Harold Bloom
VISIONARY CINEMA
The inventor of my subject is, not surprisingly, Eisenstein, who
wrote with insight on the cinematic elements in Milton and Shelley.
I want to deviate from Eisenstein's concern a little, and I choose my
motto from a poem of Wallace Stevens,
The Creations of Sound.
Speak–
ing of one "x," a poet I take to have been Eliot, Stevens says of his
poems, in courteous but firm disapproval: "They do not make the visible
a little hard to see." Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley meant somewhat
different things by vision, and their intentions in this matter were cer–
tainly not identical, but they all of them, in their poems, do tend to
make the visible a little hard to sec.
Critics have noted, during these last decades, the apparent conflict
between theory and performance in tlus regard, in these poets, par–
ticularly in Wordsworth. Blake seems just as odd when one starts to
know him well. "General Knowledge," he insisted, "is Remote Knowl–
edge. It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too. Both in
Art
&
Life General Masses are as Much Art as a Pasteboard Man is
Human."
An experienced reader of Blake's major poems, his epics, learns to
set aside the very early impression that there is anything cloudy or indefi–
nite about the figures or actions in those poems. Yet there is a subtler
problem in visualization that presents itself everywhere in Blake's poetry
at its most characteristic ; Blake invites the reader's ocular powers to the
enjoyment of a dangerous freedom, dangerous I think not to Blake as a
poet, but certainly to Blake as a visual artist and critically somewhat
dangerous to the reader. I read one of the most eloquent descriptive
passages in the language; I stare, disbelievingly, at an inadequate en–
graved illumination and then I try, too strenuously,
to
isolate an image
that Blake, as a poet, knew better than to isolate. Blake, I think, like
his master Milton (as Eisenstein hinted) wants us to be more of a film-
