WALLACE STEVENS, UNBLOOMED

...For Bloom is as evasive as he holds Stevens to be...

...When Stevens won the Pulitzer, the then president of Borden's, responding to a new~paper piece in which "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" was quoted, telegrammed Stevens: "I want to know one thing...

...To Bloom, Stevens is, as I have suggested, a grudging transcendentalist struggling against his true fathers in order t o usurp their priority...

...Bloom's Stevens is the Nixon of poets: a poet compulsively seeking ever-renewed evidence of power through infinite psychological maneuverings and subterfuges...

...The meaning of a poem, thus, is in the violence done to another poem...

...I object rather to Bloom's way of saying, a way that belittles Stevens and makes one wonder why he is worth reading in the first place...

...What might appear to be the most difficutt step in R.'s thesis is really one of the easiest...

...JOHN L. MeKENZIE Bishop Robinson has proved to all satisfaction his ability to combine sound and methodical scholarship with original, imaginative and even exciting ventures in the world of ~.heological thinking...

...Men do come to terms with their fathers, and some even do so gently and with humor...

...If he did, of course, he would have to pronounce all poets helplessly and hopelessly neurotic...

...The attempt is admirable, and one for which Bloom is superbly suited, for he is certainly a master rhetorician and he knows his Freud backwards and forwards...

...R.'s thesis is not dashed off...

...To avoid misunderstanding let me say at once that I wish him luck...

...And it is not only extra-canonical literature that is important...

...I see Stevens not as an "involuntary Transcendentalist" but as a man struggiing to overcome his own urge to the egotistical sublime...

...Nor can I accept Bloom's belated emphasis...

...the Transcendental searcher is after all the more dominant part...

...As to Bloom's second book, which is on Stevens, what a fine book that could have beenT For Bloom is a sympathetic reader of Stevens (much more so than Vendler, say), and he seems to remember every word" that Stevens ever wrote...

...In short, having taken Stevens as his province, Bloom feels free to exercise a droit de seigneur whenever he chooses...

...Indeed, it is not until page 315 (or page 350 for anyone who takes Bloom's odd advice in his "Preface" to read the last chapter first) that Bloom comes out with his position: "The poetry of earth is only one part of him...

...For his Stevens is a ghost of a man battling ghosts with the ghosts of words (etymologies...

...More, he is judicious throughout and his readings are usually apt and informative once the layers of theory have been cut away...

...In other words, though Bloom hedges by calling Stevens an "involuntary Transcendentalist" (p...

...He is more a solipsist seeking a sense of his own power tfian a naturalist seeking authentically to affirm the course of things...

...But I am not being entirely fair to Bloom here...

...R. cites every major work of New Testament criticism for the last century and a large number of minor works...

...I may liken such a conspiracy to the conspiracy of Talmudic Judaism to treat Christianity as non-existent...

...they live in a world of words and do' battle only with the abstractions of time and history...

...But his struggle to do so, or his struggle against his own negations and desire for transcendence, is what to me is moving in him...

...Nevertheless, one finds oneself asking the same question vis-a-vis Bloom...

...Absurd, of course...

...it is on that ground, finally, that I would recommend Stevens and censure Bloom...

...But Bloom's poets seem to have no lives...

...One has to wonder, however, whether even a scholar of R.'s dimensions and achievements can take on a hundred years' tradition of New Testament criticism and get away with it...

...R. points out that other early Christian lkerature which is certainly later than 70 shows a poignant awareness of what must have been a revolutionary development in both ' Judaism and Christianity...

...365), his answer overall is that Stevens is against ice cream...

...R. has no trouble in showing that these texts show no awareness of the event...

...His Strong poets, then, would all be weak men...

...His fundamental attempt has been to combine psychology and rhetoric, or to find the meeting ground of Freud and Frye...

...Press, $17.50 To begin in a mode congenial to Stevens, an anecdote (possibly apocryphal...

...In fact for so many different authors and so many different works such a silence would in any other context be judged the result of a conspiracy...

...Book one is a book intended to exemplify massively the theoretical concerns that Bloom has pursued in his recent prodigality (The Anxiety o/ Influence, A Map o/ Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Poetry and Repression, and Figures of Capable Imagination...

...But curiously, to use Bloom's favorite word (it appears on almost every page of the present work), Bloom characteristically misses the point of psychoanaThe point is not that Stevens is happier in the more "realistic" mode o/ contiguities but that he belatedly realizes the authentic burden of Romantic metaphor, which is to "fail" so as to prepare a path /or the restitutions o/ Romantic metaleptic reversal, the mode o/ transumption...

...It is exposed in a book of 360 pages devoted to dating alone, only one of the questions of "general introduction," although R. cannot escape entirely the questions of authorship...

...Surely no one ever pushed the argument from silence so far...

...But that doesn't bother Bloom, who holds repression, as he does oedipal fixation, to be a sign not of neurosis but of vitality...

...Stevens to begin with is a poet who can be terribly cold, which even the most sympathetic of readers must take account Commonweah 691 of...

...Which brings me to the central fault of Bloom's book: it is not one book but two...

...Bloom's Stevens is also a poet totally self-deceived, a poet who repressed every motive Bloom considers important in his poetry...

...Bloom, however, does not...

...R.'s central thesis can be put briefly: there is no clear allusion in the New Testament to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D...

...The argument from silence is the weakest of all historical arguments...

...Wallace Stevens' lytic theory, that point being t o arrive at a standard of psychic health...

...R. takes up the question of why the book of Acts ends when it does and deals with what may be called the sophisms which are alleged to explain why a work which was written in 85 after Peter and Paul had died in a persecution of Roman Christians, Palestinian Judaism and Jewish Christianity had been annihilated, and the Roman empire had had its own internal revolution, should 28 October 1977:692...

...Naturally," R. says, "if one presumes to challenge the scientific establishment in any field one must be prepared to substantiate one's case in some detail...

...But neither in his book on Stevens nor, odder yet, in his essay on Coleridge does Bloom relate his ideas on the poetic-oedipal to ego development...

...Poetic influence, then, is not what it seems (nor is anything else), as Bloom says overtly in his essay on Coleridge in Figures of Capable Imag_9 ination...

...Redat|ng t h e New Testament JOHN A. T. ROBINSON Westminster, $15...

...Cannot poets do the same with respect to their less threatening metaphorical fathers...

...Therefore, by an easy corollary, they wrote before the event...

...Indeed, one wonders what moves Bloom (he says that he is moved almost as often as he observes how "curious" something is or that " - is the most .. in all of Stevens"-such mannerism should h~ve been expunged...

...If not, the problem, surely, lies, as it perhaps did for Coleridge, in the sphere of ego development rather than in that of rhetoric...

...Emerson and Whitman made Stevens uneasy not because he wanted to be them, but because he wished to purge himself o f their attraction...

...But book one does not go well with book two...

...Are you for or against ice cream...

...And that is no wonder given Bloom's picture of Stevens---a heavyweight taking on just about the whole nineteenth century in a desperate struggle to prove his anteriority...

...In other words, I find that Stevens was, though often with much hesitation, for ice cream...

...357) and saying that "full transcendence is not available to Stevens" (p...

...Perhaps Stevens, a perspectivist, allows for such a reading...

...What he says about the relation of Stevens to Emerson and Whitman, both of whom did trouble Stevens, is of note...

...Perhaps Stevens did not reach that point...

...The strong poet deliberately, albeit hnconsciously, misinterprets his predecessors so as to claim their territory for himself...

...For one thing, the compounding of motives leads to a writing style that is all~ but unreadablemnot just dense, but simply poor...

...Rather, he compounds the coldness so that Stevens seems frozen to the core, icier than his own snow man...

...A widely used work of general introduction, the English translation of Feine-BehmKiimmel, runs to 384 pages without the bibliography...

...But my Stevens, like that of J. Hillis Miller (Poets of Reality), is quite another bird...

...It is impossible that in twenty-seven books written by members o f a dissident Jewish sect, most of them Jews, this catastrophe of Judaism should not be mentioned...

...Therefore the authors were unaware of the catastrophe...

...Redating the New Testament shows no diminution in the scholarly virtues just enumerated...

...So Bloom thinks nothing of contradicting at every point Stevens's own statements on his work, of using etymologies to subvert surface meanings, and of forcing Stevens into a mold that Stevens himself objected to vigorously...

...There are very few New Testament texts which can be even adduced as allusions to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and most of these are found in the "synoptic apocalypses" of Matthew and Luke...

...Then, Bloom's theorizing fosters a depersonalization of Stevens that Stevens of all poets can least afford...

...What Bloom overlooks is that in the sphere of family relationships itself oedipal fixation is not necessarily the rule...

...He argues that the treatment of the temple and sacrifices in the epistle to the Hebrews could be written after 70 only if the author used conscious literary devices to conteal his knowledge of the end of temple, priesthood and liturgy--a catastrophe which would have strengthened his argument...

...but when the silence is total, it raises questions...

...Missing the point, he finds nothing amiss in his view that the relation between a "strong" poet of one generation to that of an earlier generation is one of deep, fierce oedipal conflict...

...The true sublime as I feel it in Stevens is not the egotistical sublime of Whitmanesque will and power, but the antisublime (from the perspective of the egotistical sublime) of the acceptance of necessity, of celebrating the bloom on the plum in all its ephemerality, of effacing one's narcissism to the point of saying "yes" with conviction...