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HAROLD BLOOM
sect of one (Abdiel), a church of one (himself ) . He appealed to the
holy light to shine inward, and created English Romanticism by doing
so. The implicit distrust of the visible in Blake and Wordsworth, in par–
ticular, has some relation to Milton's blindness, for Milton is the great–
est visionary poet in the English language, as Isabel McCaffrey remarks.
He yearns, most movingly, for the visible, but he does not need it, and
its absence became one of the greatest of his astonishing panoply of
strengths.
There is, I think, a profound sense in which poetry
is
antithetical to
cinema, an opinion expressed rather strongly by Valery. My concern here
is not to say anything about the nature of cinema, but to apply the
principle of Borges: that artists create their own precursors, and force
us to read the precursors differently. Art forms do the same, and the
consciousness of films compels us to read past poetry differently. That this
difference is sometimes loss is beyond dispute;
Paradise Lost
has yielded
some of its primary excitement to our cinematic experiences. But, if con–
trolled, the difference becomes gain, becomes indeed another working of
Wordsworth's compensatory imagination. I want, in this investigation, to
bring a critical eye ' conditioned by cinema freshly to bear upon Blake's
visionary procedure, and ""ordsworth's and Shelley's. Somewhere along
the roads that led from the major Romantics to our poets who matter
most - to Stevens and Hart Crane particularly - the distrust of the
merely visible dissipated. One wants so badly for Tennyson to have freed
his inner eye, to have yielded himself to the phantasmagoria that was
his truest mode. Browning, particularly in the greatest of his lyrics,
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," does yield momentously to
vision, and renews something of the Romantic freedom. Stevens hesitates,
endlessly, at the verge of that freedom. But, to this day, for a full-scale
emancipation from a mere appearance of objects, we need to go back to
the founders of modem poetry, to Blake and to Wordsworth.
If
I ask myself what I remember most vividly, at all times, about
Blake's three long poems -
The Four Zoas, Milton
and
Jerusalem
-
the
answer is always argument - passionate, beautiful argument between
mutually tormented consciousnesses - and never actions or sights as such.
But Blake does more than make us hear these arguments; he stations
the disputants in a context informed by conceptual images, images that
either poise themselves just within the visible, or compel a new kind of
visibility to appear. From their starts, his long poems refuse to seek the
visually remembered world. Even Wordsworth, of course, is found not
by the visually remembered world, but by that world taken up into the
mind, and seen again by the eye of the mind, as Geoffrey Hartman insists.
