PARTISAN REVIEW
III
in the fullness of revelation. One thinks of Blake's obsession with the
sky, "a void boundless as a nether sky" in the
Marriage,
and the
many abominable skies of
The Four Zoas,
culminating in "the black
incessant sky" of the apocalyptic Ninth Night, and contrasting with
the redemptive "Sky is an immortal Tent built by the Sons of Los"
in
Milton.
We are then told about
Jerusalem,
about the sky of
Prometheus Un–
bound,
about how "Yeats stands beneath that Urizenic sky, a failed
Promethean quester...." The gracelessness of this language seems ut–
terly inappropriate to the poised splendors of "The Cold Heaven," and
when Bloom eventually calls it a "harrowing and effective vision" we
may well feel it's effective mainly because it so effectively reminds him
of other skies in his heroes Blake and Shelley, and even in his other
hero Wallace Stevens whose words from "Sunday Morning" are mis–
quoted in the excerpt above. It is hard to see how either "Adam's
Curse" or "The Cold Heaven" become better or more comprehensible
poems by subjecting them to this barrage of analogies with poets whose
doctrines Bloom feels are more imaginatively valid than Yeats's own.
Since for Bloom, greatness seems to
O«cur
when a poem is dialectically
involved with great poets, this means that he spends much of his time
writing
around
poems, or above them, praising a stanza for its manifesta–
tion of something called "High Romanticism" or "Sprezzatura" - or
something Blakean, Shelleyan or Wallace Stevensian.
Let it be emphasized that much of the book is devoted to full, often
brilliant commentary on
A Vision
and on the plays, while the treatments
of certain poems which make Bloom uneasy ("Sailing to Byzantium"
and "The Second Coming") and others he greatly admires ("Vacil–
lation," "A Dialogue of Self and Soul") express the responses of a
complicated, passionate reader. But my overall wish was that this reader
would play it more by ear. In praising
Words for Music Perhaps
for its
song, he adds almost by the way that "For the most part the argument
of the songs in the middle of Yeats's series
is
in their movement, and
needs commentary of a sort my limitations as a prosodist keep me from
being able to contribute." But except for Saintsbury we all have limita–
tions as prosodists, and perhaps "prosody" is not to the point here, or
at least no more than it ever is: for, unless you separate "rhetoric" or
"sonority" from substantial truth or validity, the argument -of
any
Yeats
poem is in its movement. Bringing that movement before us is a dif–
ferent task from defining Yeats's relationship to Shelley and Blake, or
Gnosticism or the Promethean Quester. It's also different from insist–
ing that one poem is of course far superior to another. In the presence
of what seem to me Yeats's finest poems - "Easter 1916" and "Among
School Children" - Bloom refuses to play it by ear and the spirit of his
