Revisionary Allegory in Late Bloom

Abstract

Revisionary Allegory in Late Bloom Daniel T O’Hara (bio) The American Canon: Literary Genius From Emerson to Pynchon Harold Bloom The Library of America 435 Pages; Print. $24.00 I first taught Wallace Stevens as an assistant professor at Princeton University in the Fall of 1976 when Harold Bloom was visiting for two weeks and sat in on the lecture course on modern poetry given by Theodore Weiss, a poet-critic-editor (of Antaneus, a one-time influential poetry journal). Bloom had been invited by the department chair, A. Walton Litz, whose book on Stevens had come out a few years previously, and Bloom’s Stevens book was to appear in Spring 1977. So, a felicity happily to be arranged. Lecture courses were broken down into preceptorials, as they were known, taught by assistant professors while the lectures were the responsibility of the full professors. We functioned the way graduate students did at other schools for large lecture courses. Here is the poem I taught: “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” Not less because in purple I descendedThe western day through what you calledThe loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I sawOr heard or felt came not but from myself;And there I found myself more truly and more strange. I knew Bloom’s take on the poem, as the chapter from his book had been published in Diacritics, a leading journal of critical theory then. Bloom argues that, along with “The Snow Man,” this poem forms a revisionary pattern of imaginative response to the poetry of the past, particularly to the poems of visionary reduction by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the elegiac Walt Whitman, and the poems of visionary inflation also by Shelley and the daemonic Whitman — particularly the Whitman of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” As the poet looks into the water as the sun sets, he sees himself reflected in the water with a halo of golden light around his head, as if he were Christ being baptized at the start of his ministry by his cousin John the Baptist. Stevens’s poem works to revise this vision via irony into comedy, but not quite parody or self-parody. Its tone is a bit more than half-serious for that to be so. The speaker of the poem, as Bloom never tires to rehearse in his career, is Whitman as the Sun itself reimagined as the man-mountain from the hinterlands of America, called in Stevens’s poetry, Hoon. Here he and the addressee, a notorious blue-stocking as the pale twilight moon, perhaps, are sitting down to high tea, say at 5 pm in Boston or perhaps even Hartford in late fall. The defensive stance of the Stevens speaker, Hoon himself, is extreme, Bloom (following Stevens) would assert even severe. Hoon retracts into himself as if into the sea, even as he proclaims himself an inadvertently creative God, whose ears create the hymns they hear, whose mind creates the golden ointment sprinkled on his beard, and who contains all and is the measure of all there appears coming out of him, including that sea. A thoroughly autonomous self-world monad, closed in on itself like the ultimate uncrackable nut, and so not beholden to Whitman or Shelley or even to the you serving him tea. Does the early Stevenian comic antics obliterate the memories of earlier, serious poetry of the sublime, such as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”? If it does then Stevens, at the great cost of solipsism, achieves one over his poetic rivals, his precursors. If not, Stevens would become only a minor name in the long catalogue of would-be geniuses such as Edwin Percy Whipple. The defensive stance of radical solipsism exacts a price. This is uncertainty of tone. Are readers...