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cal" post-Miltonic English lyric is large, but specific and empirical; it is to
be contrasted with those apocalyptic generalities that seek
the
"origin" of
"literature, " but find only gloomy and convulsive flashes to illuminate that
night in which all cats are gray.
Bloom proceeds to test the map on Browning's "Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came," and then on poems by Milton, Emerson, Whitman ,
with more fragmentary readings of others. Bloom recognizes that his
scheme is precisely schematic, that poets have rebelled against the model,
that subtypes and variant possibilities exist. He does not specify these ,
unfortunately, but insists that the basic scheme is there as an aid to reading.
The problem is that a map, while not inaccurate, may still be hard to use;
for maps are necessarily incomplete. Bloom is not very good at binding the
scheme to the concrete instance. His commentaries are almost as difficult to
interpret as the map itself or as those powerfully abstract meditations that
lead up to it. Bloom may wish to guard against further reduction of a
flexible scheme into a mechanical operation of the spirit. The hopefulness
he implies by discovering
the
structure of romantic lyric is tempered by the
pessimism of calling that structure a misreading .
Kabbalah and Criticism
repeats the theory in a new key. Bloom relies
mainly on Gershom Scholem, and is probably the first theorist to use
kabbalah since Scholem 's friend Walter Benjamin . At some points the
exposition here is more intelligible , though still veiled in a cloud of
witnesses from Hans Jonas and C.S. Peirce to Freud, Emerson, and beyond .
Bloom seems to shift or at least readjust his scheme in each fresh presenta–
tion. One might wish he had bided his time , reduced his discoveries to a
single system, however multi-layered , and then expounded it with
magisterial lucidity. But such counsel is by now pointless.
Bloom has usefully insisted anew and in instructive detail that literary
language or form is not simply handed down as though it were accumulated
cultural capital. But it seems to me the poet does not only struggle against
his medium ; he also struggles
with
it. He struggles to express new experi–
ences under changed historical conditions, and he may feel not just hostility
that Milton got there first, but perhaps a sorrow or even an anxiety that
Milton offers him no precedent. Adapting a poetic medium doubtless
involves "creative forgetting" or possibly "creative misunderstanding" of
tradition ; but these may be less hostility than a way of preserving what in an
older poet and his creation is still living. Besides, literary history does not
form one canon, but several. The ancestral voices are many and varied. It is
surely noteworthy that a "new" poetic movement frequently goes hand in
hand with the resuscitation of some old poet. Could not tradition in its
variety be enabling as well as inhibiting?
