PARTISAN REVIEW
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But with regard to Yeats, Bloom's disapproval of the whole anti–
thetical quest when it involves bitter feelings toward or cavalier disre–
gard of the human lot, means he is wary of being moved by powerful
lines that say things he does not admire or believe in. Speaking of
Ille's
"rhetoric" in
Ego Dominus Tuus:
"What has begun in Yeats is
that marvelous style one fights in vain, for it can make any conviction,
every opinion even, formidable out of all proportion to its actual
imaginative validity." The quotation reveals Bloom's morally bifurcated
response to poetry: he deeply believes that the "actual imaginative
validity" of lines in
Ego Dominus Tuus
(the ones about Keats were
in question) exists apart from their rhetorical appeal, and that if we're
not careful the appeal may overwhelm and seduce us into assenting to
invalid assertions. So, referring to the first five sections of "Meditations
in Time of Civil War" he speaks of how "marvelous rhetoric has
served to set forth only a complex of prejudices" as if we could
separate the rhetoric from the prejudice, admire one and deplore the
other. So he admits to admiring the "sonority" of "Leda and the Swan"
but suspects it to be "power purchased by the loss of knowledge."
The power of Yeats's rhetoric is such that it has seduced academic
critics into believing Middle Yeats superior to Early Yeats, while Late
Yeats gets better and better. Bloom on the other hand has resisted such
blandishments. By way of establishing, at a stroke, the superiority of
Early Yeats to Middle, he quotes the first stanza of "0 Do Not Love
Too Long," a rather dull (and rather early) piece of Middle Yeats
which begins
Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
Re comments: "The sentiment is doubtless admirable, but who could
prefer the expression to this:
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The sentiment is hardly possible, but the expression has the accent of
mastery...." This confident and triumphant separation of "sentiment"
from "expression" parallels the previously noted splitting-off of rhetoric
from imaginative validity. There is also some critical bullying here,
and in that spirit I can report that one academic critic of Yeats in my
