Bloom's Romantic Humanism

...Since the Romantics were all greatly concerned with each other's work (the beginners...

...All love, unfortunately, changes, if indeed it does not end, and since nothing is got for nothing, we also get hurt when we abandon, or are abandoned by, poems...

...Let us call the sieve our American pragmatic temperament, and the spilled poetry the religion of money...

...In a previous collection of essays, The Ringers in the Tower (reviewed in The New Leader of October 18, 1971), Bloom showed himself to be as passionate a hater as he is a lover...

...Figures of Capable Imagination is more than erudite scholarship or innovative criticism...

...The Romantic Revival in English poetry caught fire from the same brands that ignited the French Revolution, and it revised forever the concept of poetic diction...

...In the end, Bloom envisions Emerson himself as being scattered and assimilated by our natures, his "oracular Yankee skull" continuing to repudiate the necessity of influence...

...The volume concludes with "The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry," a rueful acknowledgment that our poetic scene has been dominated by gentiles, and that the people of the Diaspora have found it difficult to sing God's song in a strange land—or at least to locate their true voice in a Protestant tradition...

...In that quest we recognize the highest strain of Romanticism: Blake's prophetic books...

...Bloom denies that a poem can stand alone, or can be read as if it did...

...It is a deeply felt affirmation that the workings of the human spirit are too wonderful to be idealized, and that to live fully we must, at whatever cost, strive to appreciate them in all their terrible beauty...

...Still, the spirit that motivated the contentious tone of Bloom's earlier works may well have given him his remarkable insight into the anxiety of influence...

...No one seriously interested in poetry can afford to ignore this book and its three companions, however, for their aims are profound...

...Of Blake's "London," usually read as a condemnation of social injustice, he observes, "It is a revisionist's self-condemnation, a Jonah's desperation at knowing he is not an Ezekiel," and adds, "We misread because we cannot bear to read a canonical poem as being truly so altogether negative and self-destructive a text...

...This compelling stance makes us want to believe some of Bloom's more questionable readings...

...Vico saw the trope, or hyperbolic language, as a defensive mechanism developed to conceal our ignorance of origins and our basic powerlessness...

...The Prelude of Wordsworth, Shelley's The Triumph of Life, or the lofty transcendentalism of Emerson, who gave us, as Americans, such an exalted vision of the self-made man...

...Its thesis is clearly set forth near the beginning: "If any poet knows too well what causes his poem, then he cannot write it, or at least will write it badly...

...Figures of Capable Imagination is Bloom's most accessible and appealing book to date...

...He attributes this not to opium addiction, but to a generosity of spirit that kept the great Romantic from competing with his model, Milton: "a generosity that is not allowed where each poet must struggle to individuate his own breath, and this at the expense of his forebears as much as his contemporaries...

...Thus our native voice is propelled by "the Orphic doom of repetition, in a netherworld, carrying poetry, rather than water in a sieve...

...If the image for our poetry is shamanism, the trope for criticism is passion: "Poets influence us because we fall in love with their poems...

...To see literaure for what it is, the dark mirror of our egoism and our fallen condition, is to see ourselves again as perhaps eternity sees us, more like one another than we can bear to believe...

...that here he stands in his lonely knowledge against ignorant armies of opponents...

...Finally, where complex thinkers like Kenneth Burke can lighten our load by occasionally intimating that we may share a revelation, Bloom revels in isolationism—in reminding us that he, alone, has noticed some facet, has properly interpreted some poem...

...Has Harold Bloom discovered a gap in Freud's understanding of repression, for example, or is he merely juggling terms...

...There his principle enemy was T. S. Eliot, whose orthodox Christian poetry was excluded from the critical canon, just as Eliot excluded Romantics from his...

...Although the New Criticism was not always conducive to an appreciation of the Romantic tradition, I do not consider that Bloom has successfully debunked or displaced men like I. A. Richards and William Empson...

...In the 17th and 18th centuries, study of the trope was primarily an exercise in classical rhetoric, designed to teach by the imitation of models how to attain certain effects...

...And in a practical work, Figures of Capable Imagination (Seabury, 273 pp., $11.95), he discusses specific poets in terms of his ideas...

...Still more unorthodox is the identification of Coleridge and Wordsworth with those "carion kites" in Adonais to whom Shelly cries, "Thou canst not soar where he [Keats] is sitting now...

...Unlike strong poets, critics are seldom seers or shamans...

...oddly, he neglects to mention Freud's own romantic myth of the primal artist, a dramatic portrayal of the individual's heroic struggle to break out of traditional stances...

...the Romantic's search for appropriate language was an exploration of his own imaginative process—the source of his art...

...To call the Emersonian Henry Ford a master of divination, and so major an Orphic, does not discredit the native strain, for Orphism, though esoteric, is a democratic religion...

...Wordsworth's repression of "blind contemplative Milton," for instance, emerges as the Hermit of "Tintern Abbey" through a "forgotten" tradition—the Miltonic Solitary of "Il Penser-oso...

...In common with many theorists, moreover, he is often capable of seeing every quality of a certain poem except its badness...

...For though defense takes instinct as its object, defense becomes contaminated by instinct, and so becomes compulsive and at least partly repressed, which rhetorically means hyperbolical or Sublime...

...Bloom argues that a misreading (he terms it "misprision") of our forerunners opens the possibility of making their accomplishments our own...

...It helps remind us, too, that Adonais is really Shelley's elegy for himself...

...Nevertheless, Bloom offers hope of a new covenant...

...This manner of misreading is demonstrated in Gnostic and Kabbalistic writings—symbolic interpretations of the Bible that are obviously not in keeping with the intention of the text, yet are new "strong poems" as remarkable as the original...

...Every poem is rewritten from the past, and its best chance is to be a "strong poem," giving the impression of a fresh start, "a lie, but a beautiful lie...

...Much of what he has said is outrageous, but it is also inspired by a vision of the redeeming grace of literature...

...Bloom's very style eschews restraint, and his uncompromising opinions have made him a controversial figure...

...Of the two, Poetry and Repression is the more difficult...

...Having outlined the mechanics of his theory, Bloom applies it to selected English and American Romantic poetry...

...we may feel in reading them that they give themselves to us, yet, like the Beloved on Keats' "Urn," they must always remain the same...

...One wonders, however, whether "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was not more of a shaping force than Bloom might want to admit...

...As one of his former detractors, let me state at the outset what I perceive to be his weaknesses...

...Poetry, for Bloom, is Romantic poetry...

...The important issues raised by Poetry and Repression need to be further debated and tested in the refining fire...

...Thus in his theoretical tetralogy, completed now with the publication of Poetry and Repression (Yale, 293 pp., $11.95), he explores the battle each poet must wage to keep from being overwhelmed by his precursors, While maintaining the illusion that his poem is unique...

...In any event, in the new book he seems ready to allow that "familiar compound ghost" to rest in peace, and the assertive stridency has given place to a more self-assured benignancy...

...Bloom holds that repression itself brings about the trope...

...Yet there is a seductive nobility in the image of Shelley attacking his own eminent antecedents, fallen from their early revolutionary and imaginative fervor to become grand old men...

...His love for some of these poems is intense, and occasionally his own misprision jealously excludes anyone else's possible interpretation...

...Blake and Wordsworth, uneasily looked upon Milton as their forebear), they admirably demonstrate the tension Bloom asks us to see...

...With this triumphant metaphor Bloom becomes his own Orphic poet, chanting whatever victory can be wrested from loss, and proclaiming transcendence over life's tragedies through sublime insight...

...These cavils notwithstanding, it must be acknowledged that Bloom has made a remarkable contribution to poetic theory, and that his new books deserve the closest attention...

...Without venturing into biography Bloom manages to make the 10 poets he treats appear quite as fascinating...

...Central to this view is Vico's contention that what we understand we merely incorporate, and what we do not we recreate out of ourselves...

...Freud believed that repression resulted in neurotic compulsion, but sublimation allowed "unacceptable" instincts to be channeled into more agreeable areas...

...The Sublime is the "vehicle of buried desires, by violent heightenings of consciousness or attention...

...Both new books should dispel all doubt that he is one of our most important critics...

...Poetry, as he never tires of saying, is a highly competitive mode...

...This tradition is here designated American Or-phism, after the Greek mystery cult that sought immortality and divinity by means of union with nature...

...Writers & Writing BLOOM'S ROMANTIC HUMANISM BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL ROMANTICISM, Harold Bloom assures us, is "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...

...several of his theories are less valid when applied to the Metaphysical or Augustan schools (for which he seems to have scant respect...

...Although mostly concerned with the American tradition, Bloom begins with Coleridge's failure to realize his poetic potential...

...When Bloom tells us that "Poetry, revision, and repression verge on a melancholy identity, an identity that is broken afresh by every new strong poem, and mended afresh by the same poem," he approaches the unyielding and terrible vision that was William Blake's when he wrote, Los built the stubborn structure of Language, acting against Albion's melancholy, who must else have been a dumb despair...

...The dominant figure of capable imagination is Emerson, "the friend and aider of anyone whatsoever who would live in the spirit"—the true ancestor of American poets from Whitman and Dickinson, through Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, to those contemporary poets Bloom most admires, John Ashbery and A. R. Amnions...

...The point is discussed at greater length in the earlier volumes of the tetralogy: The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism...

...a poem is a "psychic battlefield upon which authentic forces struggle for the only victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over oblivion...

...He must repress the causes, including the precursor poems, but such forgetting, as this book will show, itself is a condition of a particular exaggeration of style or hyperbolical figuration that tradition has called the Sublime...

...But his wild flashes of insight are intriguing...

...Criticism is as much a metaphor for the acts of loving what we have read as for the acts of reading themselves...

...his readings of Blake and Tennyson, in particular, suffer from stultifying closeness...

...In the standard, or, as Bloom would say, canonical misreading, the kites represent those critics whose reviews were inaccurately thought to have killed Keats...

...Bloom shows great originality in his examination of Freudian theory's relation to poetic imagination...

...Here his complex theories marvelously support studies of 13 poets, some of whom are "of capable imagination" yet incapable of full performance...

...Ultimately, his perspective is both tragic and heroic...

...Browning receives his due in a charming aphorism: "Perhaps the oddest of all Browning's endless oddities is that he was incurably sane, even as he imagined his gallery of pathological enthusiasts, monomaniacs, and marvelous charlatans...

...Since his striving for autonomy precluded attachment to any tradition, he was faced with creating the myth of his own origins...

...they are redactors whose chief delight must be in the study and explication of the Word...

...Unfortunately, as Bloom remarks, every American poet wants to be a leader, that is, Orpheus—who, while his song could charm and heal, nonetheless lost his beloved a second time to the Underworld, and following a solitary existence in the wilderness became a part of nature by being dismembered and scattered by bacchants...

...Bloom's most radical revision is his use of Freudian terminology...

...Confronting this revolution of sensibility, Bloom is obsessed with what he calls "the Anxiety of Influence...

...And no love is more in the high Romantic tradition than the love of poems...