Beach Boys: Stevens, Whitman, and Franco-American Modernism

Abstract

N THE FORTY YEARS, almost, since the publication Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens: The Poems Our Climate, scholarship has weathered, and indeed has often forecasted, sea-changes that have al- tered the contours literary studies. Bloom's psychopoiesis has fared less well, however. His signature swerve (or clinamen) has been superseded by other turns—spatial, transnational, historical—and as the paradigms have shifted, Bloom's vertical model poetic genealogy has been undermined by the transversal and mobile modalities Deleuze and Guattari's rhi- zome. Troping the trope a la Bloom has become, if not a proscribed activ- ity, then a guilty pleasure. That said, and even if we move on to consider and Whitman under different rubrics, it would be downright per- verse to broach the topic this special issue the Wallace Journal without first revisiting Bloom. The account the interpoetic relation between Whitman and Ste- in The Poems Our Climate is, by Bloom's own admission, very complex (11), but his nonetheless remains the standard, if not the sole, study the subject. Diane Middlebrook's Walt Whitman and Wallace Ste- vens predates Bloom's book, and although Middlebrook was Bloom's stu- dent, her comparativist approach is not based on (his) idea influence (19). Where Middlebrook treats the two poets separately but symmetri- cally in order to assess the effects a loose analogy between Stevens' and Whitman's romantic conception of the mind's creative relation to reality (19), Bloom anatomizes, in his own words, overt allusions that conceal as much as they reveal Whitman's deepest and most anxiety- inducing influences upon Stevens (15).