
With not unreasonable desires which we can satisfy
From time to time without causing cataclysms
That keep getting louder and more forceful instead of dying
away. (AWK, p. 109)
Bloom, whose own ethical center is based on the darkly Romantic
principle that "only the agon is of the essence" (DC, p. 5), will
neither recognize nor long abide in a world where "ordinary people"
meet the exigencies of their making "without causing" those cata
clysmic breakings which, for the belated Romantic prophet, constitute
the proper influx of redemptive vision. The "restitution of narcissism"
that is the beginning and the end of Bloom's solipsistic critical
mission inevitably entails a refusal to examine the social shapings
of language as they in turn shape the language-bound world of the
poet’ b making. Such a refusal is perhaps too high a price to pay for
278
the indubitable "strength" that accompanies "unreasonable" Romantic
"desires." Harold Bloom's mapping of the poems at the end of the
Romantic mind is itself a highly self-conscious emblem of that mind
in an extremity of its own making. If Bloom's quest to save A.R.
Ammons and John Ashbery from themselves and their time has any "use"
beyond that envisaged by the master mapmaker, it may be to remind
us that self-conscious cunning does not necessarily redeem solipsistic
extremity, even if that extremity is presented as the "misreading"
that the age demands.
279
Notes for Chapter Five
^ See "A New Look at Lit Crit," Newsweek, 22 June 1981,
pp. 80-83. Most of the article is devoted to the deconstructionist
side of the Yale School, with Jacques Derrida getting the lion's
share of attention. Bloom is called, not entirely accurately,
"a brilliant critic of American literature who eschews linguistic
argot" (p. 83).
2
For many of these charges against Bloom, see the Introduction.
Two other acute critiques of the Bloomian enterprise might be
mentioned here. For an intriguing discussion of Bloom's false
prophecy in his handling of the materials of Judaism, see
Cynthia Ozick, "Judaism & Harold Bloom" in Commentary, 67, No. 1
(Jan. 1979), 43-51. Ozick argues that Bloom is "engaged in the
erection of what can fairly be called an artistic anti-Judaism"
(p. 46) and sees his self-conscious prophecies about literary
history to be pernicious "idol-making" (p. 47). For a valuable
discussion of Bloom's intensely patriarchal conception of literary
history, see Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 46-53.
Acknowledging that Bloom's model might seem "offensively sexist
to some feminist critics" (p. 47), Gilbert and Gubar nonetheless
maintain that it is precisely Bloom's courage in recognizing and
formulating a psychology of the essentially male structures of our
Western literary experience that makes him so important to theorists
in the new field of literary psychohistory.
3
Bloom's use of Nietzschean insights on the nature of reading
and interpretation is best seen as part of his dialogue with de Man,
which will be discussed in Chap. 6. In general, Nietzsche for
Bloom is a "prophet of the antithetical” (AI, p. 8) and a great
philosopher of "revisionism," although Nietzsche, like Emerson
and Blake, apparently suffered little from the anxiety of influence
himself.
^ See "Terministic Screens," in Proceedings of the American
Catholic Philosophical Association (Washington D.C.: Catholic
University of America, 1965), pp. 87-102; rpt. in Burke's Language
as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 44-62. In
this important essay, Burke analyzes the mechanisms whereby any
terminology that we use will condition the knowledge gained through
using it: "Even if any given terminology is a reflection of a
reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection
of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection
of reality" (p. 45). Of course, a similar point has been made often
280
in the philosophy of science and mathematics in this century, as well
as in the hermeneutics of reading; Burke's particular relevance to
Bloom is that he presents a philosophy of rhetoric, and one, further
more, that Bloom has found to be of "use."
The following abbreviations of the Ammons volumes from which
I quote in this chapter will be used:
CP Collected Poems, 1951-1971 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972).
SP The Snow Poems (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977).
Sphere Sphere: The Form of a Motion (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,
1974).
g
The observation by Stevens to which Bloom alludes is this: "It
is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem." See
"Adagia," in Stevens' Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, ed. Samuel
French Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 165. Ashbery's
"completion" of Stevens is "antithetical" apparently in that, according
to Bloom, Ashbery would delete the "not" from Stevens' pronouncement.
^ The following abbreviations of the Ashbery volumes from which I
quote in this chapter will be used:
AWK As We Know (New York: Viking Press, 1979).
DDS The Double Dream of Spring (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970;
rpt. New York: The Ecco Press, 1976).
HD Houseboat Days (New York: Viking Press, 1977).
SP Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Viking Press, 1975).
TCO The Tennis Court Oath (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press,
1962).
8
See James Benziger, rev. of The Visionary Company, Criticism, 5
(1963), 185-88.
g
My phrasing intentionally echoes the title of Ammons' "Extremes
and Moderations" (CP, p. 328). This long poem is one of Ammons' more
interesting forays as poet/philosopher, though the plea expressed in it
for a fruitful union of the moderate with the extreme is compromised by
Ammons' typical inability to conceive of the ethical dimension of socie-r-
tal relations in any terms other than the dialectical ones he uses to
describe natural phenomena.
^ Hartman, "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness," Centennial
Review of Arts and Science, 6 (1962), 564; rpt. in Beyond Formalism,
p. 309.
^ See Howard's essay, "A.R. Ammons: 'The Spent Seer Consigns
Order to the Vehicle of Change,'" in Alone with America: Essays on
the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (1969, rev. ed. New
York: Atheneum, 1980), pp. 1-26. It should be noted that the
appreciation of Ammons published in the first edition of Howard's
book in 1969 antedates Bloom's earliest essay on Ammons by a year.
281
Diacritics, 3, No. 4 (Winter 1973) features essays on Ammons*
by Josephine Jacobsen, David Kalstone, Jerome Mazzaro, Josephine
Miles, Linda Orr, and Patricia A. Parker, as well as an interview
with Ammons by David Gros'svogel. i
13
See Hyatt H. Waggoner, "The Poetry of A.R. Ammons: Some
Notes and Reflections," Salmagundi, Nos. 22-23 (1973), pp. 285-93.
^ Alicia Ostriker, "Drought and Flood," rev. of Sphere,
Partisan Review, 47 (1980), 153-61. For Donoghue’s reading of
Ammons, see "Ammons and the Lesser Celandine," Parnassus, 3, No. 2
(Spring-Summer 1975), 19-26.
^ See A.R. Ammons, "A Poem Is a Walk," Epoch, 18 (1968),
114-19.
16
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl
Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71), 2
(1956), 810.
^ Derrida's deconstruction of the "transcendental signified"
is best sumamrized in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse
of the Human Sciences," which appears in Derrida's Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1978), pp. 278-93, and, somewhat altered and with an accompanying
colloquium, in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man:
The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 247-72. For the basis
of Derrida's deconstruction of the "transcendental signified,"
see his discussion of Saussure's conception of the arbitrary nature
of the linguistic sign in Part 1 of Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1977), pp. 3-93.
18
For a trenchant attack on Coleridge's lust for the absolute,
see Walter Pater's "Coleridge," in Appreciations, vol. 5 (1901)
of The Works of Walter Pater, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co..
1900-22), 65-104. The essay itself was composed in the mid 1860's.
19
Quoted in Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies
in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1970), p. 174. Burke has taken this Coleridgean
observation from Table Talk (May 1, 1830).
20
See The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 152.
21
Bloom's objection to such synecdoche is that it usually
gets individuated in poetry as metaphor, as a figuration which
takes us only to the limitations of perspectivist dualisms and
inside-outside imagery. See the discussion in Chap. 3 of Bloom's
conception of askesis and metaphor.
282
22
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The States Man's Manual (London,
1316), p. 230.
23
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen
Coburn, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1957- ), 2 (1961),
entry # 2445. 17.19.
2 A
I am quoting from the famous Coleridgean description of
the poet as bringing "the whole soul of man into activity" through
"that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively
appropriated the name of imagination." See Chap. 14 of the
Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (New York: E.P. Dutton
and Co., 1971), p. 174.
25
See Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1 (1956),
625-26.
26
This "miraculism" is behind much of Krieger's rigbrous
reworking of Coleridgean poetics. See especially his Theory of
Criticism: A Tradition and Its System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1976), which strikes me as a culmination of his work.
See also "Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading of Litera
ture," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S.
Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 211-42.
27
David Grossvogel, "Interview / A.R. Ammons," Diacritics
(Winter 1973), p. 52.
28
In his discussion of Ammons' "The Wide Land," Bloom
typically sees the wind as an "emblem of the composite precursor,"
Emerson and Whitman (FC, p. 213). More interestingly, in his
treatment of Hibernaculum, Bloom defines the wind in all of Ammons’
work as "a metonymy for the lean word, then for the empty word"
(FC, p. 224)— a figure which undoes the traditional Romantic
identification of the wind with fullness of spirit.
29
See The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 261-62.
30
See Alan Holder's book-length study— the only one on
Ammons thus far— called A.R. Ammons (Boston: Twayne, 1978),
pp. 106 and 161. Linda Orr's essay "The Cosmic Backyard of
A.R. Ammons," in Diacritics (Winter 1973), 3-12, is valuable on
Ammons' stylistic devices.
^ Miller, p. 1.
283
32
Ibid., p. 3 .
33
Ibid., p. 8.
3^
See A.R. Ammons, "Note of Intent," Chelsea Review, Nos. 20-
21 (1967), pp. 3-4.
35
Again, see Chap. 1 of Miller's Poets of Reality, especially
pp. 4-5. For another enticing analysis of the implicit "scientism"
of Romanticism, we may turn to Kenneth Burke's discussion of the
theories of linguistic fictions advanced by Jeremy Bentham and
Emerson. Burke's argument is most pointed in his essay, "I, Eye,
Ay— Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on 'Nature' and the Machinery
of Transcendence," Sewanee Review, 74 (1966), 87-95; rpt. in
Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 186-200.
36
My phrasing is meant to remind of the nature of my use of
Coleridge, which is to highlight certain features of his theorizing
that Ammons has said he admires and that obviously are crucial to
Ammons' own poetic practice. Coleridge is as elusive a thinker as
Romanticism has produced; I am aware that there is much more to his
thinking on the imagination and poetic creation than I have presented.
Even on the matter of Coleridge's "constitutional malady" for recon
ciling opposites (to use the apt phrase of one of his earliest
scholars, Alice D. Snyder), there is room for considerable disagree
ment. Angus Fletcher, for instance, in his '"Positive Negation’:
Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge," sees
Coleridge's habitual- recourse to logic and "method" as a defense
against an even greater propensity for engaging the fearful dynamics
of the diachronic imagination.
37
Auden's Foreword to Some Trees, Yale Series of1.
Younger Poets, 52 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 11-16,
has not been reprinted in subsequent editions of Some Trees from
Corinth Books in 1970 and The Ecco Press in 1978.
38
The phrase is taken from Ernst Cassirer's discussion of
the defects of Max Muller's dualistic approach to mythical thinking.
See Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover,
1946), p. 7.
39
Bloom notes that "Ashbery necessarily began in a world emptied
of magical images and acts" (FC, p. 170); he also observes, while
discussing Three Poems, that Ashbery "backs away from" the "sudden
glory" of the "privileged moment" at the center of Romantic tradition
(FC, pp. 205-06). But, of course, since "we can surmise" that this
backing off is done "for defensive reasons, involving both the
anxiety of influence and more primordial Oedipal anxieties" (FC,
p. 206), the lineaments of Ashbery's visionary quest for unity of
being are still somehow intact.
284
See Perloff's '"Mysteries of Construction': The Dream Songs
of John Ashbery," in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), p. 266. Ashbery's
comment is quoted by Perloff in her "'Transparent Selves': The
Poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara," The Yearbook of English
Studies, Modern Humanities Research Association, 8 (1978), 171-96.
^ Ashbery, "The Impossible," Poetry, 90 (1957), 252.
^ Bloom, "Viewpoint," Times Literary Supplement, 30 May 1980,
p. 611.
A3
See Charles Altieri, "Motives in Metaphor: John Ashbery
and the Modernist Long Poem," Genre, 11 (1978), 653-87. This is
one of the most important pieces on contemporary poetics yet written.
44
For information on the composition of "Europe," see Perloff,
The Poetics of Indeterminacy, pp. 268-69.
See Paul Carroll, "If Only He Had Left from Finland Station,"
in The Poem in Its Skin (Chicago: Follett, 1968), pp. 6-26.
46
Ibid., p. 22.
^ Ibid., p. 20.
^ My phrasing alludes to Kenneth Burke's famous "definition of
man" as "the symbol-using animal." See "Definition of Man,"
Hudson Review, 16 (1963-64), 491-514; rpt. in Language as Symbolic
Action, pp. 3-24. Like Burke, Ashbery "defines" man in a
"dramatistic" fashion that deliberately begs epistemological questions
in order to explore more fully the suasions of our being-within-cul-
ture. Unlike Burke, whose later work has come to be preoccupied with
those consummations of dialectical symbolicity that deliver what
he calls the "god-terms" of literature and culture, Ashbery does not
finally seek a controlling perspective amid the plethora of symbolic
forms through which man lives.
49
No specific work need be cited here; the entirety of Burke's
career as rhetorician, critic, and philosopher of ethics has been
built upon his "dramatistic" battle with "scientistic," or knowledge-
oriented, modes of perception.
See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans.
Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 126-35.
Heidegger, of course, preoccupies Derrida. For a particularly
pointed critique of Heideggerian "Being," and for Derrida's replace
ment of that ontic term with his own deconstructing "trace," see
"Difference," in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison
(Evanstop, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 129-60.
285
52
See Janet Bloom and Robert Losada, "Craft Interview with
John Ashbery," New York Quarterly, No. 9 (1972), p. 25.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd. ed.,
trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (1953; rpt. New York: Macmillan Co., 1968),
p. 226.
55
Bloom and Losada, "Craft Interview with John Ashbery," p. 22.
56 Ibid., p. 12.
^ Louis A. Osti, "The Craft of John Ashbery: An Interview,"
Confrontation, No. 9 (1974), p. 89.
58
See Kenneth Burke, "Literature as Equipment for Living,"
Direction, No. 1 (April 1938), p. 11; rpt. in his The Philosophy
of Literary Form, 3rd. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press,
1941; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 297.
59
Burke himself strategically skirts epistemological traps m
A Grammar of Motives by calling his Pentadistic terms and ratios
"necessary 'forms of talk about experience’"— not '"forms of
experience'" themselves (p. 317). In A Rhetoric of Motives (New
York: Prentice-Hall, 1950; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1969), he then presents a theory of rhetoric and reality which
features the "attitudinal and hortatory" motives of "symbolic action"
rather than reductive "scientistic" perspectives on human behavior.
Rhetoric, Burke says in a passage central to his whole project, "is
rooted in an essential function of language itself, function that
is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language
as ja means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond
to symbols" (p. 43).
286
CHAPTER SIX: HUMANISM IN THE EXTREME:
THE PREDICAMENT OF ROMANTIC REDEMPTION
Harold Bloom's theories of vision and the anxiety of influence
have proved to be powerful precisely because they have embodied so
resourcefully many of the passionate concerns of readers of poetry
in what Bloom sees as our fragmented and faithless age. If Bloom's
early works countered the authoritarian and classical orthodoxies
of the waning era of Eliot with a conception of poetry and a version
of poetic history that featured the majesty of the autonomous
Romantic imagination transcending the dull recalcitrance of nature,
language, and society, then the many volumes of his mature phase
have expanded upon that earlier visionary Romanticism in order to
secure the ground of poetry from the encroachments of even more
powerful adversaries who would seek, in Bloom's view, to abolish
the authority of poetic vision altogether. In order fully to assess
the significance and the appeal of Bloom's critical project in the
seventies, we must see it in conjunction with those other theories of
poetic history and poetic creation that have seemed most pointedly
to threaten it. Rather arbitrarily, we might designate as especially
salient Bloomian adversaries two critics, Hugh Kenner and Paul de Man,
who are completely different in temperament, approach, philosophy,
and aims, and in the nature of the critical relation they have to
287
Bloom. Kenner, the author of The Pound Era, A Homemade World,
and a host of other books elucidating a tenaciously Modernist
literary vision, presents a canon of modern literature and a corollary
method for reading radically opposed to Bloom's. De Man, a central
rhetorician of deconstruction and, unlike Kenner, a friend and a
colleague of Bloom, provides a commentary, at times explicit and
at other times implied, upon the logic and the methods of Bloom's
own rhetoric of Romantic agon. In the previous chapter we have seen
the price that Bloom's intense Romanticism pays for its neglect
of the social and conventional side of poetic vision in two important
contemporary poets; now, through an examination of his relation to
two key contemporaries in criticism, we should be able to judge the
full depth of Bloom's enduring commitment to a revision in the
awareness of poetry in our time.
The last twenty to thirty years have been marked by a plethora
of competing conceptions of literary history, none of them quite
achieving the ascendancy or the notoriety of Bloom's canonizing
project. With the demise of the New Critical hegemony in the fifties
there came, too, a loss of any single critical authority or body of
principles and precepts upon which to base evaluations of literary
texts. While Bloom's critical father, Northrop Frye, did attempt to
systematize the permanent forms of the literary imagination in his
Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, the system itself showed little interest
in the process of canonization and pronounced an active distaste for
288
critical polemics of any kind. Certainly part of the reason for
Bloom's rise to critical fortune within the turbulent field of
Romantic and modern poetics has been his extraordinary eagerness to
offer a map of literary history that would move beyond the reticence
of Frye to redress the perspectivist confusions of reading in our
time. And yet, Bloom has had an adversary in the business of canon-
making over the last two decades, an opponent whose canon of great
moderns has established compelling claims for the continuing relevance
and power of that Modernist tradition which the aspiring age of
Romantic Myth generally has been inclined either to repudiate or to
banish to the dungeon of a distinctly malign neglect. Bloom's
revisionary Romanticism finds its polar antithesis in the Poundian
poetics of Hugh Kenner, a poetics, and an implied literary program,
that have fallen short of proper pre-eminence perhaps only because of
Kenner's deliberate eschewal of the sort of fervid and theoretically
charged systematizing that Bloom, on the other hand, willingly de
livers. Kenner's canon, based on the High Modernism of the Pound
Era, finally incorporates not only Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, and
the exemplary ghost of Flaubert, but also William Carlos Williams,
Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Olson among poets of more
recent reputation. The accompanying method for reading advanced by
Kenner tends to treat poetic language on the model of Williams' famous
prescription for the poem as a "machine made out of words"'*'— or,
in Kenner's updated Olsonian metaphors, as a "field of action" or a
2
vector made out of various verbal energies. Predictably, Bloom
289
refers to Kenner as an "antiquarian" whose sole achievement resides
in having dogmatized the "gossip':' grown old of the Pound Era into the
"myth" of a chimerical Modernism (MM, p. 28). And indeed, nothing
could be further removed from Bloomian "misreading" or Bloomian
literary history than Kenner's "homemade world" of verbal quiddities
wedded to what might be called American poetic "know-how" under the
general instruction of the cranky American pedagogue Pound. Yet it is
exactly because the two theories are so divergent that we can profit
from a comparison of them to characterize the spirit of Bloom's entire
rescue operation.
First, however, we might turn our attention to the challenge
offered Bloomian revisionism by Paul de Man, a challenge which, since
it is even deeper than Kenner's, should also be more revealing of the
directions of Bloom's critical prophecy. For while Kenner's
"philosophy" of poetry and method of reading are foreign enough to
Bloom that he seldom deigns to mention them except by way of momentary
imprecation, the nihilistic Nietzschean rhetoric of de Man is so
unsettlingly close to Bloom's own method for mastery through mis
reading that it has .induced in his mapping over the past decade a
profound shadow drama, a subtle lover's quarrel with the tempting
demystifications of the deconstructionist regimen that has spurred
the development of several of Bloom's most penetrating and contro
versial ideas. De Man is approached in Bloom's most recent volumes
with the "reverence" due an "advanced critical consciousness, the
most rigorous and scrupulous in the field today" (WS, p. 393),
290
because he furnishes Bloom a formidable critique of his key assumptions
about the nature of "error" in poetic language and in reading. At
the same time, however, de Man also serves as an illustration to
Bloom of the aridity and the baroque asceticism into which the
doctrine of "error" collapses if it is not secured by the final ground
of Romantic desire. Bloom’s attempt to work out his conflict with
de Man and to distance himself from deconstruction forces him to
clarify the implications of his own crisis-vision of poetics and
brings him finally to that apotheosis of his entire theory of rhetoric
and Romantic poetics that we have seen Wallace Stevens, with its
featured theory of the visionary crossing, to represent.
In an important review of The Anxiety of Influence appearing
in Comparative Literature in 1974, de Man made two suggestions that
were to be crucial to the development of Bloom's subsequent work.
First, he noted that the six revisionary ratios rather sketchily
presented by Bloom in the most elliptical of his books could easily
be seen to have "paradigmatic rhetorical structures" in the figures
3
and tropes of traditional'rhetoric. A Map of Misreading in 1975,
with its breakdown of the ratios into psychic, imagistic, and
tropological components, initiated th quest to chart these structures
and thereby to exploit the rich terminological resources of the
Aristotelian line of rhetorical criticism. Second, and even more
important, de Man, with his usual regard for the rhetoricity of
criticism, advanced the claim that Bloom's insight into the systematic
swervings of influence suffered from a blindness toward the status
291
of influence itself, which, in de Man's "more linguistic terminology,"
would have to be seen as "a metaphor that dramatizes a linguistic
structure into a diachronic narrative." For de Man, the real subject
of The Anxiety of Influence is not what Bloom himself intends to
feature, the mammoth tale of poetic battle in post—Enlightenment
poetry; rather, what the volume really concerns is "the difficulty
or, rather, the impossibility of reading and, by inference . . . the
indeterminacy of literary meaning." "We can forget about the
temporal scheme and about the pathos of the oedipal son," de Man
suggests; "underneath the drama stands a pretty tight linguistic
model that could be described in a very different tone and
terminology." The model then extrapolated by de Man from Bloom's
map of the six revisionary ratios eliminates the "naturalistic
language of desire; possession, and power" of Bloom, representing
as it does "a step backward" into "the constraints of natural
reference," and replaces the Oedipal drama of influence with a
deconstructionist rhetoric of necessary "patterns of error" that are
revealed to be "rooted in language rather than in the self."
De Man's handling of Bloom's subject-centered, intensely
psychologistic theory strongly reflects, of course, his own
theoretical ties to the continental tradition of post-structuralist
thought inspired by Sassurean diacritical linguistics and the
Nietzschean revolt against traditional metaphysics. The main ideas
of the deconstructionist movement led by the brilliant French
philosopher, Jacques Derrida, and including among its prominent
292
American adherents not only de Man but J. Hillis Miller, are by
now common currency within the literary establishment. The
deconstructionists seek primarily to subvert what they call the
traditional Western "logocentric" belief in the "metaphysics of
presence." From Nietzsche, they derive the notion that all of
man's values are ultimately groundless and illusory, all his
cultural codes arbitrary inventions in a world that he can never
really know. From Saussure, they appropriate a model with which
to explain the endless play of significations or free-floating
signifiers within man's language-systems when those systems are
deprived of the ultimate referent or "transcendental signified" that,
in traditional metaphysics, has always given them order and determinate
meaning. As presented by. Derrida in his important triad of studies,
Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena,
the deconstructionist critique of logocentrism focuses on a
dismantling of the Western privileging of speech over writing, a
"phonocentrism" which Derrida regards as an especially telling
example of the nostalgic.-, desire of Western man for the unmediated
4
presence or the absolute origins of the signified. Since such
moments of pure meaning, of meaning absolutely present to conscious
ness, can never be had, the Derridean decentering releases us to
a world of "free play," of the infinite wandering, or deferment, of
signification, for which Derrida coins the apt portmanteau term,
"differance." In literature, the world into which we are liberated
293
is one rid of the tyranny of determinate voice, presence, form,
or meaning, a world where the complete range of the significations
of the text may be given the full "play" that criticism character
istically has contrived to deny. Miller delivers a lucid summary
of this aspect of the deconstructive enterprise in his unraveling
of Wallace Stevens' "The Rock":
Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a
careful and circumspect entering of each textual
labyrinth. The critic feels his way from figure
to figure, from concept to concept, from mythical
motif to mythical motif, in a repetition which is
in no sense a parody. It employs:, nevertheless, the
subversive power present in even the most exact and
unironical doubling. The deconstructive critic seeks
to find, by this process of retracing, the element in
the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the
text in question which will unravel it all, or the
loose stone which will pull down the whole building.
The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground
on which the building stands by showing that the text
has already annihilated that ground, knowingly or un
knowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the
structure of a text but a demonstration that it has
already dismantled itself.5
Deconstruction thus works not as a destruction but as a demystified
recognition of what the text has already done to itself, if the
critic would only discard the comfortable but finally oppressive
fiction of determinate meaning. As de Man explains in Blindness
and Insight, "That sign and meaning can never coincide, is what is
precisely taken for granted in the kind of language we call literary.
Literature, unlike everyday language, begins on the far side of
this knowledge; it is the only form of language free from the fallacy
of unmediated expression."^ The deconstructive critic's major
294
task, then, Is to locate the "aporias," or negative moments, where
the text, "aware" of the abyss of its own fictionality, in effect
cancels itself out, and reveals the final paradoxes of truth and
falsehood inherent in the only absolute it can ever know: the
supreme fictions of its singifiers' "trace"-like dispersion.
Detractors have charged that the deconstructionist movement as
a whole represents little more than a particularly extreme and self-
serving stage in a history of Western philosophcial skepticism that
is almost as long as the history of the "metaphysics of presence"
that the movement intends to subvert. Citing Derrida against himself,
they argue that it is at best an exercise in futility and at worst
a monstrous and anti-humanistic terminological game, to seek to
deconstruct the language of logocentrism while at the same time
acknowledging, as Derrida repeatedly does, that such a language
is the necessary and inescapable medium of the critique itself.
Yet the movement has gained considerable power in the American
academy in the past decade, a power, like Bloom's own, that might
be based partly on literary politics and the suasions of intellectual
fashion, but that seems to an even greater extent to reside in the
very nature of the world for literature that it makes possible for us.
Without embarking on a Survey Perilous into the heartland of
deconstruction and its metaphysical discontents,^ we can still hope
to sketch the predicament of literature and poetics in the past
several decades, and the place of Bloom and his deconstructive Yale
colleagues within it, by asking ourselves the key question: what do
295
Bloom and his profoundly intimate antagonists have ini common?
Or, translated into the terms we have been using in this chapter:
what is the nature of Bloom's concern with de Man's challenge?
In his attempt to explain why Bloom is brought to the impasse
of the melodramatic tale of the Romantic imagination presented in
The Anxiety of Influence, de Man acutely observes that the problem
arises from the radical conception of the imaginative process
advanced by Bloom in his earlier work. Bloom's crucial, if tentative,
insight in that work, de Man contends, is "that, all appearances to
the contrary, the romantic imagination is not to be understood in
dialectical interplay with the presumably antithetical category of
'nature'." Rather, as our own discussion in Chapters 1 and 3 has
shown, Bloom comes increasingly to espouse a theory which sees the
Romantic imagination as autonomous, nonreferential, acting according
to the sublime guidance of its own "internalized" laws. Precisely
because such an imagination exists by definition in the realm of the
ineffable— exists, that is, in the pure potentiality of what it has
ceaselessly ceased to be— any attempt to describe it suffers from
the lack of a conceptual language that could be adequate to it.
It is at this point, de Man argues, that Bloom makes his key mistake.
Faced with the "difficult philosophical predicament" forced upon
him by the very acuity of his understanding of the nonreferential
nature of the imagination, "Bloom's perhaps unconscious strategy,"
de Man suggests, "has been to reach out for a new definition of the
imagination by means of near-extravagant overstatement. Since the
296
imagination is unimaginable, it can only be stated by hyperbole.
Poetry, the product of the hyperbolic imagination, can do anything."
In this, the heightening of Romantic vision granted him by his newly
won rhetoric of Romantic triumph, Bloom for de Man becomes "the
subject of his own desire for clarification."
What all this means is that de Man objects to the new Bloom
theory because it takes a wrong turn at a point far down the line
in its revisionary conception of the imagination. As a deconstruction
ist, de Man does not object to Bloom's central insistence on the
nonreferential quality of the imagination; it is precisely this
deconstruction of the "signified" in Bloom's theory which intrigues
him. Rather, what de Man recognizes here, and thereby forces Bloom
to contend with as well in all his subsequent work of the seventies,
is that there is an abyss beckoning the theorist whenever refer-
entiality is abandoned as a normative ground for any kind of language
use. For de Man, this abyss is the infinite regress of an autonomous
textuality as it dances over the deeper void of human insignificance
in a world decreed by Nietzsche to be godless and adrift. The
challenge to Bloom, sharing de Man's belief that all the orthodox
gods are dead, sharing his conception of the nonreferential imagi
nation, and sharing then, too, de Man's Nietzschean certainty that
all must be and should be "error" in poetry and in reading, is to
legitimize his plea that such error does not plunge us into the
nightmare of Nietzschean perspectivism, but rather still serves,
297
at least in its moments of deepest defensive majesty, to help us
"see ourselves again as perhaps eternity sees us, more like one
another" in our "egoism and our fallen condition" than "we can bear
to believe" (FC, p. xii) .
Bloom's response to the de Man threat takes two primary forms,
both involving the development of just such a rhetoric of misreading
as de Man's review recommends. We have already discussed Bloom's
use of the Lurianic tale of limitation-substitution-restitution as
a model .for poetic creation. Now we are in a position to see its
full significance as a corrective to the desiccations of the
deconstructionist enterprise. For while the first two stages of
poetic creation as envisaged through Luria "can be approximated in
many of the theorists of deconstruction" (MM, p. 5), the third and
most important stage, the stage of that visionary representation
which restores meaning and thus earns for poetry whatever grandeur
it may still attain, cannot be undertaken with the overly limited
tools of the deconstructionist project. The deconstructionist reader,
"at once blind and transparent with light, self-deconstructed yet
fully knowing the pain of his separation both from text and from
nature," doubtless, Bloom observes, "will be more than equal to the
revisionary labors of contraction and destruction" (MM, p. 5).
But, to deconstruct or to demystify in this fashion, to limit reading
solely to the limitations and the swervings of signification within
the vast labyrinth of our textuality, is only "a limited good" (MM,
p. 175) if the reader does not also go about the central task of
298
re-centering which remains the primary burden, and the chief
responsibility, of poetic meaning. The deconstructionist, in
declining to scale those heights of restituting hyperbole (and, by
extension, synecdoche before and metalepsis after) that de Man finds
objectionable in his review of The Anxiety of Influence, declines
also then to transcend the "destructive weariness" of "Romantic
irony" in its "purified form" which de Man's allegories of reading
ultimately deliver (DC, p. 16).
To this point Bloom's counter-assault exists largely as counter
assertion. The problem, as Bloom painfully knows, is in the deeper
stratum of "error" itself when considered to be the origin and the
end of all utterance. De Man's many allegories of reading over the
past decade are all based on his earlier definition and valuation
of Romantic allegory as a demystified "rhetoric of temporality," a
rhetoric more penetrating than the traditionally conceived rhetoric
of symbolic identification insofar as it recognizes "a distance in
relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the
desire to coincide," establishes instead "a language in the void
g
of this temporal difference." De Man's response to the obliteration
of "identity" before the random diachrony of signification is to
accept with grim joy the effacement of truth, self, and presence that
he himself has decreed. How can Bloom's own diachronic narrative
of the referentless imagination not also, then, acknowledge defeat
before the apparent groundlessness of its conceptions of itself?
The answer lies in what we have seen to be the crucial turn in
299
Bloom’s thinking in his mature phase, the replacement of the master
trope, "vision," by the even more cunning and resourceful trope of
"influence." This transformation, implicit from the start of
Bloom's career in his notion of "mythopoeia" as the imaginative
process whereby vision strives against all threats to become
completely itself, is not fully explored and exploited until the
mid-seventies, when the challenge of deconstruction forces Bloom to
justify the ways of his rhetoric to de Man. Why is restoration
possible? And how can a theory based on the inevitability of
misprision still claim an essential truth for the vision of both
criticism and poetry?
Bloom answers these questions with one of his most daring
gambits. Against de Man's suggestion that "influence" is but a
metaphor that changes a linguistic model for the problematics of
signification into a story or a temporal unfolding, Bloom argues
in return that metaphor is only one trope among six, and that it
is the six taken together that "influence" purports to represent.
If influence was just a metaphor, Bloom observe, it would "be
reduced to semantic tension, to an interplay between literal and
figurative meanings" (MM, p. 77). But the story within the "sixfold,
composite trope" of influence is not a story about semantic tension,
about truth or falsehood viewed in mimetic terms; such distinctions,
Bloom asserts, are irrelevant by de Man's own logic, since language
exists by virtue of its initial and engendering referentless autonomy.
Bloom's Kabbalistic model, on the other hand, "starts" with the
300
"assumption . . . that all distinction between proper and figurative
meaning in language has been totally lost since the catastrophe of
creation" (WS, p. 394), and then proceeds from that assumption to
see into the life of what poetic language really is about, which is
"the will to utter within a tradition of uttering" (WS, p. 393).
"Still evident even in the most advanced models of post-Structuralist
thought," Bloom observes, is a striking confusion of "signification"
with "meaning," a mistaken notion that they are somehow the same
(PR, p. 240). They are not identical, Bloom argues, for the
"structures" of poetic meaning consistently and transcendentally
"evade the language that would confine them" (MM, p. 77).
And thus, through the offices of de Man's counterpointing
challenge, we return to the heart of the Bloomian vision already
elaborated in Chapters 3 and 4. "There are no tropes, but only
concepts of tropes," Bloom acknowledges in Wallace Stevens (p. 393),
but his project for misreading nonetheless is saved from the dire
fate of Derridean "erasure" or labyrinthine de Manian ascetism by
the knowledge that the errors of poetry and of criticism, the lies
which are their essential meaning and their only vision, are errors
not of signification, of the semantic positives and negatives of our
merely referential being, but, rather, lies against that enemy
lurking within all of us strong enough to misread and to write,
the internalized Time or Tradition which, even as it establishes the
very grounds for meaning, kills. The "poetic equivalent of Freud's
concept of defense" (DC, p. 16) is Bloom's answer to the eviscerations
301
of Gallic skepticism; against Derrida's "Scene of Writing" he is
thus able to posit a more powerful and ennobling "Primal Scene
of Instruction" where the "anxiety-inducing transgression" of
strong poetry endures "one stage beyond" the mere letter of its
deconstruction (FC, p. xii).
And yet there is one more clarification still to be forced on
Bloom by the de Man challenge, a culminating clarification insofar
as it involves that crisis-point or crossing of vision which Bloom
conceives to reside at the center of his drama of defensive creation
as a substitutive "breaking" of form between the tropes of limitation
and representation. In an examination of the rhetoric of Nietzsche
initially appearing in Yale French Studies in 1975, de Man concludes
that rhetoric itself may be regarded as the "gap" between its
traditional formulation as "persuasion" on the one hand, and as
"a system of tropes" on the other:
Considered as persuasion, rhetoric is performative
but when considered as a system of tropes, it
deconstructs its own performance. Rhetoric is a
text in that it allows for two incompatible, mutually
self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts
an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading
or understanding. The aporia between performative
and constative language is merely a version of the
aporia between trope and persuasion that both
generates and paralyzes rhetoric and thus gives it
the appearance of a history.9
With aatypically audacious appropriation, Bloom in the final
theoretical chapter of Wallace Stevens changes de Man's "aporia
or figuration of doubt" from a "gap" to a "crossing" (p. 392),
justifying the change on the expected grounds that "rhetoric
302
____
considered as persuasion . . . takes us into a realm that also
includes the lie" (p. 386). If the rhetoric of poetic argument
includes the "lie," then, the Bloomian logic of visionary desire
goes, the tropes of poetry between which the crossings of vision
transpire are themselves not figures "of knowledge," as de Man's
semantics of deconstruction would have them, but figures of "will,"
of will "either translating itself into a verbal act or figure of
ethos," or will, by the very force of its transcendent desire,
"failing to translate itself and so abiding as a verbal desire or
figure of pathos" (p. 393). Either way, while the trope might
first appear as "a cut or gap made in or into the anteriority of
language," such an appearance is illusory since '"language"' itself
must be seen to be an "anteriority" acting "as a figurative
substitution for time." Misprision, Bloom deftly summarizes, is
"the process by which the meanings of intentionality trope down
to the mere significances of language, or conversely the process
by which the significations of language can be transformed or troped
upward into the meaningful world of our Will-to-Power over time
and its henchman, language" (pp. 394-95). Bloom's theory of reading,
then, while sharing with the deconstructionists the seemingly
nihilistic belief that poems "don't have presence, unity, form, or
meaning" as criticism traditionally has conceived them (KC, p. 122),
nonetheless "triumphs" over mere demystification with its featured
principle that what poems dn deliver is a . desire to continue, a
desire which presupposes a powerful Romantic Will prevailing beyond.
303
The "crossing" is at the heart of Bloom's final response to the
threat of deconstruction because in that catastrophic breaking-of-
the-vessels of presence, unity, form, and meaning which propels all
strong poetry, there is an equally profound testament to the power
of the language-less, relentless "faculty of self-preservation"
which gives signification its sole ground. And too, since the
crossings occur between topoi which are, we will recall, "voices
of the dead," the cuts that they make in the language of the poem
serve finally to affirm once again the primacy of the logos, of the
inspired prophetic voice, over the depredations of deconstructionist
"writing" ("ecriture"). The cunning of Bloom's "misprision" of
de Man's key concept of "gap" or "aporia," is representative of
the cunning of his entire project to save Romanticism in its time
of need. Bloom's strategic genius is to take Romanticism at its
putative worst, after the crumbling of the great Romantic Truth
into the manifold "errors" of a vainglorious and solipsistic
imagination, and, in the ringing tones of a "belated" prophecy built
upon, radically altered assumptions about the nature of poetic meaning,
to declare this apparent nadir to be,' in fact, the very emblem of
Romantic "strength" and greatness. His tactical triumph in this
instance is to present his theory of poetic battle at its seemingly
most vulnerable, at a point where the disjunction between the figures
of language threatens to proliferate into the endless regress of
Derridean "differance," and to argue that it is exactly here where
the unassailable dynamic essence of the Romantic vision is most
304
powerfully revealed.
Of course, In one sense our discussion of the dialogue between
Bloom and de Man has simply recapitulated from a different angle
some of the most important points of Chapters 3 and 4. But the
change in angle is important. If the appeal of Bloom’s "uses"
for poetry in the Romantic tradition is to be gauged fully, we must
consider what alternate "ends" his theory is fighting most fiercely
against. Because it is so close to Bloom's revisionary Romanticism
in so many crucial ways, the deconstructionist regimen provides a
particularly salient focus for comparison. As a prophet after the
accomplished Fate of our culture's waning, Bloom wants to make the
world still possible for the authentic life of strong poetry, even
as he is impelled to warn, by the very logic of his theory of
Romantic diminishings, that the ravages of Time only conspire to
make it less so. To save for the errors of poetry a Truth that
even the most thoroughgoing skepticism of our time could not
dismantle, he must make that Truth an affair entirely of an agon
which transpires beyond language, beyond culture, beyond nature,
in a transcendent realm where to be visionary is the grandest blessing
and the most majestic curse that the absolute absences of our
self-imposed solitude can bestow. "The human writes, the human
thinks, and always following after and defending against another
human," Bloom asserts against the "humanistic loss" represented by
Derrida's elevation of the Scene of Writing over the oral tradition
(MM, p. 60). In that humanity, however savage, willful, and warped
305
by the imperatives of influence, we may still see, Bloom affirms,
following a remark of Pater on Coleridge, "'the true interest of
art,' which is to celebrate and lament our intolerably glorious
condition of being mortal gods" (FC, p. 41).
The analysis of the poetry of A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery in
the previous chapter has suggested several ways in which Bloom's
theory gravely distorts the import of their work in order to
proclaim for these two important contemporary poets an extreme
heroism which Ammons seems hardly to deserve and Ashbery certainly
not to desire. Now, after seeing that such extremity is meant, at
the very least, to respond to the different but equally intense
extremity of deconstructionist nihilism, we are in a position to
assess more fully the nature of Bloom's canonizing as an intended
solution for the problems of poetry in our belated time. Again
a comparison to Kenner is helpful, for now the gulf between the two
theorists is revealed to be at bottom a radical divergence in
conceptions of the "uses” of poetry within culture. Bloom's
definition of poetry as the extra-linguistic, agonistic vision
enduring beyond all contact with the Shelleyan dross of mere reality
is countered completely by Kenner's contention, from The Poetry of
Ezra Pound in 1951 through his last major study in poetics, A Homemade
World in 1975, that poetry is above all the language with which
culture breathes, the verbal forms through which it is shaped and
articulates itself. Like Bloom, Kenner affirms the value of poetry
over philosophy; like Bloom too, Kenner strongly favors the
306
distinctive world of American poetry-making in the twentieth-century
over the traditional modes of poetic perception still advanced in
England. And yet the assumptions behind Kenner's valuations of
the American Modernist strain reveal that the distance between his
poetics and Bloom's revisionary Romanticism is so profound as to
be not only aesthetic but ultimately ethical.
Poetry's truth is greater than philosophy's, Bloom claims, be
cause poetry's vision, unlike philosophy's, evades the congealed
abstractions and codified categories of culture that would confine
it. If finally this means that poetry must evade all language in
order to be about its own desires to continue, nonetheless that
about-ness is sublime in that it bespeaks the grandeur of the
solitary will behind it. Kenner, on the other hand, sees poetry
as more valuable than philosophy largely because poetry is truer to
its own ineluctable whatness as language. For Kenner, Williams'
famous pronouncement, "No ideas but in things,” does not mean simply
that poetry is about the business of presenting images, hard, direct,
or otherwise; it means, says Kenner, that poetry jls itself a _ thing,
that words have thingness as one of their indispensable properties,
and that the energies of language are not only connected by, but are
embodied in, the intricate audio—graphic, semantic-syntactic web
of their relations to each other. Kenner's is thus pre-eminently
a poetics of the spoken and written word— not the Word— a poetics
of the sensuousness of language cleaving the printed page or. the air.
"A structure of words, that's the aim," he says in A Homemade World
307
about a short poem by George Oppen, "and the 'meaning' is whatever
applicability they attract" (p. 186). The taut, sinuous lines of
Kenner's own prose--so pronounced a contrast to the sprawling and
orotund prophetic encirclings of Bloom's sentences-— point to the
nature of this attraction. From the Vorticism of the High Modernists
to the intricate "word games" of Zukofsky (HW, p, 189), the poetry
that Kenner chronicles and praises is distinguished by its abjuring
of all those "units of perception detachable from the language" of
the poem itself (p. 187), and by its corollary commitment to "new
systems of connectedness" (p. xiii) whereby the living, vibrant
energies of culture, nature, and language are integrated, released,
"made new." Bloom, cherishing above all else the unbounded visionary
desire not reducible or confinable to the codifications of language,
yet goes on to deliver, with extreme quasi—philosophical rigor,
what he says all the great Romantics— Blake, Wordsworth, Freud—
have presented; a map, a code for a sort of Romantic geometry to
be put to a "saving use." Kenner, on the other hand, provides no
chart, no elaborately worked out hierarchy of concepts, no extended
defense of his own epistemological assumptions. When he observes of
the "naive realism” of Williams that "any philosopher would promptly
drive a Mack truck" through it (HW, p. 65), he might very well be
speaking about the genial air of inductiveness characterizing his
own work. Naive realism "sufficed, for Williams," he notes,
"to free the poet from anxieties he hadn't the patience for,"
just as it suffices for Kenner to relieve him from the necessity of
308
critical obeisance to the crises of linguistic belief endemic to
«-• 10
our time.
Kenner’s impatience with all those questions of vision,
imagination, and reference that so exercise theorists such as Bloom
and de Man is perhaps most apparent in his devaluation of Wallace
Stevens before the masters of his Modernist canon, and especially
before Williams, that other great modern American poet who chose to
stay home. "The American Modernists," Kenner says, are aligned
by their "hidden sources of craftsmanship, hidden incentives to
rewrite a page" (HW, p. xvii), and by their Dedalian determination
"to practice art as though its moral commitments were like
technology's" (p. xv). "A fifty-year reshaping of the American
language" is what they were all about, Pound through Robert Creeley,
a reshaping done under the aegis (all exceptions admitted with
alacrity by Kenner, the practicing inductivist) of another famous
proclamation of Williams: "It isn't what he [the poet] says that
counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of
perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to
verify its authenticity."^ The chief problem with the poetry of
Wallace Stevens, Kenner contends, the problem which compromises it
so profoundly that Stevens' work seems fated to serve posterity
only as a marginally interesting illustration of "a phase in the
history of poetry" (HW, p. 72), is that he is a poet afflicted
precisely with the humanistic burden of having "Something to Say"
(p. 57), said something amounting to little more, Kenner goes on
309
sardonically to observe, than "discursive variations on the familiar
theme of a first-generation agnostic,"
In Kenner’s view, Wallace Stevens is a poet hobbled by two
misfortunes formidable in their ironic relation: first, he suffers
from a typically modern crisis in belief about the ability of
language to say anything; and second, he then spends an entire
poetic career going about the old-fashioned humanistic business of
saying how hard (if not impossible) it is to say things. Stevens
in his preoccupation with that Supreme Fiction which, if accepted
as a fiction, could still give life, "tended to suppose that he was
at grips with a religious or a philosophic crisis," Kenner asserts
(p. 82).
But it was a writers’ crisis purely, a poets' crisis,
an episode in the history of nature poetry since
Wordsworth. It is entangled in religion and
philosophy: of course it is. But it existed, neatly,
on the poetic plane; how to make predications con
cerning snow, or blackbirds. It was on the poetic
plane that Stevens coped with it, often magnificently.
(pp. 82-83)
The magnificence inheres in Stevens' "chief technical insight,"
which is that only the techniques of painting could hope to capture
the "relationship of the sole man to the mute universe" (p. 77).
And yet Kenner is moved quickly to exasperation by this as well.
The poetry that results from Stevens' felt philosophical predicament
is, he says, reft of "human actions with agents good and bad" (p. 74);
lacking in "variety of feeling" (p. 75); "empty of people altogether"
(p. 71); and full "merely" with "ways of looking at things" (p. 78).
"So many scrupulously arrested gestures," he summarizes, "so
310
laborious an honesty, such a pother of fine shades and nuanced
distinctions; yet that forty years’ work revolves about nothing more
profound than bafflement with a speechless externality which poets
can no longer pretend is animate" (p. 81).
Against this sustained exercise in poetic sound and fury about
the issue of signifying nothing, Kenner posits the "polar opposite"
of Williams' working philosophy of language, featuring the
"assumption that words share thinghood with things, and that language
is a social fact needing no explanations" (p. 81). Such an
assumption, unlike Stevens' endless puzzling over "how words relate
to reality," accomplishes, says Kenner, what a poetic epistemology
should accomplish; with quiet efficiency, it allows the poet to write
his poems, to forge his "red wheelbarrow" as a patterned verbal
energy or a "thing" made, while at the same time assuming that such
thinghood is shared with the correlative real object one might espy,
red and dependable, on any given farm.
It is obvious how remote Kenner’s analysis of Stevens is from
Bloom's, both in particulars and in general assumptions about poetic
meaning. As we have seen, Bloom passionately repudiates any
reading of Stevens as a painterly poet or a mere perspectivist of
"dilapidations," More important, Bloom's entire operation on Stevens
is designed, like all his rescue attempts, to save the poet from
the Ulro into which he would fall if his work were to be regarded
as merely a trafficking in the problematics of signification, a
worrying over the difficult task of having "Something to Say."
311
The very substance of Kenner’s charge against Stevens— itself a
dyslogistic variant of the sort of reading given Stevens by Vendler—
will not even be admitted by Bloom, since according to his conception
of Romanticism no Romantic poet every really writes about the
externality of nature anyway, not even to take such a subject as
a predicament in predication. "Wallace Stevens was the last Romantic,"
Kenner intones, "the last poet of a long era that believed in 'poetry,'
something special to be intuited before the words had been found,
something of which one's intuition guided the precious words" (p. 185).
Bloom, of course, from his radically different perspective, tells
us much the same thing (adding several poets beyond Stevens to prove
that the situation is not completely hopeless). But while Bloom
sees the waning of Romanticism hyperbolically as nothing less than
the death knell for an entire culture, Kenner is quite content to
bring in the new poems beyond the end of the Romantic mind, for the
new, he would affirm, is where we all live our lives, poets, critics,
computer scientists, and garbage collectors alike. "'Is there
any poetry here?' the Romantic reviewer would ask, looking up from
the book; do I detect those harmonies that transcend the crass
and the quotidian, that ignore the Ford car and the asphalt and the
computer?" (p. 185). Thus Kenner lampoons the likes of Bloom,
piercing what he sees as the foggy air of Gothic nostalgias with
the light of his witty prescription for the new that "The poem is the
Gestalt of what it can assimilate." The analogue for poetry that
he then advances marks his quirky contemporaneity in the same way
312
that the Oedipal battles and heroic defeats of the map of misreading
mark Bloom’s willful nostalgia for an earlier age of Romantic
grandeur. A poem, Kenner repeats, with his eye on a world far
removed from Grasmere or Cumberland, shady bowers or vales sublime,
is
the Gestalt of what it can assimilate, like New
York City; and a visitor to New York City at any
time is apt to feel the place is in process of
being improvised. Structures run up, abandoned,
left behind in a night; graffiti, sound and light
shows, irridescences; neon; footnotes to history;
registrations of the current, persistences in the
memory, in tacit defiance of paperback transcience;
so the domain of the 1970’s Muse. (p. 185)
My own point is not to poke fun at Bloom's eloquent and
impassioned "persistences in the memory" of the Romantic mind. Rather,
the intriguing aspect of the conflict between Kenner and Bloom lies
in the depth of their divergence on crucial questions of what I have
been calling, after Bloom's Emersonian pragmatics of the "uses" of
poetry, poetic ethics. Kenner's credo, perhaps best seen as a
secularization of the High Modernist religion of art advocated by
Joyce (a Shelleyan in his youth) and Pound (an accomplished imitator
early on of certain of the late Romantic poets), would hold that
poetry is important only insofar as it does "make it new," only
insofar as the poet forces himself to live on the cutting edge of
the life and the language of the culture around him. "When a man
makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes words as he finds them
interrelated about him and composes them— without distortion which
would mar their exact significance— into an intense expression of
313
12
his perceptions and ardors ..." : another pronouncement of
Williams that could stand as Kenner's own. And what it implies for
Kenner's method of reading poetry is that the words on the page matter
more than anything else, more than the abstractions of philosophy,
more too than the "sacred" imperatives of Romantic vision and
redemption, because not only are those words the life of the poet,
his authentic homemade logos, they are also, since the poet necessarily
lives in culture and expresses his perceptions through the language
that he finds around him, verbal embodiments of the cultural energy
which has helped to give them shape. Bloom, on the other hand, with
ethics predicated on the solipsistic logos of a Romantic Will
deliberately placed beyond the encroachments of all mere sharing,
either social or linguistic, would maintain that the proper function,
and the only hope for poetic-art, is continually to re-make the old,
to forge again through the fires of vision and its battles a breaking
of shape equal to the primal desires of the great prophets of the
past.
Bloom's broodings on the fate of reading and misreading in our
time always have been heavy with apocalyptic foreboding over the
very survival of poetry in a culture that will not heed its true
prophets. Even in the mature period marked by the darker
"internalized" complications of the anxiety of influence as a master
principle for his work, Bloom continues to retain his original Blakean
faith in the all-important role of the imagination in the lives of
men, and an equally intense Blakean conviction that society by its
314
very nature can never accept the vision delivered by its embattled
poet-prophets. Los, "the imaginative principle within man" (BA,
pp. 385-86), may be bloodied by savagery and parricide in the final
incarnation of Bloom's theory, but his function still is to redeem
us, to make us gods once again after our fall into the fractured
ordinariness of our common humanity. Like Emerson, the cunningly
chosen avatar of the map of misreading's program for an American
"re-centering" against the de-centerings of deconstruction (MM, p. 176),
Bloom will never cease affirming that "That is always best which
gives me to myself" (EW, 1, 130), even if such a self is driven,
by the forces featured by Bloom, to the grisly Oedipal battles
evermore about to be of influence. Like Bartleby, the perversely
heroic prisoner of his own self-imposed solitude amid the sterile
Gestalt of a not very fictional New York City of Emerson's time,
Bloom "would prefer not to" if asked to quit his self-communings
for the life of men at large within the exile of modern civilization.
Extremity in itself becomes yet another "defense" in the formidable
Bloomian arsenal, an extremity and, stylistically, a hyperbole,
designed to transmute the curse of Time into the heroism of desperate
resistance before all that in our culture and within ourselves which,
remorselessly and inevitably, schemes to defeat us.
What does Harold Bloom give us, then? What is there in his
self-styled critical prophecy that seems to be central to the way
we read poetry in our time, central not only for the praise it has
garnered and the influence it has amassed, but for the heated and
315
keenly personal condemnation with which it also has been met?
Defining Bloom by the nature of his opponents, we have located his
poetics as a response, on the one hand, to the absolute obliteration
of the ontic self argued by Derrida and de Man, both of whom tend to
regard the self-conscious, self-glorying 'I' of the Romantic era
as an elaborate and now obsolete historical fiction. On the other
hand, if Bloom is precisely a self-conscious, self-glorying resister
to the brave and monstrous world of autonomous inhuman textuality
promulgated by the legions of Derrida, he is also an unwilling
participant in the world of our ordinary, culture-ridden lives as
our poets might live them now under the benison of Kenner. Where
do we live our lives, then, according to the revisionary Romanticism
of Harold Bloom? Time and again, throughout all stages of his career,
he tells us: we are happy only when we are most our selves, when,
temporarily free from the miserable dualisms to which we have been
condemned both by our society and by our mortality, we are most
within "that solitary and inward glory we can none of us share with
others" (FC, p. 109).
It seems a suggestive, though hot necessarily a damning,
coincidence, that the decade in which Bloom's theory of the anxiety
of influence rose to prominence recently has been labeled, through
the writings of Christopher Lasch, Tom Wolfe, and a host of others,
the "Me Decade" or an "age of narcissism," a time when glorification
of the self became a defining American passion, especially among
13
the leisured classes and the cultured elite. Whatever the final
316
authority of commentators such as Lasch and Wolfe— Lasch in particular
has been used as a starting point for prognostications of cultural
14
malaise by everyone from Jimmy Carter to Gerald Graff — they do
provide an accurate enough thumbnail sketch of a decade in which,
among a good many other things, preoccupation with the inner meanings
of the innermost self became a leading American growth industry.
The deconstructionist effacement of the constitutive self, like most
culminations of philosophical skepticism, has little enough to do
with the way anyone, from the most intellectually haunted ideologue
to the gas station attendant down the street, actually lives his life
(a point Samuel Johnson, with typically "hard-headed" rationality,
made of an earlier skepticism in an earlier time). In contrast,
Bloom's theory, pronouncing itself in Stevensian fashion as a
theory of poetry that is also a theory of life, is meant to take
us— those of us who still read poetry, at any rate, a lonely enough
crowd to be sure— to the wellsprings of our solitary being by
furnishing a map that will guide us through the dim and daemonic
realms of our hidden and untranslatable desires. As Kenneth Connelly,
in a fascinating and fatidic review of Yeats appearing in The Yale
Review in 1971, has observed:
Bloom's Romanticism seems an exalted, tremendously
erudite', and consistently noble form of Consciousness
III; it postulates the duty of every man and every poem
to strive for the triumph of man, not under God or in
the hope of heaven but here and now. The notion of the
divine is secularized and placed with mathematical equa
lity in each human breast, and salvation is to be realized
not after death but in historical progress. It is a
brilliant, learned, impassioned version of "Wishing Will
Make It So."15
317
It is precisely, of course, Bloom's overwhelming erudition,
his loftiness of temperament, and his passionate intelligence in
service of a complex, historically-grounded conception of the Romantic
psyche, that distinguish him from the many recent gurus and popular-
izers of consciousness, poetic and otherwise, whom he quite properly
scorns. For what is especially interesting about Bloom and the
"restitution of narcissism" espoused by him as a primary poetic
principle, is that he takes us and our poets inside the map of
misreading not to "adjust" or, in his all-purpose term for the
neurasthenic quick-fixes of contemporary psychology, to "idealize,"
the tangle of poetic influence-relations he sees governing all
reading, but, rather, to intensify existing conflicts by making us
even more aware of the savagery and the sublime self-ishness which,
he warns, are our only "defense" against the shadows of our own
belatedness. Connelly, writing as he was at the crucial juncture
in Bloom's career between the early theory of vision and vision's
culmination in influence and the wars of poetic desire, of course
could not see that the motto for Bloom's project in the years ahead
would become something like "Wishing Won't Make It So, But in the
Wishing and Its Losses There Is the Saving Strength of Sublime Defeat."
But this is only to say that the unique interest of Bloom's Romantic
myth lies in the resourceful way in which it contrives seemingly
to make the worst of an already bad situation for poetry, for reading,
and for the self, only at the last moment, and in fittingly melo
dramatic fashion, to salvage the victory of triumph-in-defeat out
318
of all that which would seem most to condemn it. "Rivalry,
misinterpretation, repression, and even plain theft and savage
misprision" (FC, p. xii): Bloom stands as the chronicler and the
prophet of a whole host of apparent vices upon which, he says,
"literature itself is founded," a roster of deadly agonistic sins
formulated by the founding fathers of revisionism, Nietzsche and
Freud, whose "darkest" insights Bloom himself revises to make yet
more alarming. Bloom's entire project, like the ratio of apophrades
which not only concludes but, in effect, summarizes his map for
post-Enlightenment poetry, is marked by a thoroughly "conscious
rhetoricity" (MM, p. 102) as it attempts to subvert the usual
categories of humanism in order to save the dark heart of Romantic
vision beneath. What Bloom quite consciously gives us as a
theory of poetry and of life is a mythographic chart for Psychological
Man forced first to live within the abyss of the constitutive
inner self, and condemned then to the most excruciating manner of
solipsistic grandeur precisely by the realization that this is
his inescapable plight.
In presenting the elaborate map of his mature phase that purports
to tell the true tale of the poetic psyche, Bloom, a Blakean as
always, is following through on the wisdom gleaned from his early
studies of Blake's intricate mythography, a wisdom perhaps
encapsulized in the observation from Blake’s Apocalypse that "a
psychology ... is necessarily a cosmology" (p. 325). When Los
proclaims early in Jerusalem that "I must create a System, or be
319
enslav'd by another Man's" (1.10.20), he is providing not
only the "guiding principle of Blake's poetry" (BA, p. 376),
but also the ruling precept for all of Bloom's own systematizing in
the years following, a systematizing that comes to feature just
the sort of radical polysemism as a principle for reading that
Blake pioneered in the Romantic mode. Yet Bloom's my.th must depart
from Blake's at a rare and crucial moment, for Blake, too, in his
primal strength, over-idealized the psychology and the cosmology of
the redemptive Romantic imagination. "I will not Reason & Compare:
my business is to Create," Los boldly announces in the line succeeding
his proclamation of visionary emancipation, but Bloom is impelled,
by the privileged position of his despair almost two centuries
later, to go about the business of comparison, of weighing and
judging the outcome of all the visionary strife in the years since
Blake. "Comparison" is now not only the central duty of the
canonizer but also, then, the characteristic "topos" of the Romantic
Sublime (WS, p. 399), and the assumption about poetry-making upon
which it rests is that Blake was wrong when he called the Imagination
the "Real Man." Or, rather, he was not so much wrong as he was
engaged in the happy fallacy of wishing it were so. "Perhaps there
is" a "Real Man" of the Imagination, Bloom observes several times in
his later work, "but he cannot write poems, at least not yet"
(MM, p. 198; FC, pp. 140-41). The inevitable correction follows:
"poetry is written by the natural man who is one with his body"
(MM, p. 198), and, among other things, this means that the anxiety
320
of influence determining all strong poetry is itself "the fear of
death," which for the poet-as-poet is translated into the fear
"that there is not enough for him, whether of imaginative space
or in the priority of time."
The "central strife" of the Blakean cosmology as presented
by Bloom in his early work, the strife over "the fate of Ore, the
natural Man, the human energy warred over by the contraries of Los
and the opposing Spectres of Urizen and Urthona: art against the
doctrines and the circumstances that restrict" (VC, p. 33), is thus
"internalized" in Bloom's later theorizing by the recognition that
it is what transpires within the psyche of man which presents the
greatest restriction, and thus the gravest danger to imaginative life.
And since the "recalcitrance" within, represented by the master trope
of "influence," is a necessary precondition, or ground of meaning,
for whatever vision a poet achieves, it only follows that the
modern poet is cursed most profoundly by having to be himself, by
having to be the miserable and afflicted pawn of his own belated
godhood that he is. Since "influence" is terminal, an inescapable
end as well as a beginning, there is no "cure of the ground" for
its afflictions; there is only a tone, a style fit for triumph-in-
despair. "The secret of Romanticism, from Blake and Wordsworth down
to the age of Yeats and Stevens, increasingly looks like a therapy
in which consciousness heals itself by a complex act of invention"
(RT, p. 337). Thus Bloom observes in The Ringers in the Tower, and
it is one of the most trenchant insights he has ever provided,
321
not only into Romanticism as he conceives it, but, necessarily then,
too, into Romanticism as he cunningly and powerfully exemplifies it
in his own complex act of invention, his theory of Romantic Man in
extremis.
Of course, if Bloom's campaign to save Romanticism follows the
old military adage that the best "defense" (in Bloom's case, Freudian)
is a good "offense" against tradition and its encroachments, his
rescue operation also has opened itself to the charge of having
fulfilled its intentions in a way that would be anathema to any
competent military strategist. "He had to destroy Romanticism in
order to save it," might be the motto volunteered for Bloom's project
by an entire army of unpersuaded critics, scholars, and readers of
poetry, and the delicious absurdity of the formula, so grim and so
comical in the true manner of our time, would seem to have a resonance
not wholly inappropriate to Bloom's own conscious designs toward
Romantic redemption. What is destroyed by Bloom's conception of the
Romantic mind? Above and beyond all else, innocence perhaps—
innocence defined as the hope for vision and for an imaginative life
that would liberate us from our squalor and our apparently ineluctable
alienation, innocence defined as the joy of reading when reading is
affirmed to be an authentic sharing with the life of the vision of
another. To highlight the full extremity of Bloom's working out of
the consequences of his conception of the Romantic psyche, we need
only compare him to his former teacher and mentor, M.H. Abrams, a
magnanimous critical father whose "Scene of Instruction" Bloom has
322
schemed relentlessly to subvert. From The Mirror and the Lamp
through his culminating magisterial study of the Judeo-Christian
millennial patternings of Romantic thought, Natural Supernaturalism,
Abrams, like Bloom, has concentrated almost exclusively on
delineating the contours of Romantic vision and imagination as they
are both represented in, and expressed by, the great works of the
Romantic mind. Like Bloom too, he has premised his entire under
taking upon a keen awareness of the dumbfounding gulf that stands
between imaginative man and the fulfillment of his hopes and desires,
so infinite and majestic. And yet Abrams, unlike Bloom, has steadily
maintained a position within the mainstream of our inherited humanism
and modern critical culture with his eloquent insistence that the
lamp of the Romantic mind is not, and can never be, darkened by the
dilemmas brought on by its own uncompromising aspiration. Against
Bloom, who first adopts Blake and Shelley, and later Freud and
Nietzsche, as his instructors for the scene of Romanticism revised,
Abrams has steadfastly pledged his allegiance throughout his career
to the poet he conceives to be the grand moderator and the greatest
figure of the visionary company, Wordsworth, especially the Wordsworth
who announces, in the "Prospectus" to his intended masterpiece,
"The Recluse," that he will "sing"
Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread . . . (PW, p. 590, 1.14-18)
With an exegetical structure based on Wordsworth’s "Prospectus,"
323
Natural Supernaturalism is based as well, then, on these high
Wordsworthian hopes for the continuing relevance of the liberating
Romantic imagination, even in an age whose faithlessness and whose
myriad linguistic frustrations seem destined to subvert past glories.
All of Abrams' hopes for literature and for Romanticism are in the
passage in Natural Supernaturalism where he posits the enduring
"Romantic positives" against a time which he sees as contriving
either to subsume or to destroy them:
In our own age a number of the most talented authors
have turned against the traditional values of
the civilized order, to voice the negatives of what
Lionel Trilling has called an "adversary culture."
Some envision the end of our world as an apocalyptic
bang, others as a plaintive whimper; in the latter
version, an anti-hero plays out the moves of the end
game of civilization in a non-work which, in some
instances, approaches the abolition of meaningfulness
in language itself. The Romantic writers neither
sought to demolish their life in this world in a
desperate search for something new nor lashed out
in despair against the inherited culture. The burden
of what they had to say was that contemporary man
can redeem himself and his world, and that his only
way to this end is to reclaim and to bring to
realization the great positives of the Western past.
When therefore, they assumed the visionary persona,
they spoke as members of what Wordsworth called the
"One great Society ... I The noble Living and the
noble Dead," whose mission was to assure the
continuance of civilization by reinterpreting to
their drastically altered condition the enduring
humane values, making whatever changes were required
in the theological systems by which these values
had earlier been sanctioned. Chief among these values
were life, love, liberty, and joy. These are the high
Romantic words, the interrelated norms which always
turn up when the poets get down to the first principles
of life and of art, which they proclaim without unease
and with no sense that these commonplaces may have
outworn their r e l e v a n c e . ^ 6
324
Not surprisingly, given his acceptance of the spirit of the
Romantic enterprise, Abrams does not worry unduly about the possible
treachery of the letter; for him, as he has explained in response
to an attack by J. Hillis Miller,^ the writer, even the most
exuberant Romantic prophet chafing at the bounds of language, may be
assumed not only to have a definable and determinate authorial status,
18
but to have written his work "in order to be understood," In his
important review of Natural Supernaturalism, Hiller objects that
Abrams both begs crucial questions raised by the Romantic texts
themselves on the final adequacy of any common norms for interpre
tation within tradition, and also "pays notably little attention
19
throughout to the question of signs of of language," The
consequence of this lack of reflection on the problematics of
language and of meaning in Romantic expressiveness, Miller contends,
is that "Abrams perhaps takes his writers a little too much at face
value, summarizes them a little too flatly, fails, to search them
for ambiguities or contradictions in their thought, does not
20
’explicate’ in the sense of unfold, unravel, or unweave." Since
this would very likely be the objection that Bloom, as a theorist
of a related type of misreading and "wandering" textuality, would
offer against the methodology of Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams'
reply to Miller is intriguing. He defends his relatively straight
forward reading of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schelling, Schiller, and
the other great heroes of his Romantic corpus, by arguing that since
these writers did write "in order to be understood," certain
325
"interpretive assumptions" may be employed in reading them.
To escape the prison of solipsism and to assure the goal of vital
communication, the Romantic poets, Abrams suggests,
. . . had to obey the communal norms of their language so
as to turn them to their own innovative uses. The
sequences of sentences these authors wrote were designed
to have a core of determinate meanings; and though the
sentences allow a certain degree of interpretive freedom,
and though they evoke vibrations of significance which
differ according to the distinctive temperament and
experience of each reader, the central core of what they
undertook to communicate can usually be understood by
a competent reader who knows how to apply the norms of
the language and literary form employed by the writer.
The reader has various ways to test whether his under
standing is an "objective" one; but the chief way is
to make his interpretation public, and so permit it to
be confirmed of falsified by the interpretations of
other competent readers who subscribe to the same
assumptions about the possibility of determinable
communication.
In this lucid expression of the orthodox creed that reading
remains distinctly possible for our time, Abrams can be seen to be
responding to the powerful heterodoxies of both Bloom and de Man,
and to the obliteration of "communal norms" of language as a basis
for interpretation and reading that Bloom's Romanticism and de Man's
t
deconstruction represent. Indeed, in an essay appearing in Partisan
Review in 1979, "How to Do Things with Texts," Abrams explicitly
groups Bloom with Derrida (and Stanley Fish) as exemplary figures
in what he calls the brazen new world of "Newreading," a world
in which reading at first seems to be liberated by its movement
beyond traditional interpretive standards, but in which it is finally
freed, Abrams argues, only to perform the endlessly subtle gamesman
ship and the slow self-reflexive suicide of the subverter who needs
326
the order that he so passionately attacks. "Newreading" is suicidal,
Abrams asserts, because it knowingly "destroys the possibility that
a reader can interpret correctly either the expression of his theory
22
or the textual interpretations to which it is applied." It is
merely gamesmanship, after all, because the Newreader himself knows
"that he is playing a double game, introducing his own interpretive
strategy when reading someone else's text, but tacitly relying
on communal norms when undertaking to communicate the methods and
23
results of his interpretations to his own readers."
Bloom's assault on innocence, of course, cuts much deeper
than just an attack on the methodology of reading. If Derrida is,
in the words of Abrams' witty thrust, "an absolutist without
24
absolutes," Bloom, on the other hand, is unabashedly an absolutist
who endeavors to save, at the language-less cynosure of his map,
an essence of defeated but inviolable Romantic Will. Deconstruction
as an exercise in extremity claims that all linguistic signification
is ultimately empty, an endless wandering in language without a home.
Bloom, making his rapprochement with Derrida and de Man in
Deconstruction and Criticism, argues that either the theory of
language as "dearth of meaning" or the opposite theory of language
as "plenitude," as a "Kabbalistic magical absolute," is acceptable
to him. "All I ask," he concludes, "is that the theory of language
be extreme and uncompromising enough" (DC, p. 4). Thus, Bloom's
theory strategically and ruthlessly eliminates the entire middle
ground of language in which we usually think ourselves to live,
327
the ground of language as a communal activity, as a medium which
defines us in our reducible but nonetheless essential sharings.
The necessary corollary of this cut, as Abrams observes, is that
Bloom's map eliminates from the Scene of Literature "the greatest
diversity of motives for writing poetry, and in the products of
that writing, the abundance of subject-matters, characters, genres,
and styles, and the range of the passions expressed and represented,
from brutality and terror and anguish, indeed, to gaiety, joy, and
25
sometimes sheer fun." In attempting to force us to the dubious
Romantic redemption of an ever more agonized awareness of our fallen
innocence and our consequent life within the agonistic extremes of
the map of misreading, "what Bloom's tragic vision of the literary
scene systematically omits," Abrams contends, "is almost everything
that has hitherto been recognized to constitute the realm of
literature."
Bloom's audacious subversion of the traditional possibilities
of humanism, of "adjustment" or hope or the "joy” which Abrams
identifies in Natural Supernaturalism as the liberating Romantic
26
"norm of life," amounts in its larger designs to nothing less
than a giant Fable of Alienation, a conceptual Dark Tower of the
Romantic Imagination before which all the great questings of vision
in the Romantic tradition are seen to end. It is no accident that
one of Bloom's favorite poems is Browning's haunted version of
27
quest romance, "Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The
nightmarish landscape through which Roland journeys, so rich with
328
grotesquerie and unnatural distortion, is a resonant correlative
for the grim subjective life that the poet, perhaps against his
conscious will, divulges. The quester himself, identified typically
and tellingly by Bloom as "the modern poet-as-hero" (MM, p. 122),
seems uncannily like a figure from the wells of modern nightmare,
driven from within by he knows not what to an end he knows not
where, to be possessed finally by the terror that becomes defiance
before the malign and singular presence of a Tower which, despite
its apparent otherness, seems to mirror the quester's own darkest
and most treacherous desires. All of Bloom's own obsessive readings
of Romanticism are about just such a "triumph of life" as threatens
Roland at the end of his journey; all of his readings of Romanticism
recognize that the malignity which we confront is primarily an
alienation, profound and irreducible, that devours us from within.
Finally, all of Bloom's revisions of Romanticism wrest from the
quester's predicament the only victory to be calculated in a moment
o
of such imminent peril, the triumph of noble defiance before the
self-induced, self-fought spectre of self-destruction. All our
vision, Bloom cries, slughorn set to lips, surveying the dark and
distorted landscape of his Romantic history, is a savage phantasm,
a lie not just in its telling but in the very ground of its existence
as imagination, and this necessary selfsame identity of vision and
error is the only glory that we should want, or that we shall ever
have, from the remorseful and relentless questings of the Romantic
Imagination.
329
The critical project of Harold Bloom, taken as a whole, has
many merits that even his detractors would not deny. Bloom's twelve
major volumes feature countless seminal readings of important
Romantic and modern poetic texts, all the readings invested with
a passionate erudition entirely appropriate to an exegete of the
grand Romantic tradition, none of them completely compromised by
our disagreement with the hubristic designs of the map for misreading.
Bloom has introduced an unarguably sophisticated mode of psycho-
pbetics and psychohistory into the generally moribund realm of the
traditional scholarly study of literary influence, thereby compelling
a trenchant reexamination of those idees regues concerning influence,
self, and the role of psychobiography which for so many years have
stultified critics interested in the dynamics of literary tradition.
In the process, Bloom's polemical zeal, at the very least, has
caused important questions to be raised about the nature of reading,
Romanticism, and rhetoric, questions that critics of literature
in any field would be doing themselves a disservice to ignore.
Yet, Bloom's enterprise, for all its obvious merits, seems important
finally in a way that none of these contributions, taken individually,
would suggest. Perhaps above all, what Bloom has given us, with
his self-styled critical prophecy for a belated age, is an idea of
criticism whose deliberate extremes and contrived rhetoric of crisis
do not so much address as reflect the very real crisis in vision
troubling not only the profession of literary criticism but the
entire tradition of humanistic culture in the last half of the
33D
twentieth-century.
Humanism in its larger sense as an inherited body of beliefs
about the essential nobility of man within the wealth of his culture
and its artistic creations has foundered badly in our time before the
apocalyptic realities of man’s other creations, genocide, mass
starvation, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the catastrophes
awaiting us in our progressive destruction of the earth's fragile
environment. The split between literature and science, value and
fact, the culture of liberalism and the cult of applied science,
seems no closer to a fruitful mediation now than it did almost two
centuries ago in the first formulations of the first Romantics.
28
Our best fiction writers speak of the literature of exhaustion
as they undertake a task no more sublime than what Bloom quite rightly
calls an immense and brilliantly wrought "voluntary parody" of
literature itself (MM, p. 38), an exhaustive recycling of the
materials of past Western culture performed with the debilitating
awareness that none of it— none of what the writers themselves now
are doing, none of what was written or thought in the great Book of
the past— really matters or ever really can halt the headlong
"progress" of mankind toward, at best, an unplanned obsolescence, or,
at worst, a final nuclear meeting with a "gravity's rainbow" of
falling bombs.
The general crisis in humanism— a crisis which, for all its
new-found sense of urgency, is itself as new as "The Prelude" or
"Dover Beach"— has been intensified within the realm of literary
331
criticism and the profession of teaching over the past twenty years
by bitter intramural squabbles over the proper role of criticism
within culture, and by the growing perception among many scholars,
critics, and teachers of the humanities, whatever their critical
positions, that the society at large has become indifferent, if
not actively hostile, to any claims for the continuing importance
of humanistic culture, no matter how those claims might be presented.
At a time of steadily declining interest in the humanities and of a
perceived "crisis in literacy," which together seem to guarantee
that our English departments on the university level, if they have
any relevance at all, will have it only insofar as they package
themselves as glorified "trade schools" in the "communications arts,"
a widespread feeling has arisen that, while literature itself may
not be "played out" on the stage of Western culture, the tradition
of explicating and interpreting it by professors of college English
nonetheless might be through, a victim both of its own past richness
and of its current lack of coherence or confidence in its many
29
disparate undertakings.
How to make the humanities important again? How to read, and,
just as important, how to write about literature, when the sheer
stunning volume of academic publishing, coupled with the vast
impoverishment of much that is thereby produced, seems to indict
the occupation as a whole? These are uneasy questions confronting
any academic critic today, and they are questions that Bloom's
enterprise, often without wholly intending to, bears revealingly upon.
332
For, on the one hand, Bloom, with his relentlessly single-minded
focus on the strivings of the contextless visionary imagination,
very seldom explicitly concerns himself with the time in which he
lives, except to lament that he is forced to live in it at all.
Similarly, in his theorizing on the dynamics of tradition in poetry,
he never sees the poetic imagination as responding to an historical
moment, only to intra-psychic forces of "influence" whose "temporality"
is solely a function of the continuing compulsions of the isolate
Romantic imagination. And yet, for all his lack of interest in any
crises other than the cultivated crossings of the deep strife-ridden
Romantic soul, Bloom does finally deliver an answer of sorts to the
manifold troubles of academic humanism in our time. He seeks to
make literary criticism important again by unburdening it of much
of the excess baggage of its traditional humanism, its gentility,
its idealism, its sense of literary tradition as an "ideal order,"
and by replacing all these musty accouterments with his own highly
melodramatic mapping of crisis-ridden Romantic desire. He attempts
to ameliorate the distress associated with the common perception
that works of "high art," especially poetry, are increasingly less
read in an age of electronic illiteracy, by reminding us that all
tradition is necessarily elitist, and by arguing as well that,
in the greater bloody parricide of literary history as he envisions
it, the Titans of true poetic vision will win out in the end (an
end that may be nearer than we think for literature, he portentuously
warns) to assume their deserved pre-eminence. Above all, he endeavors
333:
to tell us, through the exemplary visionary instance of his own
audacity in framing such an intensely charged tale of the "vast
visionary tragedy" of Romantic desire (AI, p. 10), that nobility and
majesty, heroism and greatness, are still ours, if only we can
marshal the "strength" and, yes, he affirms darkly, the desperation,
necessary to imagine them as our belated being's heart and home.
Bloom's answer for our ills is, in other words, a "therapy"— a
therapy for Romanticism and thus a palliative, if not a cure, for
the maladies afflicting the humanistic culture in which Romanticism
continues to earn its salience. All that is required to be both
solaced and heartened by the mythographic fable of Bloomian Romanticism,
is a willing suspension of our disbelief in the premises and as
sumptions that make Bloom's story possible. Once this is accomplished,
once we accept the world of the isolate yet embattled Romantic
visonary as the only world possible for modern poetry, our malaise is
transformed into desperation and thereby ennobled, our directionless
ness becomes defeat and is thus made tragic.
Viewed from another angle, as a prescription for a critical
method, Harold Bloom's program for Romantic revision seems above all
a response to the many lingering explication-oriented conceptions
of criticism still commanding support in the academy today, including
the mainstream tradition of explication and paraphrase of Romantic
texts represented by M.H. Abrams. Bloom's profound and polemical
enlargement of the bounds of the critical enterprise attempts to blur,
if not obliterate, the distinctions that have usually operated between
334
literature and criticism, "primary" and "secondary" texts. "All
criticism is prose poetry," Bloom proclaims in his "Manifesto for
Antithetical Criticism" (AI, p. 95) as a necessary corollary to his
continuing contention that all poetry is "poetic argument." Both
positions dissent rigorously from that residual New Criticism which
would condemn interpretation to the dungeon of explication and poetry
to the prison of "pseudo-statement"; both positions serve to align
Bloom with other traditions of interpretation and exegesis in Western
culture that he proceeds systematically to exploit. What Bloom
finally gives us, as several of his best reviewers have observed,
is a new sort of criticism that is in one sense very, very old.
Bloom’s canonizing tale of Romantic literary history belongs to the
tradition of Midrashic commentary on the Old Testament, a type of
commentary which Angus Fletcher usefully defines as "turned to the
revelation of a continuing hidden truth assumed to inhere in the
30
unity and therefore to locate the center, of a canonic tradition."
We have already noted how Bloom capitalizes on his appropriated
relationship to the prophetic works of the Old Testament by referring
to himself as a "kakangelist," and by continually invoking the
rhythms and the tonalities of prophecy in order to present as
vibrantly as possible the tragic grandeur of the central Romantic
canon. Less obviously, he uses Midrash as a model, and as an implicit
justification, for his own strenuous canonizing practice, a practice
which involves not only eliminating everything in the history of
literature over the previous two centuries that does not conform
335
to the requirements of visionary Romanticism, but even within the
Romantic tradition itself, excising much that other critics have
deemed important— Coleridge's theorizing, German Romanticism,
Romantic art and music, Romantic prose fiction— but that does not
admit of the predominantly lyric "centrality" which is the only real
object of Bloom's critical vision.
Beyond Biblical exegesis, Bloom in his mature incarnation as
mapmaker of misreading continues to rely more heavily on Blake—
another revisionary reader in the Scriptural tradition— than on
any other single figure to buttress his critical prophecy. As
Cynthia Ozick has ably summarized, Bloom's many theorizing volumes
of the seventies contrive to give us not criticism as we usually
know it but "a long theophanous prose poem, a rationalized version
31
of Blake's heroic Prophetic Books." Bloom intends to stand, she says,
"as a vast and subtle system-maker, an interrupter of expectations,
a subverter of predictability— the writer, via misprision, of a new
Scripture based on discontinuity-of tradition." Perhaps it is this
underlying Blakean symmetry in all of Bloom's books that allows his
project for criticism to come completely into focus. Too self-
conscious to possess Blake's primal and direct imaginative power, too
belated to be able really to deliver the life of authentic visionary
prophecy as the master does in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, Bloom
nonetheless answers the confusions of our time with a Scripture whose
"saving use" is itself derived from a revisionary reading of Blake's
most revisionary prophetic poem, Milton. The fearful ratios of the
336
visionary imagination at war will be the sole subject of this new
Scripture, the blocking of all the Blocking Agents of art its pritpe
visionary "desire." Harold Bloom’s "defense" of the Romantic
Imagination, predicated as it is upon the extremes of the Romantic
vision endangered from within as well as without, emerges as a
brilliantly resourceful mythographic expression of its own need to
justify itself. That the Scripture delivered by Bloom offers bold
new possibilities for the art of criticism is hardly to be doubted.
That it escapes the treacherous tautologies of its complex, self-
imposed "therapy" is a tale, fittingly enough, that only time will
tell.
337
Notes for Chapter Six
■ * " See the Author's Introduction to The Wedge (Cummington, Mass.:
Cummington Press, 1944); rpt. in Selected Essays of William Carlos
Williams (New York: Random House, 1954), p. 256.
2
For Kenner's discussion— and endorsement— of the poetics
of the post-Poundian poets Zukofsky, Oppen, and Olson, see Chap. 6
of A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. 158-93. All subsequent quotations from
this work will be documented in parentheses in the text as (HW).
3
See Paul de Man, Comparative Literature, 26 (1974), 269-75.
Since the review is relatively short and since I will be quoting
copiously from it in the pages to follow, I will not document any
further citations. De Man's review is important enough to merit
reading in its entirety by anyone interested in Bloom.
^ The Derridean critique of the "metaphysics of presence" is
the basis of all his work. For pointed dissections of
"phonocentrism," see Chap. 6 of Speech and Phenomena, pp. 70-87,
and Part 1 of Of Grammatology, pp. 3-93.
J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II,"
Georgia Review, 30 (1976), 341.
6
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric
of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 17.
^ There is an abundance of criticism on the Derridean movement,
both expository and argumentative. For especially provocative
attacks on Derrida's ends, means, and philosophical assumptions, see
M.H. Abrams, "The Deconstructive Angel," Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977),
425-38, and "How To Do Things with Texts," Partisan Review, 46 (1979),
556-88 (the latter also treats Bloom and Stanley Fish); Charles
Altieri, "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge
to Derridean Literary Theory," Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976),
1397-423; Denis Donoghue, "Deconstructing Deconstruction," rev. of
Deconstruction and Criticism and Allegories' of Reading, New York
Review of Books, 12 June 1980, pp. 37-41; Gerald Graff, "Deconstruction
as Dogma, or, 'Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Strether Honey'," rev.
of Deconstruction and Criticism, Georgia Review, 34 (1980) , 404.-21,
and Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 61-62, 81-82, 145-46,
and 192-93.
338
g
Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation:
Theory and Practice, ed. Singleton, p. 191.
9
de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 131.
^ The "naive realism" of Kenner is quite consciously a strategy,
of course. For the basis of Kenner's working philosophy of induction,
we might turn to R. Buckminster Fuller, whose theorizing on the
properties of systems has provided Kenner with not only ideas but
an idiosyncratic critical vocabulary— "patterned integrity," "vector,"
and so on. Kenner1s Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller
(New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973) is an invaluable guide to
both the philosophy and geometry of Fuller and the logic underlying
Kenner's own method of literary criticism. Like Fuller, Kenner takes
as first principle not the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am,"
but, as Kenner puts it, "'I experience, whatever I am'" (p. 161).
11
12
13
Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, p. 257.
Ibid.
See Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in
an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,
1978). Wolfe, of course, has coined the famous phrase in his "The
Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," in Mauve Gloves & Madmen,
Clutter & Vine (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976),
pp. 126-67.
14
See Graff's Literature Against Itself, Chaps. 1 and 3,
pp. 1-29 and 63-101. Graff's basic argument is that the "power of
powerlessness" promulgated by contemporary radical or adversary
culture itself represents yet another capitulation to the decadent
consumerism of late capitalist culture.
^ Kenneth Connelly, rev. of Yeats, Yale Review, 60 (1971),
398.
16
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1971),
pp. 430-31. The Wordsworth lines quoted by Abrams are from the 1805
edition of The Prelude, 10. 968-69.
J. Hillis Miller, "Tradition and Difference," rev. of Natural
Supernaturalism, Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter 1972), 6-13. While
professing admiration for Abrams' learned and eloquent contribution
to "the grand tradition of modern humanistic scholarship" (p. 6),
Miller nonetheless challenges the very assumptions upon which he
sees Natural Supernaturalism as founded, and offers a brief
deconstructive reading of Romantic language and tradition to take
their place.
339
18
See "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A
Reply to Wayne Booth," Critical Inquiry, 2 (1976), 447-64, The
essay is reprinted in Wayne Booth’s Critical Understanding: The
Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1979), pp. 175-94. See Critical Inquiry, pp. 456-58 (or Booth,
Critical Understanding, pp. 186-88), for Abrams’ most pointed discus
sion of Miller’s objections.
19
"Tradition and Difference," p. 8.
20
Ibid., p. 11.
21
Abrams, "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History,"
Critical Inquiry, p. 457 (or Critical Understanding, p. 187).
22
"How To Do Things with Texts," p. 568.
23 Ibid., p. 587.
24 Ibid., p. 569.
23 Ibid., p. 586.
2 6 '
Natural Supernaturalism, p. 431.
27
Bloom's two major readings of "Childe Roland" mark the
movement in his thought from the transitional phase of the late
sixties featuring the "internalization of quest romance" to the
phase in which all quests are revealed to be part of the Oedipal drama
of poetic influence. For the earlier reading, see "Browning's
'Childe Roland': All Things Deformed and Broken," in The Ringers
in the Tower, pp. 157-67; for the later reading, designed by Bloom
as a showcase for his new map, see A Map of Misreading, pp. 106-22.
28
The phrase is from John Barth's famous essay, "The Literature
of Exhaustion," Atlantic, August 1967, pp. 29-34.
29
For perhaps the most sweeping recent critique of the crisis
in the humanities, see Graff's Literature Against Itself. Graff's
antidote for the malaise in humanism and for the nihilism of much
modern art and literary criticism is, unfortunately, a call for a
return to notions of "mimesis," "realism," and the "liberal arts"
that he leaves relatively unexamined. For discussions of the problems
of criticism from an entirely different point of view, see Geoffrey
Hartman's title essay in The Fate of Reading, pp. 248-74, and all
of his Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980). Hartman argues rather eloquently
for the liberation into creative interpretation that his colleague,
Bloom, much more strenuously represents. For a pointed expression
340
of disagreements on our critical and cultural malaise, see Graff's
review of Criticism in the Wilderness in New Republic, 1 Nov. 1980,
pp. 34-37.
30
Angus Fletcher, "The Central Commentary: Notes for a Review,"
rev. of The Ringers in the Tower, Diacritics, 1, No. 1 (Fall 1971),
17.
31
Ozick, "Judaism & Harold Bloom," Commentary, 46.
341
Bibliography
I. Works by Harold Bloom
The following abbreviations of works by Bloom have been used where
applicable throughout this bibliography.
AI Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry.
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973.
BA -. Blake* s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1963.
FC - . Figures of Capable Imagination. New York: Seabury
Press, 1976.
KC ----------. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press
1975.
MM ------- A Map of Misreading, New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1975.
PR ----------. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake
to Stevens. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976.
RT : --------- . The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic
Tradition. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971.
SM -— : Shelley's Mythmaking. New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1959; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969.
VC ----------. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English
Romantic Poetry. 1961; rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1971.
342
WS , --------- . Wallace Stevens; The Poems of Our Climate.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977.
Yeats ------- . Yeats. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.
DC --------- , ed. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York:
Seabury Press, 1979.
Other works by Harold Bloom:
Bloom, Harold. Rev. of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-
History , by David Biale. New Republic, 23 June 1979, pp. 36-37.
--------- . "A.R. Ammons: The Breaking of the Vessels."
Salmagundi, Ncs. 31-32 (1975-76), pp. 185-203. Rpt. in FC,
pp. 209-33.
-------- . "Bacchus and Merlin: The Dialectic of Romantic Poetry
in America." Southern Review, 7 (1971), 140-75. Rpt. in RT,
pp. 291-321.
--------- . "Blake's Jerusalem: The Bard of Sensibility and the
Form of Prophecy." Eighteenth Century Studies, 4 (1970-71),
6-20. Rpt. in RT, pp. 65-79.
--------- . "The Breaking of Form." In DC, pp. 1-37.
--------- . "Browning's 'Childe Roland1: All Things Deformed
and Broken." Prose, No. 1 (1970), pp. 29-44. Rpt. in RT,
pp. 157-67.
----- • ---. "The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens."
Massachusetts Review, 7 (1966), 23-42. Rpt. in RT, pp. 217-33.
343
"Christianity and Art." New Republic, 5 Apr. 1969,
pp. 25-28.
—----. "Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence." Diacritics,
2, No. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 36-41. Rpt. in FC, pp. 1-17.
-----. "Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand and
A.R. Ammons." Southern Review, 8 (1972), 133-49. Rpt. in FC,
pp. 150-168.
-----. "Emerson: The Glory and the Sorrows of American
Romanticism." Virginia Quarterly Review, 47 (1971), 546-63.
Rpt. in FC, pp. 46-64, under the title, "Emerson: The Self-
Reliance of American Romanticism."
. "Harold Bloom on Poetry." New Republic, 29 Nov. 1975,
pp. 24-26.
-----. "The Internalization of Quest Romance." Yale Review,
58 (1969), 526-36. Rpt. in RT, pp. 13-35.
. "John Ashbery: The Charity of the Hard Moments."
Salmagundi, Nos. 22-23 (1973), pp. 103-31. Rpt. in FC,
pp. 169-208.
---- ; . "Myth, Vision, Allegory." Rev. of Allegory: The Theory
of a Symbolic Mode, by Angus Fletcher, and other books.
Yale Review, 54 (1964), 143-49.
-----. "Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: Hollander’s The Head of the
Bed." In The Head of the Bed, by John Hollander. Boston:
David Godine, 1974, pp. 21-32. Rpt. in FC, pp. 263-73.
344
----- . "The New Transcendentalism: The Visionary Strain in
Merwiri, Ashbery, and Ammons." Chicago Review, 24, No. 3
(Winter 1972), pp. 25-43. Rpt. in FC, pp. 123-49.
----- . "'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction': A Commentary."
In Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Ed. Marie Borroff. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1963, pp. 76-95. Rpt. in RT, pp. 235-55.
. "The Place of Pater: Marius the Epicurean." Intro
duction to Marius the Epicurean, by Walter Pater. New York:
New American Library, 1967. Rpt. in RT, 185-94.
. ."'To Reason with a Later Reason': Romanticism and
the Rational.” Midway, 11, No. 1 (Summer 1970), 97-112.
Rpt. in RT, pp. 323-37.
■ — . "The Unpastuted Sea: An Introduction to Shelley."
Introduction to Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley.
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Rpt. in RT, pp. 87-116.
. "Viewpoint." Times Literary Supplement, 30 May 1980,
p. 611.
. "Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate." Prose,
No. 8 (1974), pp. 5-24. Rpt. in FC, pp. 103-19.
. "Walter Pater: The Intoxication of Belatedness."
Yale French Studies, No. 50 (1974), pp. 163-89. Rpt. in FC,
pp. 18-45.
345
II. Essays and Reviews Concerning Bloom:
Abrams, M.H. "How To Do Things with Texts." Partisan Review, 46
(1979),, 566-88.
Altieri, Charles. Rev. of FC, and other books. Criticism, 19 (1977),
350-61.
Benziger, James. Rev. of VC. Criticism, 5 (1963), 185-88.
Burke, Kenneth. "Father and Son." Rev. of MM. New Republic,
12 Apr. 1975, pp, 23-24.
Connelly, Kenneth. Rev. of Yeats. Yale Review, 60 (1971), 395-403.
de Man, Paul. Rev of AI. Comparative Literature, 26 (1974),
269-75.
Donoghue, Denis. "Stevens at the Crossing." Rev. of WS. New York
■ Review of Books, 15 Sept. 1977, pp. 39-42.
"Elephants and Shelley." Rev. of J>M. Times Literary Supplement,
21 Aug. 1959, p. 482.
Fletcher, Angus. "The Central Commentary: Notes for a Review."
Rev. of RT. Diacritics, 1, No. 1 (Fall 1971), 16-19.
Hartman, Geoffrey. "War in Heaven." Rev. of AI. Diacritics, 3,
No. 1 (Spring 1973), 26-32. Rpt. in Hartman's The Fate of
Reading and Other Essays. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1975, pp. 41-57.
Hirsch, David H. "Deep Metaphors and. Shallow Structures." Rev. of
KC. PR. FC. and other books. Sewanee Review, 85 (1977), 153-66.
346
Hollander, John. "Let a Thousand Blooms..." Rev. of Yeats.
Poetry, 117 (1970), 43-45.
Kermode, Frank. "Notes Toward a Supreme Poetry." Rev. of WS.
New York Times Book Review, 12 June 1977, pp. 9 and 44.
Lewis, C.S. "Poetry and Exegesis." Rev. of VC. Encounter, 20,
No. 6 (June 1963), 74-76.
Miller, J. Hillis. "J. Hillis Miller on Literary Criticism."
New Republic, 29 Nov. 1975, pp. 30-33.
Nemerov, Howard. "Figures of Thought." Rev. of AT, and other books.
Sewanee Review, 83 (1975), 161-71. Rpt. in Nemerov1s Figures
of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other
Essays. Boston: David Godine, 1978, pp. 18-29.
Ozick, Cynthia. "Juadaism & Harold Bloom." Commentary, 67, No. 1
(Jan. 1979), 43-51.
Pettingell, Phoebe. "A Text That Is an Answer." Rev. of WS.
Poetry, 131 (1977), 165-69.
Preyer, Robert 0. "Voyagers of the Imagination." Rev. of VC.
Yale Review, 51 (1961), 316-19.
Ricks, Christopher. "A Theory of Poetry, and Poetry." Rev. of PR.
New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1976, p. 6.
Riddel, Joseph. "Bloom— A Commentary— Stevens." Rev. of WS.
Wallace Stevens Journal, 1 (1977), 111-19.
---------. "Juda Becomes.New Haven." Rev. of WS. Diacritics, 10,
No. 2 (Summer 1980), 17-34.
347
Said, Edward. "The Poet as Oedipus." Rev. of MM. New York Times
Book Review, 13 Apr. 1975, pp. 23-25.
Towers, Robert. "The Ways and Means of Literary Critics." Rev. of
KC, and other books. New York Times Book Review, 21 Dec. 1975,
pp. 15-16.
Vendler, Helen. "Defensive Harmonies." Rev. of PR. Times Literary
Supplement, 27 June 1976, pp. 775-76.
Wasserman, Earl. "Shelley for the Present." Rev. of _SM, and other
books. Yale Review, 48 (1959), 609-12.
Wellek, Rene. "Romanticism Re-examined." In his Concepts of Criti
cism. Ed. Stephen G. Nichols. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1963, pp. 199-21.
III. Other Works, both Literary and Critical:
Abrams, M.H. "The Reconstructive Angel." Critical Inquiry, 3
(1977), 425-38.
--------- . The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953.
--------- . Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1971.
------ ■ --. "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A
Reply to Wayne Booth." Critical Inquiry, 2 (1976), 447-64.
■ — — — --- . "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric."
In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to
Frederick A. Pottle. Ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom.
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965, pp. 527-60.
348
Altieri, Charles. "Motives in Metaphor: John Ashbery and the
Modernist Long Poem." Genre, 11 (1978), 653-87.
--------- . "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A
Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." Modern Language
Notes, 91 (1976), 1397-423.
Ammons, A.R. Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: W.W. Norton
and Co., 1972.
--------- . "Note of Intent." Chelsea Review, Nos. 20-21 (1967),
pp. 3-4.
--------- - "A Poem Is a Walk." Epoch, 18 (1968), 114-19.
--------- . The Snow Poems. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977.
--------- . Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York: W.W. Norton
and Co., 1974.
Aristotle. The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Trans. Lane Cooper.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960.
Ashbery, John. As We Know. New York: Viking Press, 1979.
--------- . The Double Dream of Spring. New York: E.P. Dutton
and Co., 1970; rpt. New York: The Ecco Press, 1976.
--------- . Houseboat Days. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
--------- . "The Impossible." Rev. of Stanzas in Meditation, by
Gertrude Stein. Poetry, 90 (1957), 250-54.
--------- . Self-Portrait in a . Convex Mirror. New York: Viking
Press, 1975.
--------- . The Tennis Court Oath. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
Univ. Press, 1962.
349
Auden, W.H. Foreword to Some Trees, by John Ashbery. Yale Series
of Younger Poets, 52. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1956^
pp. 11-16.
Baker, Carlos. Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a . Vision.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948.
Barth, John. "The Literature of Exhaustion." Atlantic, August 1967,
pp. 29-34.
Bate, Walter Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1970.
Blackmur, R.P. "W.B. Yeats: Between Myth and Philosophy." In
Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and World, 1952.
Blake, William. Blake: Complete Writings, with Variant Readings.
Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969.
Bloom, Janet, and Losada, Robert. "Craft Interview with John
Ashbery." New York Quarterly, No. 9 (1972), pp. 11-33.
Burke, Kenneth. "Definition of Man." In Language as Symbolic
Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1966, pp. 3-24.
----------. "Four Master Tropes." In A Grammar of Motives.
New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1969, pp. 503-17.
---------- "I, Eye, Ay— Concerning Emerson's Early Essay on
'Nature' and the Machinery of Transcendence." In Language
350
as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method.
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966, pp. 186-200.
--------- . "Literature as Equipment for Living." In The Philosophy
of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1941; rpt.
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973, pp. 293-304.
--------- . A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950;
rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969.
------------ "Terministic Screens." In Language as Symbolic Action:
Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1966, pp. 44-62.
Bush, Douglas. Mythology and the Romantic Tradition. 1937; rpt.
New York: Pageant Book Co., 1957.
Carroll, Paul. "If Only He Had Left from Finland Station." In The
Poem in Its Skin. Chicago: Follett, 1968, pp. 6-26.
Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth. Trans. Susanne K. Langer.
New York: Dover, 1946.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. George Watson.
New York. E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971.
--------- . Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed.
Earl Leslie Griggs. Vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1956.
----------- The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen
Coburn. Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon, 1961.
351
--------- . The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Ed. Kathleen Coburn. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.
--------- . The States Man's Manual. London, 1816.
--------- . Table Talk (May 1, 1830). Quoted in Kenneth Burke,
The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1960; rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1970, p. 174.
de Leon, Moses. The Zohar. Trans. Harry Sperling; Maurice Simon;
and Paul P. Levertoff; with an Introduction by J. Abelson.
5 voIs. 1934; rpt. New York: Soncino Press, 1970.
de Man, Paul. "Action and Identity in Nietzsche." In Allegories
of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979, pp. 119-31.
--------- . Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.
--------- . "The Rhetoric of Temporality." In Interpretation:
Theory and Practice. Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 1969, pp. 173-209.
Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." In Speech and Phenomena. Trans.
David B. Allison. Evanston, III.: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1973, pp. 129-60.
--------- . Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1977.
--------- . ’ .'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences." In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass.
352
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 278-93.
Donoghue, Denis. "Ammons and the Lesser Celandine." Parnassus, 3,
No. 2 (Spring-Summer 1975), 19-26.
------. "Deconstructing Deconstruction." Rev. of DC and
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust, by Paul de Man. New York Review of Books.
12 June 1980, pp. 37-41.
Duffy, Edward. Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley1s
Critique of the Enlightenment. Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1979.
Eliot, T.S. "Shelley and Keats." In The Use of Poetry and the Use
of Criticism: - Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry
in England. London: Faber and Faber, 1933, pp. 87-102.
1 -----. "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." In Selected Prose of
T.S. Eliot. Ed. F.ranke Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1975, pp. 175-78.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class
in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838." In The Works
of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter Works). Standard Library
Edition, with General Index and a Memoir by James Eliot Cabot.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1883. Vol. 1, 117-48.
— ---------. "Circles." In Works. Vol. 2, Part 1, 279-300.
— ------- . "Experience." In Works. Vol. 3, Part 2, 47-86.
----------. "History." In Works. Vol. 2, Part 1, 7-43.
353
--------- - The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Ed. Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Vol. 5. Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1965.
--------- . The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman and J.E. Parsons. Vol. 8.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1970.
--------- . "Merlin." In Works. Vol. 9, 106-10.
--------- - "Nature." In Works. Vol. 1, 13-80.
--------- . "The Poet." In Works. Vol. 3, Part 2, 7-45.
--------- . "Poetry and the Imagination." In Works. Vol. 8, 7-75.
------ . "Self-Reliance." In Works. Vol. 2, Part 1, 45-87.
Ende, Stuart. Keats and the Sublime. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964.
--------- . "’Positive Negation’: Threshold, Sequence, and
Personification in Coleridge." In New Perspectives on Coleridge
and Wordsworth: Selected Papers from the English Institute.
Ed. Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971,
pp. 133—64.
--------- - The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser. Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971.
Freud, Anna. The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Trans. Cecil
Baines. London: Hogarth Press, 1948.
354
Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. In The Standard
. . -Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(hereafter Works). Ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with
Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. Vol. 20.
London: Hogarth Press, 1959, 101-18.
----------. Moses and Monotheism. In Works. Vol. 23 (1964), 1-137.
--------- - "Repression." In Works. Vol. 14 (1957), 141-58.
----------. "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men."
In Works. Vol. 11 (1954), 163-75.
----------. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In Works.
Vol. 7 (1953), 123-245.
----------. Totem and Taboo. In Works. Vol. 13 (1955), 1-162.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957.
----------. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947.
-------- . "The Rising of the Moon." In Spiritus Mundi: Essays
on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1976, pp. 245-74.
Fuchs, Daniel. The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens. Durham, N.C.:
Duke Univ. Press, 1963.
Gide, Andre. First and Second Notebooks of The Counterfeiters.
Trans. Dorothy Bussy and Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1957, pp. 367-423.
355
Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic:
The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979.
Graff, Gerald. Rev. of Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of
Literature Today, by Geoffrey Hartman. New Republic, 1 Nov.
1980, pp. 34-37.
------. "Deconstruction as Dogma, or, 'Come Back to the Raft
Ag'in, Strether Honey'." Rev. of DC. Georgia Review, 34,
(1980), 404-21.
%
--------- . Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern
Society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979.
Grossvogel, David. "Interview / A.R. Ammons." Diacritics, 3, No. 4
(Winter 1973), 47-53.
Harrison, Jane. Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922; rpt. New York:
World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1966.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of
Literature Today. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980.
--------- . "The Fate of Reading." In The Fate of Reading and
Other Essays. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975, pp.
248-74.
--------- . "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness." In
Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970. New Haven
Yale Univ. Press, 1970, pp. 298-310.
356
--------- . "Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure."
In Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970. New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970, pp. 3-23.
. Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1964.
Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans.
Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977.
Holder, Alan. A.R. Ammons. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Howard, Richard. "A.R. Ammons: 'The Spent Seer Consigns Order
to the Vehicle of Change.'" In Alone with America: Essays
on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950.
1969; rev. ed. New York: Atheneum, 1980, pp. 1-26.
Jarrell, Randall. "Reflections on Wallace Stevens." In Poetry
and the Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953; rpt.
New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1955, pp. 121-34.
Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958. Vol. 2.
-. The Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1978.
Kenner, Hugh. Bucky: A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller.
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973.
-. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
357
Kceiger, Murray. "Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading
of Literature." In Interpretation: Theory and Practice.
Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1969, pp. 211-42.
- Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System.
Baltimore: .Johns Hopkins Press, 1976.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in
an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton
and Co., 1978.
Leavis, F.R. "Shelley." In Revaluation: Tradition and Development
in English Poetry. New York: George W. Stewart, 1947,
pp. 203-40.
Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition
in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1955.
Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965.
--------- . "Stevens1 Rock and Criticism as Cure." Georgia Review,
30 (1976), 5-31.
--------- . "Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure, II." Georgia
Review, 30 (1976), 330-48.
--------- . "Tradition and Difference." Rev. of Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature, by M.H. Abrams. Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter
1972), 6-13.
358
Milton, John. "Areopagitica." In Complete Prose Works of John
Milton. Ed. Ernest Sirluck. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1959, 480-570.
- r - 1- ; — — — . The Complete English Poetry of John Milton. Ed.
John T. Shawcross. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963.
"A New Look at Lit Crit." Newsweek, 22 June 1981, pp. 80-83.
Orr, Linda. "The Cosmic Backyard of A.R. Ammons." Diacritics, 3,
No. 4 (Winter .1973), 3-12.
Osti, Louis A. "The Craft of John Ashbery: An Interview."
Confrontation, No. 9 (1974), pp. 84-96.
Ostriker, Alicia. "Drought and Flood." Rev. of Sphere: The Form
of a Motion, by A.R. Ammons, and other books. Partisan Review,
47 (1980), 153-61.
Pater, Walter. "Coleridge." In The Works of Walter Pater. Vol. 5:
Appreciations. London: Macmillan and Co., 1901, 65-104.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961.
Perloff, Marjorie. "’Mysteries of Construction’: The Dream Songs
of John Ashbery." In The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud
to Cage. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981,
pp. 248-87.
--------- . "'Transparent Selves’: The Poetry of John Ashbery
and Frank O’Hara." The Yearbook of English Studies, Modern
Humanities Research Association, 8 (1978), 171-96.
359
Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in
American Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966.
Pottle, Frederick. "The Case of Shelley." In English Romantic
Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. M.H. Abrams.
1960; rev. ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975, pp. 366-83.
Quintilian. The Institutio Oratoria. Leob Classical Library. Trans.
H.E. Butler. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964. Vol. 3.
Scholem, Gershorn. Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and
Talmudic Tradition. 2nd ed. 1960; rev. ed. New York: Jewish
Theological Seminary of America, 1965.
-------- . Kabbalah. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book
Co., 1974.
--------- . Ma.jor Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken
Books, 1941.
--------- . On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Trans. Ralph Manheim.
New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Defence of Poetry." In The Complete Works
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck.
Vol. 7. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, 105-40.
--------- . Shelley: Poetical Works. Ed. .Thomas Hutchinson;
revised by G.M. Matthews. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. 1954;
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
-------- . The Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.
--------- • Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose. Ed. Samuel
French Morse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.
---------- The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and
a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971;
rpt. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1972.
Stillinger, Jack. "The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in
'The Eve of St. Agnes’." In "The Hoodwinking of Madeline"
and Other Essays on Keats's Poems. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1971, pp. 67-93.
--------- . "Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keats." In
"The Hoodwinking of Madeline" and Other Essays on Keats's Poems.
„ Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 99-119.
Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969.
Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure
and Psychology of Romantic Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1976.
Whitaker, Thomas. Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History.
Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1964.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Scully Bradley and Harold W.
Blodgett. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1973.
Williams, William Carlos.' "Author's Introduction to The Wedge."
In Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York:
Random House, 1954, pp. 255-57.
361 '
Wilson, Milton. Shelley's Later Poetry: A Study of His Prophetic
Imagination. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959.
Winters, Yvor. "Jones Very and R.W. Emerson: Aspects of New England
Mysticism." In lln Defense of Reason. New York: Swallow
Press and William Morrow and Co., 1947, pp. 262-82.
----------. The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe. 1953; rev. ed. New York: Macmillan Co., 1968.
Wolfe, Tom. "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening." In
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter j j y Vine. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1976, pp. 126-67.
Wordsworth, William. Wordsworth: Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas
Hutchinson; revised by Ernest de Selincourt. New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1969.
Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New
York: Macmillan Co., 1976.
-. Per Arnica Silentia Lunae. In Mythologies. New York:
Macmillan Co., Collier Books, 1969, pp. 317-69.
------ ;-- . "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry." In Essays and
Introductions. New York: Macmillan Co., 1961, pp. 65-95.
-. A Vision. Revised ed. 1937; rpt. New York: Macmillan
Co., Collier Books, 1966.
Yeats, William Butler, and Ellis, Edwin J., eds. The Works of
William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. London, 1893.
Vol. 1.
362
Yoder, R.A. Emerson and the Orphic Poet in America. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1978.
363

Linked assets