I had modest desires when I ordered this book by Bloom: to read his
opinions about poets and poems many of which I don't care for as much as
Bloom does. Perhaps like Helen Vendler, I thought, Bloom will change my
mind -- about Hart Crane especially, a poet I have never liked. I
didn't mind starting with Whitman. I liked him when I was young but
"outgrew him" or so I thought. Perhaps Bloom would disclose beauties
that would have me reading him again. But Bloom here is demonstrating
Oscar Wilde's comment to Walt Whitman that "criticism is the only
civilized form of autobiography -- ending with a rather shocking bit of
self-disclosure.
On page 47 of /The Daemon Knows/, Bloom quotes six lines from Whitman's
/When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,
/In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume
strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle -- and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped laves of rich green
A sprig with its flower I break.
Bloom then writes, "Six lines of what might be termed 'plain radiance'
finds their only transitive verb in the very last word: 'break.' Walt
breaks the tally, his defining synecdoche, in the sprig of lilac he will
throw upon Lincoln's funeral cortege as it slowly departs Union Station
in Washington, D.C., to begin a long journey through many cities to rest
at last in Springfield, Illinois.
"Inevitable phrasing -- my criterion for the highest poetry -- is a
difficult matter for criticism to expound upon, since 'inevitable' here
is itself a trope dependent on aesthetic experience. In old age,
doubtless still infused by Nietzsche-as-geneaologist, I begin to believe
in what might be called his poetics of pain. He taught that
memorability was heightened by suffering: a hard doctrine, but akin to
Shelley's notion that the sublime persuades us to abandon easier
pleasures for more difficult engagements. In this severe vision the
slavery of pleasure yields to what lies beyond the pleasure principle
Is then the inevitability -- for me, anyway -- of Walt's dooryard
fronting an old farmhouse and the lilac bush so commonly growing there
more of a difficult pleasure than it seems Is my opinion that this is
so an act of knowledge, and in what sense of knowing?
"Is becoming wise an act of knowledge? For Nietzsche, the greatest
thoughts were the the greatest actions. Thinking in and through
metaphors, Shakespeare gives us persons who act with titanic
self-destructiveness, incarnate sublimity: Lear and Macbeth, Hamlet and
Othello, Antony and Coriolanus. Whitman's metaphors include what John
Hollander called his 'hard ordinary words,' terms that are charged by
Whitman with an accent entirely his own: among them 'drift,' 'passing,'
'vistas,' 'lilac,' leaf,' 'grass,' 'sea,' 'star,' and many more Keats,
Nightingale and Shelley's skylark are not more tropological than
Whitman's mockingbird and his hermit thrush. A poet who equates his
soul with the fourfold metaphor of night, death, the mother, and the
sea is thinking figuratively as fiercely as did the Hermeticists and the
Kabbalists.
"Meaning, to be human, starts as memory of a fecund variety of
pain. To inaugurate meaning, rather than merely to repeat it, you
cultivate an illness that is oxymoronic, a pathos that is already play.
Falstaff and Walt meet in this arena and find words for that is alive in
their hearts. Against trauma we /need/ Falstaff and Whitman, solar
vitalists abounding in desire. Better than Nietzsche's Zarathustra,
they realize a fresh dimension to the primordial poem of mankind,
because each creates a fiction of the self that becomes a poem in our
eyes. Meaning is voicing and images we voice become tropes of knowing.
'We can know only what we ourselves made made,' proclaimed Giambattista
Vico, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher, and Falstaff and
Walt know the selves they have forged.
"I recall writing, long ago, that any new poem is rather like a
little child who has been stationed with a large group of other small
children in a playroom, where there a limited number of toys and no
adult supervision whatsoever. Those toys are the tricks, turns, and
tropes of poetic language, Oscar Wilde's 'beautiful untrue things' that
save the imagination from falling into 'careless habits of accuracy.'
Oscar, who worshiped and twice visited Walt during an American tour,
charmingly termed criticism 'the only civilized form of autobiography.'
I have aged not, alas, into Wilde's wit but into a firm conviction that
true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir.
"Poets and critics alike seek to convert opinion into knowledge,
but this means opinion in the legal and not the public sense. What is
it you know when you recognize a voice? Hart Crane's extraordinary
images of voice, whether a broken tower or a vaulting bridge, undo my
expectations, even after more than seventy years of reading and knowing
him. At eighty-four I lie awake at night, after first sleep, and
murmur Crane, Whitman, and Shakespeare to myself, seeking comfort
through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent
darkness that gathers through it does not fall. Frequently, I modulate
to Stevens:
'Likewise to say of the evening star,
The most ancient light in the most ancient sky,
That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines
From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates,
Searches a possible for its possibleness.'"
*Comment: *I don't believe I've ever found comfort murmuring other
poet's poetry to myself. If poetic thoughts come to me as I try to
sleep I'll usually get up and write something -- get it out there so it
isn't hounding me. But Bloom is a critic and not a poet so he is
different. I was here reminded of a book I read ages ago, could have
been a Dutch novel, about a wealthy aesthete who titillated himself with
newer and more provocative pleasures, perfumes for example that he would
flood his room with. But in his case each pleasure grew old and
tiresome so he would have to seek something new. Bloom isn't like
that. He has his favorite poets and poems which he meditates on as he
goes to sleep. Perhaps when he was younger he wanted to read them all,
as he seems to have done before writing the /The Western Canon,
/published in 1994. Now here he is 20 years later settling down with
his favorites poets and poems: These that inspire in Bloom admiration
for their grandeur and beauty -- and, because Bloom is more than a
little bit of a philosopher, their sublimity.
Lawrence
/
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