BO.OKS
MR. BLOOM IN YEATSVILLE
YEATS. By Harold Bloom. Oxford University Press. $12.50.
"Yeats was a poet very much in the
line
of vision": the open–
ing assertion in Harold Bloom's book doesn't mean that the poet is
standing in such a way as to block our view, but that he is descended
from Blake and Shelley, the truest visionaries from that visionary com–
pany of English romantic poets Bloom has spent so much energy in
explication and praise of. What other opening assertions does it remind
us of? Try "Swift was a great English writer" or "Milton's dislodgment
has been effected with remarkably little fuss" or "Pope has had bad
luck." These famous openers come from the works of a
critic
not men–
tioned in Bloom's book but who has devoted much criticism, indeed
adverse criticism to Yeats's poetry; and perhaps the reasons for Leavis's
absence (and that of certain other British critics like Knights or Savage
or Ricks, all of whom have been less than fully admiring of Yeats) are
worth exploring. For although Bloom insists in his preface that he has
no wish
"to
deny the undoubted stature of Yeats's achievement" and
ranks him with Hardy and Wallace Stevens as the only modem poets
whose work is comparable to the great Romantics, he wishes to set this
achievement "in historical perspective." In order to do this he has
written a highly polemical book with an eye cocked at academic critics
of Yeats whom he represents as, to a man, completely idolatrous. Against
them Harold Bloom stands alone, embattled, tilting with the fools or
monsters from the academy who swallow Yeats whole. While they
slavishly defer to and create "current opinion" of Yeats, he (though
teaching at Yale, a nonacademic critic) sees through to the falsity or
silliness or confused thought of "highly regarded" poems like "The
Gyres" or "Leda and the Swan." So his book as a whole has the air of
a book that has been waited for, long overdue, clearing of the air, freshly
revaluative; and its author often likes to see himself as mischievously
insouciant, reminding us puckishly, or hopefully, that "Eliot and Pound
may prove to be the Cowley and Cleveland of this age," and that
Yeats, though a great poet, has "quite genuine limitations" which need
to be examined.
The limitations become evident, Bloom feels, when Yeats's "descent"
from Blake and Shelley
is
understood with the help of Borges's theory
that a poet is not only influenced by but also
creates
his predecessors
