Oedipal Poetics

...Psychologically Bloom's discussion is acutely perceptive, poignantly conveying the poet's anxiety about the "terrible splendor of cultural heritage...

...the devotion now given to art is probably more fervent than ever before in the history of culture...

...This is, in fact, one of the phenomena Bloom describes as "misreading," only where he condones, Auden sneers, and between the two...

...For him a poem is not a work of art by somebody else...

...His mind is so far-ranging, and his eye so fresh, that he is one of the few critics of the generation following Blackmur...

...READING The Anxiety of Influence one is constantly bowled over by the critic's originality, and occasionally almost blinded by the highly burnished gloss of his analysis...

...Indeed, Bloom carries the point to an extreme of epigrammatic audacity when he asserts that the very phrase "humane letters" is an oxymoron...

...The creative imagination is, with inescapable compulsion, savage, obsessive, solipsistic, even mad, and it must therefore banish any sufferance of Freud's "rational substitute for the unattainable, antithetical gratifications of life and art alike...

...To understand why Bloom gives such central importance to misreading, one has to recognize how profoundly different his idea of poetic influence is from the old-fashioned PhD-thesis reduction of the subject to sources, or to the transmission of ideas and images from older to younger poets...

...Bloom's interpretative concern is, rather, the question of poetic influence: the interaction between the great poems of the past and the working poet of the present, the poet's sense of his predecessors...

...Thus Bloom's conception of the poet's wrestling with the mighty dead fails to provide what it most imperatively requires—a comprehensive image of man's, and not only the Word's, immortality...

...In earlier books on Shelley, Blake, English Romantic poetry, and Yeats, he brilliantly challenged, with bracingly cranky intolerance, the received critical judgments about post-18th-century English poetry...

...it is his own discovered document...

...Bloom, a professor of English at Yale, is a thinker of powerful originality...

...Blake's lifelong boxing with the giant shade of Milton, Eliot with Tennyson, Pound with Browning, Yeats with Shelley and Blake, Stevens with Whitman—each agon provides a dramatic illustration of Bloom's theory of the anxiety that is creative rather than crippling, a magnificently horrible instance of the son's anxiety-producing rebellion against his father...

...On a less facetious level, a serious flaw in The Anxiety of Influence is the intractable abstractness of its argument...

...Bloom's allusive exposition is buttressed at almost every point, with the stately measured calm of a master builder, by suggestive or abrasive quotation from a remarkable range of philosophical, literary and psychological reading...

...Bloom—brashly rejecting the conventional critic's conjunctions between poetry and life—hyperbolizes the poet's courage in Freudian terms...

...the critic for whom no actual poem is good enough since the only one that would be is the poem he would like to write himself but cannot...

...None of this is unique to poetry, Bloom reminds us, but "a poet's stance, his Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish...

...Strong poetry is nurtured not by the superego, but by that most obstinate of illusions shattered by time and nature—the vision of immortality...

...Hobbled by a surprisingly academic astigmatism, Bloom, in telling us only how to read, fails to ask the most difficult question of all: Why do we read what the poet writes...

...There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry," Bloom writes...

...What finally emerges from the abstract, periphrastic-convolutions is less a theory of poetry than a Faustian urge to expand the limits of esthetic speculation into a visionary conception of the Godhead...

...Yet because Bloom restricts the terms and touchstones of his fundamentally religious quest to "poetic influence," instead of moving his language of reference beyond poetry to a definition of transcendence, his poetics is inadequate...

...To equate emotional maturation with the discovery of acceptable substitutes may be pragmatic wisdom, particularly in the realm of Eros, but this is not the wisdom of the strong poets...

...The demonic drive toward individuation compels the poet-child to declare war on his precursor-parent and, like Satan in Paradise Lost (for Bloom the very form and aspect of the modern poet), to deny his Father and obliterate His name...

...If this is so, it becomes rather easy, if a little vulgar, to remember Auden's definition, in his inaugural lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, of the prig...

...Bloom argues that the struggle between the present and the past, between the dead precursor and the "ephebe," or young poet in his prime, "always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation...

...His account of Yeats is not the conventionally accepted saga of a sentimental young romantic who in maturity acquired the tough poetic austerities of greatness, and the application of his theory to the poems is profoundly persuasive...

...with haughty opaqueness, he is content to conclude that "the meaning of a poem can only be another poem...

...Against Eliot's notion of the poet's surrender to the past, Bloom submits a very different vision, drawn in surprisingly relevant ways from his reading of Freud-a vision of the melancholy ferocity of the creative mind faced with the repressive perfection of past greatness...

...Tate...

...Moving through the difficult body of Yeats' work...

...The price of sublimated surrender may be crucial to the perfection of the life, he acknowledges, but it is catastrophic for the perfection of the work...

...Here Bloom's passion for the extremes of unexplicated paradox, placed under the particularly strange trope "A Manifesto for Antithetical Criticism," strips off the constraints of scholarly caution that had obtained, albeit subtly, up to this point, and the argument is boldly extended into the criticism of poetry as well...

...a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality...

...Bloom's ideas retain a concrete shape and solidity that make them accessible without ruining their imaginative and practical grandeur...

...From the outset...

...what a poem is about, what a poem can do...

...as an empirical method for the reading of poetry, though, as the "practical criticism" he claims to be formulating, it is of no use whatever...

...During the same lecture Auden also lashed out at the critic's critic, who "finds it unfortunate and regrettable that before there can be criticism there has to be a poem to criticize...

...The Anxiety of Influence, unlike Bloom's books on particular poets, is a difficult, oracular, highly theoretical, and deliberately dogmatic manifesto toward a radically new idea of "practical criticism"—by which he does not mean, as did I. A. Richards when he first employed the term in the late 1920s, rigorously close textual analysis...

...Something very like this shift from awe to exasperation occurred in my several readings of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 157 pp., $5.95), and if it seems inappropriate to compare Kierkegaard's religious genius with a professorial discussion of poetry, I must for the moment beg the question...

...he concentrates exclusively on the individual poet's feelings about the poetry that preceded his own...

...Writers & Writing OEDIPAL POETICS BY PEARL K. BELL In an essay on Kierkegaard, W. H. Auden, with his characteristically uncluttered intelligence, remarks that the Danish philosopher "is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly...

...But the few examples he gives of poetry worthy of the encomium "strong" (which he prefers to the hackneyed "great") are cited only in illustration of the unending dialectic between precursors and ephebes, and he offers neither textual nor intellectual clues to the specific merit of the poems themselves...

...It is in this connection that Bloom makes his shrewdly singular use of Freud, and particularly of the human universal Freud ironically labeled "the family romance" —the intricate Oedipal nexus, at once inescapable and dreadful, joining father, mother and child into a tight chain of blood links that simultaneously and paradoxically combine the adversary thrusts of love and rivalry, defiance and rejection...

...When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights...

...In this respect some recent remarks of Lionel Trilling's, in Sincerity and Authenticity, are highly pertinent...

...But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all others...

...In the end, however, he can only discard the implications of the urgencies beyond poetry by obsessively restricting his sight to the Word...

...Bloom is at pains to differentiate his idea of poetic influence from the view of T. S. Eliot in his seminal essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"—that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past," and that a poet's career is "a continual surrender of himself to something which is more valuable...

...Poetry is a vital part of life, but it does not constitute the whole dominion of either God or humanity...

...Throughout the course of Western poetry since the Renaissance, willfully self-assertive revisionism has necessitated "a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion . . . without which modern poetry as such could not exist...

...Bloom does not ask what a poem is...

...Yet one's assent to the more dumbfounding corollaries of Bloom's thinking begins to fail in a chapter of dogmatic maxims inserted into the middle of the book—a gnomic intermission between the scholar's star turn and the synthesizing hierophant's...

...one's nod must go to the poet, not the critic...

...This devotion takes the form of an extreme demand: Now that art is no longer required to please, it is expected to provide the spiritual substance of life...

...Ransom, and Wilson who have the stamp of self-confident audacity and learning that makes for possible greatness...

...In the desperately necessary act of making the inherited tradition his own, he must read the poetry of others as his own-"really strong poets can read only themselves"—by misreading it...

...In his brilliant book on Yeats, Bloom applied his thoughts on poetic influence to a corrective reading of the Irish poet...

...Bloom's particular enthusiasms in contemporary American poetry are A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery...

...not a critical approach to creativity but a numinous metaphor of Creation...

...In The Anxiety of Influence the same ideas are given a far less accessible form-aphoristic, theoretical, apothegmatic, and as permeable as stone...

...Though Bloom uses the Freudian analogue as a means of defining the filial severity and terror of poetic originality, he rejects Freud's vision of sublimation as the highest human achievement, because it is poetry and not life that is the focus of his inquiry...