51. Poetry and exegesis: Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
This is one of the most difficult books I have ever read: harder than Romans and ten times harder than Aristotle. In such a case vanity whispers that the fault lies with the author: prudence and the desire to be just ask whether it may not be one's own. Perhaps the best I can do is to cite a few of the expressions which puzzled me and leave the reader to judge.
‘They perform for us the work of the ideal metaphysician or therapeutic idealist, which is the role our need has assigned to the modern poet’. Have we here two alternative characterisations of the same work or two works of which a poet must do one or the other? Is a therapeutic idealist one who heals by idealism or one who is idealistic about healing? And in what sense is idealist used? ‘The apocalyptic ambition . . . is to humanise nature and to naturalise the imagination’. Naturalising the imagination might surely mean a good many different things? ‘Poems of iconic response’. Response to images (and images in what sense?) or a response (to something or other) which expresses itself in images? ‘Awakening from experience into a visionary reality.’ But if the vision is experienced, those who achieve it have not emerged from experience. If not, the process is surely to be described not as wakening but as losing consciousness? ‘An imagination . . . so predicated against the Harlot Mystery’. I can make no sense at all of predicated in this context.
Sometimes by a small emendation I can hammer out a meaning, but I don't know for sure whether it is Mr Bloom's. ‘The Miltonic belief that the sexual entrance was wider, was in fact an entire body entering into an entire body’. The natural implication of was is ‘used to be, but isn't now’; and since Paradise Lost is all about a great change in the nature of man, the suggestion is irresistible. But then Milton says nothing of the sort about pre-Lapsarian copulation between humans. In the previous paragraph, however, Mr Bloom has been talking about angelic amours (‘total they mix’). I can therefore make sense if I emend was to ‘is for creatures extremely different from us’. But if that is what he meant, how could he have written was?
Sometimes the difficulty is that Mr Bloom seems to be saying what is simply untrue about matters of fact which he must know perfectly well. Thus we are told that the Ancient Mariner ‘is a haunter of wedding feasts’. I can find no evidence for this in the text. An impulse points out to him the man to whom he must tell his story, and the particular hearer on this occasion happens to be a wedding-guest. The Mariner's own preference (which anyway has nothing to do with the matter) is ‘a goodly company’ going to an ordinary service.
The book is occupied almost entirely with exegesis; with expositions of what various poets have to say abstracted from the poetry itself. Mr Bloom is not to be blamed if, in such treatment, the very great differences of poetic achievement between the works he deals with slip out of sight. It can't be helped. If the exegesis is correct, it may in the long run do more than criticism to promote good reading.
The first and largest study is of Blake. Mr Bloom is very anxious to separate him from occult tradition and ‘the swamp of Neoplatonism’; the names of Porphyry, Taylor, and Kathleen Raine do not appear in the index. He finds in Blake many ironies which have not, I think, been seen before.
To my mind Blake overshadows the rest of the work too much. I think Mr Bloom sees the other romantics far too much in terms of the anthroposophy (so to call it) he found in Blake. Hence, while his exegesis of Blake, if correct, clarifies Blake's poems, his exegesis of the Prelude seems to me to make dark what was clear enough already.
Mr Bloom thinks better than I of Laodamia as poetry; yet to call the ghost ‘a puritan’ and to speak of ‘denied sensuality’ is surely to misunderstand. The ghost, because he is a ghost, can never give his wife what she really wants. It is death, not Wordsworth, that denies sensuality. This poem, like the Comedy and Pearl, arises from taking seriously the belief in transmortal life. All three poets are too mature for the consolatory fantasy that this could simply restore an old happiness unchanged. Beatrice turns from Dante all'eterna fontana. The father–child relation is as ruthlessly transformed in Pearl as eroticism is in Laodamia. We accept the negation in Dante because it is swallowed up in the glowing and positive vision at the end. We can make shift to endure it in Pearl because the New Jerusalem is something more than an abstraction. But poor Wordsworth has nothing to set against it but ‘moral babble’. He has attempted a task hopelessly beyond his powers.
In Kubla Khan surely momently (‘a mighty fountain momently was forced’) must mean not ‘momentarily’, as Mr Bloom wants, but ‘moment by moment’? How else could it resemble ‘fast thick pants’? And ‘the thresher's flail’ also suggests repetition.