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WILLIAM H.
PRITCHARD
by swerving into creative misreading of them, thus protecting himself
from their threatening examples while he is sustained by their achieve–
ment. Shelley's "Alastor"
is
seen as the prototypical poem defining
Yeats's major mode, what Bloom terms the "antithetical quest-lyric"–
"antithetical" meaning antinatural. Rather than wincing at the term
as perhaps too evocative of the great classifier, Northrop Frye, it's
. important to notice that Bloom is not merely objective or classificatory
in
his use of it, since he has grave reservations about Yeats's whole pursuit
of the antithetical mode. In discussing one of the last poems he com–
mends Yeats for giving us his own
... heroic humanism, free of rancor, bitterness, eugenic claptrap,
and occult mummery.... But there is also a joy, not a tragic joy
(which is nothing but
hysterica passio
disguised), but a growing
natural joy, filling the depths of the empty heart.
It
is
a joy of
natural knowledge, purchased at the cost of power, unlike
anti–
thetical
joy, but purchased at a good price. The knowledge is a
finding of limited good, of a strength allowing mystery to be faced
without mystification, and fright without mythology.
This revealing quotation reminds us that Bloom has always written in
praise of humanism, admired it in the late Keats or in the work of
Freud and found its supreme modern poetic representative to be Wallace
Stevens who composed the great poem of man. Insofar as many Yeats
poems insist on pursuing or celebrating antithetical or (as in "Lapis
Lazuli") "tragic" joy, they, must be judged and to that extent con–
demned as fallings-off, debasements of visionary humanism as seen at
its most splendidly operative in the great poems of Blake and Shelley.
It is therefore not surprising that Bloom's favorites among the later
poems of Yeats are "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" and "Vacilla–
tion," where the antithetical soul is triumphed over by either Self or
Heart, and where a humanist victory and acceptance of man's lot
("What theme had Homer but original sin?") is the joyful outcome.
What do these polemical and historical concerns have to do with
the critic's major task of making individual poems more available to
us, seeing them truly where before they were half-seen or falsely seen?
As
in his other books and essays Bloom deals with the individual poem
largely though paraphrase of its content, comparison of its images
and events with other poems and subjective commentary. He
is
always
ready to call our attention to this or that "beautiful" passage ("These
seem to me the most deeply moving lines in the poem") and to describe
his feelings of approval or dislike regarding it. Such unabashed testimony
is attractively provocative and has the good effect of making us test our
responses against his: well, how deeply moving
is
that line anyway?
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