Harold Bloom's standards; book review.
bookburn
Sunday, April 4, 2004)
Reviewed by Martin Rubin
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The Best Poems of the English Language: Selected and with commentary,
by Harold Bloom. HARPERCOLLINS; 1,008 PAGES; $34.95
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One of the features of 20th century literary criticism was the battle
to reshape the canon of great works. Not content with what they saw as
the outmoded Victorian valuations of literature, Modernists from T.S.
Eliot to the denizens of Bloomsbury shook things up. Soon the impulse
had Donne elevated above Shakespeare and Milton, while the hapless
Romantics were knocked off the pedestal on which even censorious
Victorians had placed them.
Educated in the school of New Criticism that had codified the
strictures of Modernism still further into rigid realms of sheep and
goats, Harold Bloom had the originality and courage to resist the
orthodoxies of his day and, like his great exemplar, the Romantic poet
William Blake, sought to make his own system rather than be enslaved
by one unsympathetic to his genius. And so, Bloom entered the
visionary company of critics in order to do nothing less than shape
his own canon of what is truly great in literature.
In the past decade, Bloom has attempted to define the entire "Western
Canon," first in his eponymous 1994 book and subsequently in the more
concentrated but farther-reaching tome "Genius." Now in this anthology
of "The Best Poems in the English Language," he establishes a
comprehensive collection of what has been achieved in this sphere in
the past 600 years.
Ever a vigilant warrior in the culture wars, Bloom valiantly defends
the value of intrinsic excellence in selecting the poems: "What makes
one poem better than another? The question, always central to the art
of reading poetry, is more crucial today than ever before, since
extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, and assorted ideologies increasingly constitute the
grounds for judgment in the educational institutions and the media of
the English-speaking world."
With a typical mixture of humility and sure-footed grandeur, Bloom
describes "The Best Poems of the English Language" as "the anthology
I've always wanted to possess. It reflects sixty years of deep and
passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart
Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my life
from my twelfth year onward." And this is the key to so much that is
in these pages; not only the selection, brilliant as that is, but also
the learning, the understanding, the profound feeling for all that is
great in poetry. Aesthetic, moral and intellectual judgment are
superbly blended to produce a volume uncommonly valuable to all who
appreciate poetry and know that no matter how much they know and love
it, there are always greater understandings just over the horizon.
In a parallel to Leonard Bernstein's insight into the inevitability of
Beethoven's music, Bloom points to that quality as key to the
greatness of a fine poem's structure. He is frank in avowing that he
very much values difficulty in poetry: "Greatness in poetry depends
upon splendor of figurative language and on cognitive power, or what
Emerson terms 'meter-making argument. ' " But it is apparent
everywhere in this book that he never values difficulty for its own
sake, or preciosity and false originality. Possessed of the highest
critical standards and capabilities himself, he offers in his
introduction to this anthology some splendid opportunities for the
reader to learn how to distinguish gold from dross. With admirable
succinctness and ingenuity, he lays out the complex standards by which
such judgments can be made and he even provides examples of works that
make the grade along with ones that don't.
Similarly, Bloom's headnotes to authors and poems are for the most
part models of enlightened, spirited literary evaluations. He is
delightfully honest and up-front about his tastes, not afraid to
distance himself from the common admiration of Matthew Arnold or T.S.
Eliot. Indeed, he can be wickedly funny in straight-facedly calling
Arnold "the Lionel Trilling of his day," a marvelous reversal of the
commonplace belief among critics that Trilling is the Arnold of his
day.
Only occasionally does eccentricity creep in, as in the case of the
disproportionately long and unnecessarily discursive headnote on
William Carlos Williams, an American poet whom he doesn't much admire
and whom he represents by just three brief selections. But in the case
of Ezra Pound, a poet he admires still less and whose standing he
deprecates, Bloom can be majestic in his dismissal: "Pound's faults
are not superficial, and absolutely nothing about our country in this
century can be learned from him. ... He had brought the great ball of
crystal, of poetic tradition, but it proved too heavy for him to
lift."
There is something lovable in Bloom's abiding affection for certain
poets whom he has read, treasured and almost subsumed into his
consciousness, notably his fellow Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, the last of whose works concludes this
anthology. (Bloom has chosen not to include poets born in the 20th
century and recognizes that this limits his volume to British, Irish
and American writers.) But English poetry was the focus of his
education and of much of his mature work, and his selections are
generally generous and reflective of a lifelong love affair with its
many splendors:
"One of the few gains from aging, at least for a critic of poetry, is
that taste matures even as knowledge increases. As a younger critic, I
tended to give my heart to the poetry of the Romantic tradition,
doubtless spurred to polemics on its behalf by the distortions it
suffered at the hands of T.S. Eliot and his New Critical academic
followers: R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt
among them. In my early seventies, I remain profoundly attached to the
sequence that goes from Spenser through Milton on to the High
Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats) and then to the
continuators in Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats,
Stevens, Lawrence, Hart Crane. With Chaucer and Shakespeare, these
remain the poets I love best, but maturation has brought an almost
equal regard for the tradition of Wit: Donne, Ben Jonson, Marvell,
Dryden, Pope, Byron, and such modern descendents as Auden and Eliot (a
secret Romantic, however)."
Protean and authoritative as Bloom is in his selections and judgments,
occasionally even he can disappoint. Who would have thought that
Yeats, whom he hails here as "the major poet in English of the
twentieth century," would be reflected by so small and
unrepresentative a sample of so rich an oeuvre? Ironically, Bloom's
distaste for Eliot and his influence notwithstanding, that poet is
beautifully and amply represented with "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land"
(among others) given in full; Bloom still being Bloom, however,
refrains from giving even a brief selection from what Modernists
esteem as his magnum opus, "The Four Quartets."
But then part of the fun of any anthology is to make every reader into
a critic and make him say, I'd have put this in, or that, instead of
what has been included. And so, because canons are perpetually in
flux, the process of canon formation goes on. This superb anthology
will ensure Bloom's role in this process for a long time and will, I
hope, inspire others to walk in his formidable footsteps. .
Martin Rubin is a California biographer and critic.
(unquote)
Jim KQKnave
had a book like that coming out. He has good taste
when it comes to the good things in Shakespeare,
I'm looking forward to seeing his selections and
comments.
Now let's see if Bob turns to plasma!
Gary Kosinsky
>(quoted from San Francisco Chronicle,
>Sunday, April 4, 2004)
>
>Reviewed by Martin Rubin
SNIP
>With a typical mixture of humility and sure-footed grandeur, Bloom
>describes "The Best Poems of the English Language" as "the anthology
>I've always wanted to possess. It reflects sixty years of deep and
>passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart
>Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my life
>from my twelfth year onward."
Did any of Grumman's make the cut?
- Gary Kosinsky
bookburn
"bookburn" <book...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:107b5a9...@corp.supernews.com...
| (quoted from San Francisco Chronicle,
| Sunday, April 4, 2004)
|
| Reviewed by Martin Rubin
| --------------------------------------------------------------------
--
| ---------
|
| The Best Poems of the English Language: Selected and with
commentary,
| by Harold Bloom. HARPERCOLLINS; 1,008 PAGES; $34.95
| With a typical mixture of humility and sure-footed grandeur, Bloom
| describes "The Best Poems of the English Language" as "the anthology
| I've always wanted to possess. It reflects sixty years of deep and
| passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart
| Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my
life
| from my twelfth year onward."
I'm not sure, but my impression is that Bloom's anthology celebrating
Hart Crane will be criticised, probably because, while Bloom has
already written an appreciative introduction to the *Centennial
Edition* of Crane in '99, as the following commentary by Ormsby shows,
Crane has not recived popular acceptance in the past, due to such
things as Crane's homosexuality, suicide at 33 by jumping off a ship,
despisal by rival poets, and use of pseudo-Elizabethan language. And
there seems to be reaction to "homotextual" literary criticism that
finds inappropriate sexual biases.
(quote)
The last Elizabethan:
Hart Crane at 100
by Eric Ormsby
With that odd mixture of verbal genius and sheer bumpkinship that he
so distinctively embodied from the beginning, Hart Crane plundered and
ransacked the English language, especially the diction and vocabulary
of the Elizabethans, like a buccaneer let loose in the royal treasure
chamber. The verses he composed for his lover, the Danish sailor Emil
Opffer, probably around 1925, testify to this fiercely confiscatory
impulse, at once tender and swashbuckling:
(snip of *Centenial Edition* timely treasures)
This is apposite, for Crane was the last, and easily the finest, of
our poets to whom the full-throated sublime seemed to come as
naturally as the air he breathed. For a long time now, the
enshrinement of the quotidian has dislodged the visionary, the noble
and the sublime; indeed, the latter are seen as laughable if not
downright fraudulent. Such poetic rivals as William Carlos Williams,
who despised Crane's work, have prevailed; the ecstatic buccaneer has
been elbowed aside by the vandal in muddy galoshes. . . . . In
reaction against T. S. Eliot, and especially The Waste Land (which for
him signified an "impasse"), Crane worked to articulate a voice that
was radiantly affirmative while remaining unmistakably modern. . . .
. (In his introduction, Bloom argues, rightly in my opinion, that
The Bridge is "uneven certainly but beyond The Waste Land in
aspiration and in accomplishment.") Of the four or five
twentieth-century American poets who are his peers, how is it that
Crane alone has had virtually no "school," no following, no imitators?
Curious as it may sound, Crane's modernity is closely entwined with
his adoption of Elizabethan or pseudo-Elizabethan language. In the
plays and poems of Marlowe, Webster, and Shakespeare, Crane found a
language in the act of discovering the true vastness of the world and
astonishing itself as it did so; he also confronted a mode of
expression fully commensurate with his most incandescent visions.
Crane's ebullient modernity was reflected not only in his love of,
say, the cinema or the automobile or in his rapturous hymns to the
machine (his "oilrinsed circles of blind ecstasy"!), but also in his
appropriation of a language that encompassed all extremes between high
and low styles-from Lear's rage to his Fool's gibes-and that might
modulate with ease between solemn discourse and subway chat.
(snip of the rest, which may be read at:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/feb01/crane.htm
bb
|
Bob Grumman
Almost. He's a moron, but avoided showing it as much as he could have by
avoiding the work of poets born in 1900 or later. Since he just repeats
received opinions for pre-20th-Century poets, he can't go too wrong about them.
He is, of course, lethally stupid in his evaluation of those poets born before
1900 who wrote their greatest works in the 20th-century (though occasionally
right for the wrong reasons about a few). I'll probably read his book--alas, it
will almost certainly be bought for my high school's library. I do enjoy
reading him, and I agree with most of his standard opinions. Here's a bet: that
he won't define any of his silly terms, he'll just tell you who they apply to,
who not. (To show where I stand, let me add that, for me, his probable number
two poet, Emily Dickinson, is to his probable last-place poet, Ezra Pound,
approximately as Oxford at the age of eight was to Shakespeare at the age of
35.) Okay, now let's get back to just what Jesus's needle was.
--Bob G.
Bob Grumman
Only nine, but I wouldn't let the lout use them.
--Bob G.
Jim KQKnave
>
> Almost. He's a moron, but avoided showing it as much as he could have by
> avoiding the work of poets born in 1900 or later. Since he just repeats
> received opinions for pre-20th-Century poets, he can't go too wrong about them.
> He is, of course, lethally stupid in his evaluation of those poets born before
> 1900 who wrote their greatest works in the 20th-century (though occasionally
> right for the wrong reasons about a few). I'll probably read his book--alas, it
> will almost certainly be bought for my high school's library. I do enjoy
> reading him, and I agree with most of his standard opinions. Here's a bet: that
> he won't define any of his silly terms, he'll just tell you who they apply to,
> who not. (To show where I stand, let me add that, for me, his probable number
> two poet, Emily Dickinson, is to his probable last-place poet, Ezra Pound,
> approximately as Oxford at the age of eight was to Shakespeare at the age of
> 35.) Okay, now let's get back to just what Jesus's needle was.
I'm reading him now, and it's a pretty good anthology as long as you
realize that the choices are just his personal opinions. He has insights,
not just standard opinions, about many things. He thinks for instance
that Shakespeare's Edmund in KL is Shakespeare's take on Christopher
Marlowe.
I don't like Whitman much at all, but he does and included a poem I
hadn't read before, or at least don't remember reading, "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry" which is pretty good. But he doesn't include anything from
E.E. Cummings, who wrote several poems that are my favorites, yet he
includes what must be a personal favorite of his, Hart Crane, who to
me is the Father of All Bad Magazine Poetry. Way too much Dickinson
too, I can only take so much metaphysical doggerel in one sitting. Yet
he includes John Clare. He has 8-10 20th century poets like Allen Tate,
but none very recent, like Seamus Heaney. As I said, they are just
his personal choices.
Jim
Bob Grumman
I agree that he sometimes says interesting things about poets, which is why I do
enjoy reading him. But, to me, his interesting comments are just minor
(dogmatic) spins put on received views of more than sufficiently described and
catalogued museum pieces, and I like a lot of museum pieces. As for
20th-Century poets, he only includes work by poets born before 1900.
If I were asked to do an anthology like his, with no work by poets born after
1900, it would not be all that much different from his, I suspect. I'd have no
poems by people no one's heard of, and many of the same poems he has. The main
difference is that I'd have many more poems by the innovative modernists like
Eliot, Cummings and Pound than he has. He seems not to have appreciated any
technical breakthrough in poetry since Whitman. Now that I think on it, I am
fairly sure that I would not be able to make any interesting comments on the
works I chose. I'd much prefer doing an anthology of poems by living poets. I
could say a little of interest about some of them, and the long-dead don't need
career boosts.
--Bob G.
Jim KQKnave
> I agree that he sometimes says interesting things about poets, which is why I do
> enjoy reading him. But, to me, his interesting comments are just minor
> (dogmatic) spins put on received views of more than sufficiently described and
> catalogued museum pieces, and I like a lot of museum pieces. As for
> 20th-Century poets, he only includes work by poets born before 1900.
>
> If I were asked to do an anthology like his, with no work by poets born after
> 1900, it would not be all that much different from his, I suspect. I'd have no
> poems by people no one's heard of, and many of the same poems he has. The main
> difference is that I'd have many more poems by the innovative modernists like
> Eliot, Cummings and Pound than he has. He seems not to have appreciated any
> technical breakthrough in poetry since Whitman. Now that I think on it, I am
> fairly sure that I would not be able to make any interesting comments on the
> works I chose. I'd much prefer doing an anthology of poems by living poets. I
> could say a little of interest about some of them, and the long-dead don't need
> career boosts.
Well...there is more than one purpose for commentary. I don't think of these
things in terms of career boosts. It's still possible to say interesting
things about Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, etc.
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Bob Grumman
>news:<c59h5...@drn.newsguy.com>...
>>I agree that he sometimes says interesting things about poets, which is why I do
>> enjoy reading him. But, to me, his interesting comments are just minor
>>(dogmatic) spins put on received views of more than sufficiently described and
>> catalogued museum pieces, and I like a lot of museum pieces. As for
>> 20th-Century poets, he only includes work by poets born before 1900.
>>
>> If I were asked to do an anthology like his, with no work by poets born after
>>1900, it would not be all that much different from his, I suspect. I'd have no
>>poems by people no one's heard of, and many of the same poems he has. The main
>> difference is that I'd have many more poems by the innovative modernists like
>> Eliot, Cummings and Pound than he has. He seems not to have appreciated any
>> technical breakthrough in poetry since Whitman. Now that I think on it, I am
>> fairly sure that I would not be able to make any interesting comments on the
>>works I chose. I'd much prefer doing an anthology of poems by living poets. I
>>could say a little of interest about some of them, and the long-dead don't need
>> career boosts.
>
>Well...there is more than one purpose for commentary. I don't think of these
>things in terms of career boosts.
Few people do, which is why so many of the best artists only get their career
boosts long after they're dead--from people making more from the career boosts
they administer in a week than the artists made in their whole lives.
>It's still possible to say interesting
>things about Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, etc.
Sure. I suppose even I could. But I'd prefer to make ten interesting comments
about modern Shakespeares, Spensers, and Donnes no one else has made ANY
interesting comments about than drudge out a few fractions of interesting
comments about poets hundreds have said interesting things about, and no
contemporary has said as many as two semi-interesting NEW (sane) things about.
--Bob G.
Gary Kosinsky
>In article <716b251.04041...@posting.google.com>, Jim KQKnave says...
>>It's still possible to say interesting
>>things about Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, etc.
>
>Sure. I suppose even I could. But I'd prefer to make ten interesting comments
>about modern Shakespeares, Spensers, and Donnes no one else has made ANY
>interesting comments about than drudge out a few fractions of interesting
>comments about poets hundreds have said interesting things about, and no
>contemporary has said as many as two semi-interesting NEW (sane) things about.
Just out of curiosity, Bob, which relatively unknown modern poet, other
than yourself ;), do you think will garner major attention in later years?
- Gary Kosinsky
bookburn
"Bob Grumman" <Bob_m...@newsguy.com> wrote in message I'd much
prefer doing an anthology of poems by living poets. I
| Sure. I suppose even I could. But I'd prefer to make ten
interesting comments| about modern Shakespeares, Spensers, and Donnes
no one else has made ANY | interesting comments about than drudge out
a few fractions of interesting | comments about poets hundreds have
said interesting things about, and no | contemporary has said as many
as two semi-interesting NEW (sane) things about.
|
| --Bob G.
So give us the names of some contemporary poets writing in English who
will stay in print through the 21st C., and tell us whether they show
indebtedness to Shakespeare. Maybe you could say whether modern
poetry will use Shakespeare in irony, as Eliot does in The Wasteland,
or in imitation, as Hart Crane does? bb
. Will the tendency to Shakespeare be ironic as in Eliot's "The
Wasteland,"
Bob Grumman
> Just out of curiosity, Bob, which relatively unknown modern poet, other
>than yourself ;), do you think will garner major attention in later years?
>
>
>- Gary Kosinsky
Five or more of the following: John M. Bennett, Karl Kempton, da levy, Doris
Cross, Geof Huth, John Vieira, Crag Hill, Mike Basinski, Kathy Ernst, Marilyn
Rosenberg, Aram Saroyan--or perhaps I should say all the leading figures in
visual poetry, which I haven't here. There are a great many writers of haiku
who are excellent and ignored, also, and I'm sure a few of them will eventually
get major attention. Several language poets older than 50 are starting to get
almost major attention after being pretty much ignored for most of their lives.
From my knowledge of wrongly unrecognized poets in my own school of poetry, I'm
confident that there are as many wrongly unrecognized poets in other schools I
don't know much about like language poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry and
what I call contragenteel poetry (or street poetry) and even schools of poetry I
don't even know exist.
I can't name any one poet I'm sure will get major attention because I'm too
close to the scene, and it takes a while for things like which poets are
derivative, which truly original, to get sorted out. (I might admire poet A,
for instance, only because I've never seen poet B's work, and not know that poet
A lifted all his "originality" from poet B.) But I do think Bennett will
eventually get major attention, and--as I say--at least four others in the group
I hang with. I can't believe a whole school of poetry can have no superior
poets in it. 'specially one wot includes PhD's!
I think most of the prize-winning ones of today will fade rapidly. W.S. Merwin,
for instance, although he's written a few quite good poems.
--Bob G.