‘POETIC ORIGINS AND FINAL PHASES’-- HAROLD BLOOM

‘POETIC ORIGINS AND FINAL PHASES’

HAROLD BLOOM

Critical summary for students of Indian Universities

Dr. S. Sreekumar

Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities at Yale University was closely associated with Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller. They constituted a group which was very influential in contemporary American criticism. The over-riding influence of these critics and their role in shaping the course of American criticism, especially the campus variety, earned them the sobriquet, ‘hermeneutic Mafia’. Though Bloom was closely allied with Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, he frequently disagreed with their contentions.  “Bloom is very much his own man, one of the most idiosyncratic critics writing today”.

Bloom is very much interested in English and American poetry of which he has a remarkable knowledge, especially Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. He wrote for books in quick succession—The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism and Poetry and Repression.

Bloom’s main argument:- Strong poets are obliged to define the originality of their work against the achievement of their poetic predecessors or father-figures¹ . Nineteenth and twentieth century poets suffer from a particularly acute ‘anxiety of influence’ or sense of belatedness². Overcoming this disablement entails a creative ‘misreading’ or ‘misprision’ of the precursor by the ‘ephebe’ or aspirant poet ³. “Blooms reading of English and American poetry oscillate between the brilliant and the bizarre”.`   

‘Poetic Origins and Final Phases’ is the first chapter of A Map of Misreading.

Bloom begins the essay by stating that ‘strong poets are infrequent’ in the present century. In English poetry only Thomas Hardy and Wallace Stevens show strength. Great poets like Yeats and Lawrence or Frost may fail to display continuous strength and major innovators like Pound and Williams may never touch strength at all. Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, the High Romantics & Milton are strong poets [all the above statements appear idiosyncratic]

u   Poetic strength comes only from a triumphant wrestling with the greatest of the dead, and from an even more triumphant solipsism [the theory that only the self exists or can be known] Poetic strength rises only from a particular kind of catastrophe.

[Bloom explains what he means by catastrophe later on in the essay]

The Anxiety of Influence

This theory is an “attempt at de-idealising, it has encountered considerable resistance”. “I take this resistance shown to the theory by many poets to be likely evidence for its validity”. Poets rightly idealize their activity and all poets agree in denying any share in the anxiety of influence.

More than ever, contemporary poets insist that they are telling the truth in their work, and more than ever they tell continuous lies, particularly about their relation to one another, and most consistently about their relations to their precursors. [D. H. Lawrence says, “Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”]

Bloom says:

One of the functions of criticism is to make a good poet’s work even more difficult for him to perform, since only the overcoming of genuine difficulties can result in poems wholly adequate to an age consciously as late as our own. All that a critic as a critic can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

Catastrophe, [ (in the sense denouement): from Latin catastropha, from Greek katastrophē overturning, sudden turn, from kata- down + strophē turning (from strephein to turn)] as Freud and Ferenczi⁴ viewed it, seems to me the central element in poetic incarnation, in the fearsome process by which a person is reborn as a poet. It is the catastrophe, the dualistic vision⁵ of Empedocles⁶ who was Freud’s acknowledged ultimate precursor even as Schopenhauer⁷ was a closer and rather less acknowledged precursor.

The dialectic [a method of discovering the truth of ideas by discussion and logical argument and by considering ideas that are opposed to each other] of cosmic love and hate govern poetic incarnation. ‘At one time they are all brought together into one order by love; at another, they are carried each in different directions by repulsion of Strife’. [dualistic vision]

Initial love for the precursor’s poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible. [This is a redrafting of the Freudian concept—the hatred of the father an adolescent keeps in his consciousness].      Strife caused the initial catastrophe separating out the elements and bringing the Promethean fire of consciousness into being. The birth of poetry in the individual is similar to the Empedoclean catastrophe of consciousness and the Freudian catastrophe of instinctual genesis.

The term instinct can also be applied to several constructs developed by Sigmund Freud and other personality theorists. Freud theorized that there are instincts for life and for death, and that the sexual drive is essentially instinctive.

Some surmises upon the catastrophe of poetic incarnation

How are true poets born? What makes possible the incarnation of the Poetical Character?

Desiccation [the process of becoming completely dry] combined with an unusually strong oceanic sense is the highly dualistic yet not all paradoxical answer. We can cite the most truly poetic of all true strong poets, P.B. Shelley. The dedicatory stanzas of The Revolt of Islam ⁸ are relevant to Shelley-obsessed poets like Whitman, Yeats, Hardy and Stevens. This is the fullest vision of poetic incarnation in language. Shelley speaks about his experiences on a May dawn. He felt that his spirit was burst and he found himself weeping. But his sorrow quickly turned to sublime hope which was then followed by a sense of loneliness. “To repair this desiccation, he set forth upon erotic quests, all of which failed him, until he encountered his true epipsyche, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whereupon his solitude left him. The closing lines of the dedication anticipates the close of Adonais written after four turbulent years. The last vision of Shelley and Mary shows them ‘like lamps in the world’s tempestuous night’ which will burn for years to come. [Thus Shelley speaks about his poetic incarnation]

Poetic incarnation results from poetic influence, here the influence of Wordsworth, particularly of his Great Ode, “Intimations of Immortality’ is clearly discernible. No poet can choose his precursor any more than any person can choose his father. The Intimations Ode chose Shelley, as Shelley’s To a Skylark chose Hardy, the way starlight flows where it flows, gratuitously. [All these statements are not substantiated by Bloom]. “Whether we can be found by what is not already somehow ourselves has been doubted from Heraclitus⁹ through Emerson to Freud, but the daemon¹⁰ is not our destiny until we yield to his finding us out”.

[Bloom’s argument is that Wordsworth is the precursor of Shelley as Shelley is the precursor of Hardy. It is true that both Wordsworth and Shelley were much concerned about poetic origins. Moreover, ocean/river/lake etc, are not far away from their poetic inspiration. The quote from Heraclitus is meant to suggest that poetic inspiration will come to only those people whose mind is fertile to receive such. Here, there is clear reference to Eliot’s idea of poetic inspiration. Daemons are invisible benefactors in ancient Greek mythology. We cannot find the poet in us until we search for him. Bloom’s statements are not substantiated and they are highly individualistic].  

Poetic influence, in its first phase, is not to be distinguished from love, though it will shade soon enough into revisionary strife. ‘Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli’ is a fine reminder in Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a book whose true subject is influence. Poets tend to think of themselves as stars because their deepest desire is to be an influence, rather than to be influenced, but even in the strongest, whose desire is accomplished, the anxiety of having been formed by influence still persists.

Shelley understood that the Intimations Ode and its precursor, Lycidas, took divination [the act of finding out and saying what will happen in the future] as their true subject. The goal of divination is to attain power that frees one from all influence, but particularly from the influence of an expected death, or necessity for dying. All poetic odes of incarnation are therefore Immortality odes, and all of them rely upon a curious divinity that the ephebe¹¹ (new poet) has given successfully, not to himself, but to the precursor. In making the precursor a god, the ephebe already has begun a movement away from him, primarily revision that imputes error to the father, a sudden inclination away from obligation.

Poets tend to incarnate by the side of ocean, at least in vision, if inland far they be. If some blocking agent excludes any glimpse of that immortal sea, various surrogates readily enough are found. The haunting noise of waters echoes every imaginative crisis in Wordsworth. Here we have to brood on the full context of poetic incarnation, remembering that every strong poet in Western tradition is a kind of Jonah or renegade prophet¹². Keats was like Jonah—“I leaped headlong into the sea”. No poet can escape his destiny. Whitman speaks about the ecstatic boy touching the waves of the sea with his bare feet.

Poetic origins

The incarnation of the poetic character, if an inland matter, takes place near caverns and rivulets, replete with mingled measures and soft murmurs, promises of an improved infancy when one hears the sea again. Just when the promises were betrayed the strong poet himself will never know, for his strength is never to suffer such knowing.

u   No strong poet can deign to be a good reader of his own works. The strong poet is strong by virtue of and in proportion to his thrownness—having been thrown further, his consciousness of such primal outrage is greater. The consciousness informs his more intense awareness of the precursors, for he knows how far our being can be thrown, out and down, as lesser poets cannot know.

How can we know the true ephebe, the potentially strong poet, form the mass of ocean’s nurslings around him?

By hearing in his first voices what is most central in the precursors’ voices, rendered with directness, clarity, even a sweetness that they do not often give to us. “What we see in the ephebe is the incarnation of the poetical character, the second birth into supposed imagination that fails to displace the first birth into nature”.

Poets as poets and particularly the strongest poets, return to origins at the end, or whenever they sense the imminence of the end. The poet-in-a-poet is obsessed with poetic origins, as the person-in-a-person becomes obsessed with personal origins. Emerson is acutely aware of the mind’s catastrophic growth into full self-awareness:

“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments we have learned that we do not see directly but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these coloured and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors…” 

When the strong poet learns that he does not see directly, but mediately through the precursor, he is not able to accept a helplessness at correcting the eye of the self, or at computing than angle of vision that is also an angle of fall, a blindness of error. Nothing is less generous than the poetic self when it wrestles for its own survival. Here the Emersonian formula of compensation is demonstrated: ‘Nothing is got for nothing’. If we have been ravished by a poem, it will cost us our own poem.

Poems are neither about ‘subjects’ nor about ‘themselves’. They are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent. Only a poet challenges a poet as poet, and so only a poet makes a poet. To the poet-in-a-poet, a poem is always the other man, the precursor, and so a poem is always a person, always the father of one’s Second Birth. To live, the poet must misinterpret the father, but the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.

But who is the poetic father?

The voice of the other is always speaking in one; the voice that cannot die because already it has survived death—the dead poet lives in one. In the last phase of strong poets, they attempt to join the undying by living in the dead poets who are already alive in them. This late ‘Return of the Dead’ recalls us, as readers to recognition of the original motive for the catastrophe of poetic incarnation. Vico¹³, who identified the origins of poetry with the impulse towards divination, (to foretell, but also to become a god by foretelling), implicitly understood that a poem is written to escape dying. Literally, poems are refusals of mortality. Every poem therefore has two makers: the precursor and the ephebe’s rejected mortality.

u   A poet is not so much a man speaking to men as a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the precursor) outrageously more alive than himself. A poet dare not regard himself as being late, yet cannot accept a substitute for the first vision he judges to have been the precursor’s also.

Poetic influence has almost nothing to do with the verbal resemblances between one poet and another. Hardy scarcely resembles Shelley, his prime precursor, but then Browning who resembles Shelley even less, was yet more fully Shelley’s ephebe than even Hardy was. Poets need not look like their father, and the anxiety of influence is quite distinct from the anxiety of style. Since poetic influence is necessarily misprision, a taking or doing amiss of one’s burden, it is to be expected that such a process of malformation and misinterpretation will at the very least, produce deviations in style between strong poets.

Poetic influence between strong poets works in the depths.

Shelley and Hardy

In his early poem ‘Shelley’s Skylark’, Hardy speaks of his ancestor’s ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme. Recent critics who admire Shelley are not particularly fond of ‘To a Skylark’. We can surmise why the poem moved Hardy:

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

The thought is not as simple as it may seem. Our divided consciousness, keeping us from being able to unperplex joy from pain, and ruining the presentness of the moment, at least brings us an aesthetic gain. Hardy’s characters experience this divided consciousness. Angel Clare [Tess of the D'Urbervilles] is a kind of parody of Shelley himself. Hardy’s Shelley is the visionary sceptic whose head and whose heart could never be reconciled, for they both told truths, but contrary truths.

 “Hardy’s Shelley was essentially the darker poet of Adonais and The Triumph of Life, though I find more quotations from The Revolt of Islam scattered through the novels than from any other single work by Shelley”.

But Hardy was one of those young men who went about in the 1860s carrying a volume of Shelley in his pocket. Quite simply, he identified Shelley’s voice with poetry itself, and though he could allow his ironic sense to touch writers, he kept Shelley inviolate, almost a kind of secular Christ. His misprision of Shelley, his subversion of Shelley’s influence, was an unconscious defence, quite unlike the overt struggle against Shelley of Browning and Yeats.

Critical Estimate

1. Bloom appears more as a creative writer than as a critic in this first chapter of A Map of Misreading.

2. Bloom does not mention Shakespeare or Marlowe. Are they strong poets or weak poets? No answer is given in the piece.

3. As already stated, there are many idiosyncratic statements in the piece. Bloom does not bother to clarify any of them.

4. There are many statements which need clarification. Bloom’s comparison of the poet to the renegade prophet Jonah is an example.

5. Bloom’s analysis is intuitive and refreshing. He has nothing to do with the beaten tracks of structuralism or deconstruction.

6. As David Lodge points out the piece “oscillates between the brilliant and the bizarre”.

NOTES

1.  There is an unmistakable touch of Freudian concepts (Oedipus complex) here. 

2.  In our times, the poet who wants to write a poem on nature must first of all exorcise the ghost of Wordsworth.

3. De Man says that ' every reading is misreading’

4. Sándor Ferenczi (7 July 1873 – 22 May 1933) was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud.

5. Dualistic vision— Dualism (from the Latin word duo meaning "two") denotes the state of two parts. It is the belief in the conflict between the benevolent and the malevolent. It simply implies that there are two moral opposites at work.

After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. Bloom has long referred to himself as a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom explains: "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. [Gnostic doctrine taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit]. Gnostics believed in the duality of spirit and body: Spirit is of divine origin and good; the body is inherently earthly and evil. Gnostics were hostile to the physical world, to matter and the human body. But they believed that trapped within some people's bodies were the sparks of divinity or seeds of light.

6. Empedocles (490?-430 BC), Greek philosopher, statesman, and poet, born in Agrigentum (now Agrigento), Sicily. He was a disciple of the Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides. He asserted that all things are composed of four primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Two active and opposing forces, love and hate, or affinity and antipathy, act upon these elements, combining and separating them into infinitely varied forms. According to Empedocles, reality is cyclical. At the beginning of a cycle, the four elements are bound together by the principle of love. When hate penetrates the cycle, the elements begin to separate. Love reunites everything; then hate begins the process once again. He also formulated a primitive theory of evolution in which he declared that humans and animals evolved from antecedent forms.

7. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860), German philosopher, who is known for his philosophy of pessimism. Born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), February 22, 1788, Schopenhauer was educated at the universities of Göttingen, Berlin, and Jena. He then settled in Frankfurt am Main, where he led a solitary life and became deeply involved in the study of Buddhist and Hindu philosophies and mysticism. In his principal work, The World as Will and Idea (1819), he proposed the dominant ethical and metaphysical elements of his atheistic and pessimistic philosophy.

Schopenhauer accepted, with some qualification in details, the view of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant that phenomena exist only insofar as the mind perceives them, as ideas. According to Schopenhauer will is not limited to voluntary action with foresight; all the experienced activity of the self is will, including unconscious physiological functioning. This will is the inner nature of each experiencing being and assumes in time and space the appearance of the body, which is an idea. Starting from the principle that the will is the inner nature of his own body as an appearance in time and space, Schopenhauer concluded that the inner reality of all material appearances is will; the ultimate reality is one universal will. For Schopenhauer the tragedy of life arises from the nature of the will, which constantly urges the individual toward the satisfaction of successive goals, none of which can provide permanent satisfaction for the infinite activity of the life force, or will. Thus, the will inevitably leads a person to pain, suffering, and death and into an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and the activity of the will can only be brought to an end through an attitude of resignation, in which the reason governs the will to the extent that striving ceases.

This conception of the source of life in will came to Schopenhauer through insights into the nature of consciousness as essentially impulsive. He revealed a strong Buddhist influence in his metaphysics and a successful confluence of Buddhist and Christian ideas in his ethical doctrines. From the epistemological point of view, Schopenhauer's ideas belonged to the school of phenomenology. Schopenhauer died September 21, 1860.

8. Lines from The Revolt of Islam

 I do remember well the hour which burst

My spirit's sleep. A fresh May-dawn it was,

When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,

And wept, I knew not why;

9. Heraclitus (540?-480? BC), Greek philosopher. Because of the loneliness of his life and the obscurity and misanthropy of his philosophy, he is also called the dark philosopher or weeping philosopher.

10. A divinity or supernatural being of a nature between gods and humans. Daemons are benevolent or benign nature spirits, beings of the same nature as both mortals and deities. In ancient Greece they were believed to be "good beings who dispense riches…[nevertheless], they remain invisible, known only by their acts". In Plato's Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a "great daemon” and she describes daemons as "interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above..."  

11. An Ephebus, in ancient Greece, meant any male who had attained the age of puberty. In Athens it acquired a technical sense, referring to young men aged 18–20. Bloom uses it to mean a young poet.

12. Jonah (means ‘Dove’ ) was the son of Amittai . The Lord commanded him to go to Nineveh and warn the people against their wickedness.  But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. The mariners found out that Jonah was the reason for God’s anger. Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.” So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging.  Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prayed to God in his affliction and committed to thanksgiving and to paying what he has vowed. God commanded the fish to spew Jonah out.

Bloom cites this episode of Jonah as an example for poetic incarnation that takes place in the ocean. Similar things happen to Keats and Whitman.

 

13. Vico, (1668-1744), Italian philosopher of history. Vico's best-known work is the Principi di scienza nuova d'intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (Principles of a New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, 1725), usually called the Scienza nuova. In it he propounded a cyclical theory of history, according to which human societies progress through a series of stages from barbarism to civilization and then return to barbarism. In the first stage—called the Age of the Gods—religion, the family, and other basic institutions emerge; in the succeeding Age of Heroes, the common people are kept in subjection by a dominant class of nobles; in the final stage—the Age of Men—the people rebel and win equality, but in the process society begins to disintegrate. Vico influenced many later social theorists, including Montesquieu, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx.

Lecture notes for PG students of Indian Universities.

Dr. S. Sreekumar