Harold Bloom wrote and edited so many books that it’s hard to imagine how he found the time between them to write letters. Yet write letters he did, and just as whatever he read, he read seriously, whatever he wrote he wrote seriously. That’s something I can attest from personal experience: as a former student of his at Yale, a grad school dropout, I ventured to send him a copy of my first book of poems when it was published in 2003. I suppose the most I had hoped for was a friendly note of acknowledgement. What came back was a long, handwritten letter, not discouraging, but containing some rather severe criticisms. I still consider it the most valuable and generous response I’ve ever received: Bloom’s reading was pitched at such a high level of expectation that it was both flattering and instructive to see my work measured by someone who expected it to be as deep and radical as that of Willam Butler Yeats or Wallace Stevens. That what Bloom wanted from my poetry might not have been congruent with what I wanted from it was neither here nor there; it was how much he wanted from it that moved me so much.
There must have been many such letters, for almost any poet would have wanted Bloom as a reader, and they must all have sent him their books. But The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom understandably omits Bloom’s missives to tyros like me. Instead, it is a concise gathering of letters to and from eight writers—mostly poets, but also the critic Northrop Frye and the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin—with whom Bloom had particularly intense periods of correspondence, mostly in the 1950s through the early Eighties; only those to Le Guin and to Henri Cole date primarily from the current millennium. Oddly enough, letters from the period of Bloom’s widest renown, the years when he really looked like the critic who had read (and evaluated) everything worth reading and then some, are missing. During these years, Bloom wrote fewer letters, and, as the book’s editor, Heather Cass White, explains, the ones he wrote tended to be “shorter and less personal.”
Born in New York in 1930 into an intensely observant Jewish immigrant household, he’d learned Yiddish and Hebrew before English. Yet somewhere early on he became obsessed with English and American poetry. After graduating from Bronx Science, he studied classics at Cornell and earned his Ph.D. in English at Yale, where he remained for the rest of his life. Yet he can’t always have been comfortable at the university; he was out of sympathy for the anti-Romantic “New Critics” who dominated the English department in his early years there. By the time I turned up, he held an endowed chair outside of any department, but that meant that grad students like me could be actively discouraged by their advisors from enrolling in his courses. (It was alright for me to take his seminar on Wallace Stevens, but as for the one on Freud, I was only allowed to audit it, with no credit.) He was sometimes pigeonholed as an ally of the deconstructionists such as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, but when in an essay of his was included in the 1980 anthology Deconstruction and Criticism, his joke was, “They’re deconstruction, I’m criticism.”
Bloom’s career had its phases, and this collection of letters tracks its first two: in the Fifties and Sixties, a focus on English Romantic poetry (both terms being elastic enough to encompass Yeats as well as Blake and Shelley), followed by the highly idiosyncratic theory of influence he promulgated in the Seventies and Eighties. The early Nineties saw a surprising swerve toward a rather antireligious history of religion, starting with The Book of J in 1990, with its provocative speculation that some of the most ancient portions of the Hebrew Bible had a female author. Maybe the attention aroused by J made Bloom realize he could have a readership well beyond his academic colleagues, and he found it with the bestselling books he wrote later in that decade, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). These enabled him to spend the rest of his days as a sort of freelance Victorian sage, though some of us wondered how someone whose previous work had posited the value of a bracing aggressiveness toward poetic precursors—think of book titles like The Breaking of the Vessels (1982) and Ruin the Sacred Truths (1986)—could have become such a seemingly straightforward champion of tradition. As a young man he had wanted to complicate the idea of tradition, but later, seeing it under direct attack, he came to its defense.
●
The Man Who Read Everything begins in 1954, with Bloom a Fulbright Fellow at Cambridge, about to complete his Ph.D. on Shelley, and the recipient of these earliest letters, written between that year and 1963, turns out to be the least prominent of his interlocutors in the book. Bloom befriended Alvin Feinman in 1951 when they were both Yale graduate students; Bloom was convinced that Feinman had a great future as a poet, and in 1964 helped him publish his first book, Preambles and Other Poems, with Oxford University Press. But the first turned out to be the last; Feinman’s ambition turned out to be fatally inhibiting, and his promise remained unfulfilled. It’s touching to glimpse how energetically Bloom is willing to campaign on behalf of his friend’s work and reputation, but even more poignant is the minimalist credo Bloom utters at the end of the last of his letters to Feinman: “Wordsworth is probably closer to what one wants because he goes naked” (the allusion, of course, is to Yeats’s little poem “A Coat”: “For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked”) “and I don’t really believe in truth—not even in the truth of the imagination—just in the sound of a voice.”
The other poets we meet here were far more productive and far more prominent: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, James Merrill and—a particularly close friend of Bloom’s and a longtime Yale colleague—John Hollander. Alongside these men of Bloom’s own generation, all part of that extraordinary flowering of American poets born in the second half of the 1920s, we find the baby boomer Cole, to whom Bloom addressed not only several letters but the answering-machine messages Cole has transcribed, something his elders might not have thought of doing. More surprising might be the late-in-life (for both parties) correspondence with Le Guin. But Bloom had always been fascinated by science fiction and fantasy literature—he’d even tried his hand at it, unsuccessfully, with his only published work of fiction, The Flight to Lucifer (1979), and it’s notable that not once in these letters does Bloom refer to any work of prose fiction that’s not in those genres—and besides, though it is much less well-known than her novels, Le Guin wrote poetry all her life.
The letters with Frye—“Bloom’s idol,” as White says, “whose role in his intellectual formation can hardly be overstated”—date from 1959 to 1969. They reveal Bloom’s difficult coming to maturity as a literary thinker and are marked by the very “anxiety of influence” that Bloom attributed to poets. The letters to Frye are distinguished by an extreme deference bordering on self-abasement; Bloom confesses a fear “that fourteen years of being a student of your writings has made me an echo-chamber at worst, and perhaps a good student at best.”
For anyone who came to Bloom through the theory of influence he began developing at the end of the 1960s and published as The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, it is surprising that he was ever so engaged with Frye’s thought, which seems to offer a transhistorical system allowing the critic to locate any work within a closed framework of modes, symbols, myths and genres, as if all literature could exist simultaneously. In Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, the individual work’s essential relation is to the literary field as a whole, which does not, in his account, seem to undergo any change through time (beyond becoming more populated). Bloom would eventually proclaim, by contrast, that poems function through their agonistic relationship with a determinate precursor, and strong poems not only create new meanings through their struggle with earlier poetry but actively revise the sense of the latter. (In this, Bloom was surprisingly close to the idea of tradition as proposed by T.S. Eliot, whom he detested.)
In 1969, Bloom writes to Frye of his increasing interest in the topic of poetic influence, confessing, “What I produce seems rather perverse, but my obsession with the subject is genuine enough,” and asks if Frye has any writing on the matter. Frye considers the subject moot: “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament.” A few more letters follow, but White believes Bloom was “lastingly hurt by what he felt was Frye’s dismissal of Bloom’s guiding idea about literature.” It’s hard to believe that Bloom really could have been shocked by the elder critic’s inability to take on board a viewpoint that would require him to radically revise the ideas he’d been developing for decades, but it must have been clear that after this, the two men would only have been able to talk past each other. White quotes Bloom’s implicit dig against Frye in The Anxiety of Influence, and the explicit one in A Map of Misreading (1975). For his part, Frye, in a 1978 letter wrote to another correspondent, “I hope it isn’t too arrogant for me to think that I represent Bloom’s chief anxiety of influence; in any case he seems to me to be increasingly isolating himself from the general critical tradition, and I find his books progressively less rewarding.” What the two critics always shared, however, was the idiosyncrasy of their universalizing systems: just as it was impossible for others to use Frye’s categories—his mapping of four basic literary modes (or mythoi, as he called them) onto the four seasons, for instance—without merely repeating him, the sequence of six “revisionary ratios” that Bloom mapped out in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence could not be used by anyone else who hoped to be more than “an echo-chamber at worst, a good student at best.”
White quotes from a later book, The Anatomy of Influence (2011), a definition of influence as “literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.” It’s worth asking how the critic’s love differs from the poet’s, and whether the critic’s defenses are less perverse or vigilant. Or maybe we shouldn’t even say “critic,” since Bloom told Ammons, “I’m not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, but something odder and less, a reader.” Was Bloom the reader ever truly influenced by the poets he loved, even, or was he too well defended by his own insistent belief system? Yes, misunderstanding—misreading, misprision—was central to his idea of how poetic influence worked, but it was supposed to be more than the imposition of a set pattern. “Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently high,” Ammons complained, but “I want to be ordinary, casual, a man of this world.” Bloom won’t have this ordinariness. His Ammons must be a poet of the sublime. “You want to have made a separate peace with all the phenomena,” Bloom tells him, “but something in you goes on fighting them.” But Ammons insists: “I think the whole spirit of mad-intensity that’s crept up on us is really wrong, really destructive of large, rich, difficult, easy worlds of vision.” For Bloom, only the agonistic has value. Yet it’s also impossible to take Ammons quite seriously when he fobs Bloom off with the declaration that “my poems are minor little things tossed off the way apples fall off trees. … I don’t mean I don’t like them, I do—it’s just that they aren’t important.” It’s as if he’s trying to calm down an overexcited puppy. Later Ammons grows to find Bloom’s misprision more perturbing: “I am scared to think how different my head is structured from what you represent.” His take on the darkness Bloom finds in his writing is remarkably congruent with Frye’s offhand dismissal of influence as such a big problem: “I am not interested in the dark side as such—everybody has one.” What’s the big deal?
Bloom’s love for poetry in which he could sense a gargantuan struggle with the precursors took on an evident circularity when it became a criterion of value: the assertion that by definition great poetry struggles to overcome an earlier (and greater) poetry can never be refuted since poetry that attempts something else is not even considered. Bloom may have read everything, but there’s plenty of poetry he never deigned worthy of his attention. Eliot, Pound and Williams are only the first to come to mind; in his own time, he cared neither for the traditionalists who wanted to rescue the old techniques of meter and rhyme—he speaks of “Richard Wilbur’s smooth and tinkling nothings”—nor the counterculturalists (“all the Post-Ginsbergian barbarians”) who wanted to blow them up. And as for modern poetry in languages other than English? In these letters, it doesn’t exist: Mallarmé, Rilke, Pessoa, García Lorca, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Montale, Celan—all go unmentioned (though they would later turn up on the extensive list he added to The Western Canon at his publisher’s insistence, as would Wilbur). Ashbery’s citation of Raymond Roussel as an influence elicits no response. Later, Bloom would expound the idea of the canon, but when most of these letters were written, his canon was compact and parochial.
●
Maybe that’s why one of the great anxieties that emerges in his letters has to do with which of his poet-interlocutors really belongs in this little charmed circle. Hollander, for instance, was Bloom’s closest friend among the poets included in this book, but probably the one with whose work he was least in sympathy. Invited to edit an anthology of contemporary poets, he worries about offending his friend by leaving him out. The reason for Bloom’s skepticism toward Hollander’s work becomes clear after Ammons offers a rough and ready account of his formal approach: “my prosody has been nothing but a matter of listening,” and “I listened very carefully.” This provokes a response from Bloom that, from a critic (or, let’s say, a reader) of his standing seems shocking: “Your prosody is dark to me, but so is all prosody.” What he really means, I think, is that he doesn’t give a damn about prosody. But then “Hollander, a savant of such matters, has promised to explain the Ammons-ite metric to me.” How can someone for whom what matters—he said—is the sound of a voice not register that in poetry the metric is the medium for the voice? His fobbing off the problem as a bit of specialist knowledge that Hollander can illuminate manages to impugn both prosody as a topic and Hollander as a scholar and poet. Ammons speaks for poets in general when he reminds Bloom, “I think of form as the highest mystery, that point where form becomes a metaphor for the content.” Hollander’s playfulness with form must have made him seem fundamentally unserious.
With the others, Bloom often sounds like a lover in some farce, juggling multiple affairs and trying to keep each sweetheart convinced of being number one. He assures Ammons, “We haven’t anyone but you” and tells him, “You have to keep writing, because readers like myself need you and have no one else since Stevens died. You are what there is.” Ammons in return is coy: “What about John Ashbery or Gary Snyder or James Dickey?”—as oddly assorted a trio as one can imagine, these names might be a synecdoche for “what about everybody else?”—and then proposes that it is “very likely that Ashbery is better than anybody.” No, Bloom responds, “Ashbery is fine, but Ammons is larger and better. He has more to learn from you than you from him.” Yet it won’t be long before we find Bloom declaring Ashbery “THE POET ABSOLUTE” and telling him that the years 1956-1996 (he is writing this is in 1975) “will be remembered as: The Age of Ashbery.” Later still, he is anointing Cole the best of the younger poets while reassuring Le Guin that Cole’s poems, and those of Louise Glück, “do not interest me as much as your poetry does.”
No wonder all the poets love him right back. “You may not be a muse,” Ammons says, “but you are an inspiration.” More than that, Ammons writes, Bloom is himself a poet, whose words “are really gigantic, multidisciplinary metaphors and possess just the fuzziness and clarity, inexhaustibility, emotional range, of metaphor.” And compared to the eminent Victorians Ruskin and Pater, Bloom is “a poet of more deeply-wielded constructs” and therefore “a more essential, crucial, archetypal poet.” Ashbery marvels that “your essay is the only one that has made me think creatively about my poetry—it is so full of ideas that make me want to go on. I think this is because most criticism makes one aware of the dead quality one’s work has for one merely by being completed.” Despite the reiteration of “ones,” that’s beautifully articulated: whatever reservations you might have about Bloom’s ideas, his reading of poetry—of the rare poetry that interested him, anyway—had a vivifying effect. In looking for its origin in the creative struggle with what already exists, he brought poetry back to life.
Harold Bloom wrote and edited so many books that it’s hard to imagine how he found the time between them to write letters. Yet write letters he did, and just as whatever he read, he read seriously, whatever he wrote he wrote seriously. That’s something I can attest from personal experience: as a former student of his at Yale, a grad school dropout, I ventured to send him a copy of my first book of poems when it was published in 2003. I suppose the most I had hoped for was a friendly note of acknowledgement. What came back was a long, handwritten letter, not discouraging, but containing some rather severe criticisms. I still consider it the most valuable and generous response I’ve ever received: Bloom’s reading was pitched at such a high level of expectation that it was both flattering and instructive to see my work measured by someone who expected it to be as deep and radical as that of Willam Butler Yeats or Wallace Stevens. That what Bloom wanted from my poetry might not have been congruent with what I wanted from it was neither here nor there; it was how much he wanted from it that moved me so much.
There must have been many such letters, for almost any poet would have wanted Bloom as a reader, and they must all have sent him their books. But The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom understandably omits Bloom’s missives to tyros like me. Instead, it is a concise gathering of letters to and from eight writers—mostly poets, but also the critic Northrop Frye and the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin—with whom Bloom had particularly intense periods of correspondence, mostly in the 1950s through the early Eighties; only those to Le Guin and to Henri Cole date primarily from the current millennium. Oddly enough, letters from the period of Bloom’s widest renown, the years when he really looked like the critic who had read (and evaluated) everything worth reading and then some, are missing. During these years, Bloom wrote fewer letters, and, as the book’s editor, Heather Cass White, explains, the ones he wrote tended to be “shorter and less personal.”
Born in New York in 1930 into an intensely observant Jewish immigrant household, he’d learned Yiddish and Hebrew before English. Yet somewhere early on he became obsessed with English and American poetry. After graduating from Bronx Science, he studied classics at Cornell and earned his Ph.D. in English at Yale, where he remained for the rest of his life. Yet he can’t always have been comfortable at the university; he was out of sympathy for the anti-Romantic “New Critics” who dominated the English department in his early years there. By the time I turned up, he held an endowed chair outside of any department, but that meant that grad students like me could be actively discouraged by their advisors from enrolling in his courses. (It was alright for me to take his seminar on Wallace Stevens, but as for the one on Freud, I was only allowed to audit it, with no credit.) He was sometimes pigeonholed as an ally of the deconstructionists such as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, but when in an essay of his was included in the 1980 anthology Deconstruction and Criticism, his joke was, “They’re deconstruction, I’m criticism.”
Bloom’s career had its phases, and this collection of letters tracks its first two: in the Fifties and Sixties, a focus on English Romantic poetry (both terms being elastic enough to encompass Yeats as well as Blake and Shelley), followed by the highly idiosyncratic theory of influence he promulgated in the Seventies and Eighties. The early Nineties saw a surprising swerve toward a rather antireligious history of religion, starting with The Book of J in 1990, with its provocative speculation that some of the most ancient portions of the Hebrew Bible had a female author. Maybe the attention aroused by J made Bloom realize he could have a readership well beyond his academic colleagues, and he found it with the bestselling books he wrote later in that decade, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). These enabled him to spend the rest of his days as a sort of freelance Victorian sage, though some of us wondered how someone whose previous work had posited the value of a bracing aggressiveness toward poetic precursors—think of book titles like The Breaking of the Vessels (1982) and Ruin the Sacred Truths (1986)—could have become such a seemingly straightforward champion of tradition. As a young man he had wanted to complicate the idea of tradition, but later, seeing it under direct attack, he came to its defense.
●
The Man Who Read Everything begins in 1954, with Bloom a Fulbright Fellow at Cambridge, about to complete his Ph.D. on Shelley, and the recipient of these earliest letters, written between that year and 1963, turns out to be the least prominent of his interlocutors in the book. Bloom befriended Alvin Feinman in 1951 when they were both Yale graduate students; Bloom was convinced that Feinman had a great future as a poet, and in 1964 helped him publish his first book, Preambles and Other Poems, with Oxford University Press. But the first turned out to be the last; Feinman’s ambition turned out to be fatally inhibiting, and his promise remained unfulfilled. It’s touching to glimpse how energetically Bloom is willing to campaign on behalf of his friend’s work and reputation, but even more poignant is the minimalist credo Bloom utters at the end of the last of his letters to Feinman: “Wordsworth is probably closer to what one wants because he goes naked” (the allusion, of course, is to Yeats’s little poem “A Coat”: “For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked”) “and I don’t really believe in truth—not even in the truth of the imagination—just in the sound of a voice.”
The other poets we meet here were far more productive and far more prominent: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, James Merrill and—a particularly close friend of Bloom’s and a longtime Yale colleague—John Hollander. Alongside these men of Bloom’s own generation, all part of that extraordinary flowering of American poets born in the second half of the 1920s, we find the baby boomer Cole, to whom Bloom addressed not only several letters but the answering-machine messages Cole has transcribed, something his elders might not have thought of doing. More surprising might be the late-in-life (for both parties) correspondence with Le Guin. But Bloom had always been fascinated by science fiction and fantasy literature—he’d even tried his hand at it, unsuccessfully, with his only published work of fiction, The Flight to Lucifer (1979), and it’s notable that not once in these letters does Bloom refer to any work of prose fiction that’s not in those genres—and besides, though it is much less well-known than her novels, Le Guin wrote poetry all her life.
The letters with Frye—“Bloom’s idol,” as White says, “whose role in his intellectual formation can hardly be overstated”—date from 1959 to 1969. They reveal Bloom’s difficult coming to maturity as a literary thinker and are marked by the very “anxiety of influence” that Bloom attributed to poets. The letters to Frye are distinguished by an extreme deference bordering on self-abasement; Bloom confesses a fear “that fourteen years of being a student of your writings has made me an echo-chamber at worst, and perhaps a good student at best.”
For anyone who came to Bloom through the theory of influence he began developing at the end of the 1960s and published as The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, it is surprising that he was ever so engaged with Frye’s thought, which seems to offer a transhistorical system allowing the critic to locate any work within a closed framework of modes, symbols, myths and genres, as if all literature could exist simultaneously. In Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, the individual work’s essential relation is to the literary field as a whole, which does not, in his account, seem to undergo any change through time (beyond becoming more populated). Bloom would eventually proclaim, by contrast, that poems function through their agonistic relationship with a determinate precursor, and strong poems not only create new meanings through their struggle with earlier poetry but actively revise the sense of the latter. (In this, Bloom was surprisingly close to the idea of tradition as proposed by T.S. Eliot, whom he detested.)
In 1969, Bloom writes to Frye of his increasing interest in the topic of poetic influence, confessing, “What I produce seems rather perverse, but my obsession with the subject is genuine enough,” and asks if Frye has any writing on the matter. Frye considers the subject moot: “I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament.” A few more letters follow, but White believes Bloom was “lastingly hurt by what he felt was Frye’s dismissal of Bloom’s guiding idea about literature.” It’s hard to believe that Bloom really could have been shocked by the elder critic’s inability to take on board a viewpoint that would require him to radically revise the ideas he’d been developing for decades, but it must have been clear that after this, the two men would only have been able to talk past each other. White quotes Bloom’s implicit dig against Frye in The Anxiety of Influence, and the explicit one in A Map of Misreading (1975). For his part, Frye, in a 1978 letter wrote to another correspondent, “I hope it isn’t too arrogant for me to think that I represent Bloom’s chief anxiety of influence; in any case he seems to me to be increasingly isolating himself from the general critical tradition, and I find his books progressively less rewarding.” What the two critics always shared, however, was the idiosyncrasy of their universalizing systems: just as it was impossible for others to use Frye’s categories—his mapping of four basic literary modes (or mythoi, as he called them) onto the four seasons, for instance—without merely repeating him, the sequence of six “revisionary ratios” that Bloom mapped out in his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence could not be used by anyone else who hoped to be more than “an echo-chamber at worst, a good student at best.”
White quotes from a later book, The Anatomy of Influence (2011), a definition of influence as “literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.” It’s worth asking how the critic’s love differs from the poet’s, and whether the critic’s defenses are less perverse or vigilant. Or maybe we shouldn’t even say “critic,” since Bloom told Ammons, “I’m not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, but something odder and less, a reader.” Was Bloom the reader ever truly influenced by the poets he loved, even, or was he too well defended by his own insistent belief system? Yes, misunderstanding—misreading, misprision—was central to his idea of how poetic influence worked, but it was supposed to be more than the imposition of a set pattern. “Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently high,” Ammons complained, but “I want to be ordinary, casual, a man of this world.” Bloom won’t have this ordinariness. His Ammons must be a poet of the sublime. “You want to have made a separate peace with all the phenomena,” Bloom tells him, “but something in you goes on fighting them.” But Ammons insists: “I think the whole spirit of mad-intensity that’s crept up on us is really wrong, really destructive of large, rich, difficult, easy worlds of vision.” For Bloom, only the agonistic has value. Yet it’s also impossible to take Ammons quite seriously when he fobs Bloom off with the declaration that “my poems are minor little things tossed off the way apples fall off trees. … I don’t mean I don’t like them, I do—it’s just that they aren’t important.” It’s as if he’s trying to calm down an overexcited puppy. Later Ammons grows to find Bloom’s misprision more perturbing: “I am scared to think how different my head is structured from what you represent.” His take on the darkness Bloom finds in his writing is remarkably congruent with Frye’s offhand dismissal of influence as such a big problem: “I am not interested in the dark side as such—everybody has one.” What’s the big deal?
Bloom’s love for poetry in which he could sense a gargantuan struggle with the precursors took on an evident circularity when it became a criterion of value: the assertion that by definition great poetry struggles to overcome an earlier (and greater) poetry can never be refuted since poetry that attempts something else is not even considered. Bloom may have read everything, but there’s plenty of poetry he never deigned worthy of his attention. Eliot, Pound and Williams are only the first to come to mind; in his own time, he cared neither for the traditionalists who wanted to rescue the old techniques of meter and rhyme—he speaks of “Richard Wilbur’s smooth and tinkling nothings”—nor the counterculturalists (“all the Post-Ginsbergian barbarians”) who wanted to blow them up. And as for modern poetry in languages other than English? In these letters, it doesn’t exist: Mallarmé, Rilke, Pessoa, García Lorca, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Montale, Celan—all go unmentioned (though they would later turn up on the extensive list he added to The Western Canon at his publisher’s insistence, as would Wilbur). Ashbery’s citation of Raymond Roussel as an influence elicits no response. Later, Bloom would expound the idea of the canon, but when most of these letters were written, his canon was compact and parochial.
●
Maybe that’s why one of the great anxieties that emerges in his letters has to do with which of his poet-interlocutors really belongs in this little charmed circle. Hollander, for instance, was Bloom’s closest friend among the poets included in this book, but probably the one with whose work he was least in sympathy. Invited to edit an anthology of contemporary poets, he worries about offending his friend by leaving him out. The reason for Bloom’s skepticism toward Hollander’s work becomes clear after Ammons offers a rough and ready account of his formal approach: “my prosody has been nothing but a matter of listening,” and “I listened very carefully.” This provokes a response from Bloom that, from a critic (or, let’s say, a reader) of his standing seems shocking: “Your prosody is dark to me, but so is all prosody.” What he really means, I think, is that he doesn’t give a damn about prosody. But then “Hollander, a savant of such matters, has promised to explain the Ammons-ite metric to me.” How can someone for whom what matters—he said—is the sound of a voice not register that in poetry the metric is the medium for the voice? His fobbing off the problem as a bit of specialist knowledge that Hollander can illuminate manages to impugn both prosody as a topic and Hollander as a scholar and poet. Ammons speaks for poets in general when he reminds Bloom, “I think of form as the highest mystery, that point where form becomes a metaphor for the content.” Hollander’s playfulness with form must have made him seem fundamentally unserious.
With the others, Bloom often sounds like a lover in some farce, juggling multiple affairs and trying to keep each sweetheart convinced of being number one. He assures Ammons, “We haven’t anyone but you” and tells him, “You have to keep writing, because readers like myself need you and have no one else since Stevens died. You are what there is.” Ammons in return is coy: “What about John Ashbery or Gary Snyder or James Dickey?”—as oddly assorted a trio as one can imagine, these names might be a synecdoche for “what about everybody else?”—and then proposes that it is “very likely that Ashbery is better than anybody.” No, Bloom responds, “Ashbery is fine, but Ammons is larger and better. He has more to learn from you than you from him.” Yet it won’t be long before we find Bloom declaring Ashbery “THE POET ABSOLUTE” and telling him that the years 1956-1996 (he is writing this is in 1975) “will be remembered as: The Age of Ashbery.” Later still, he is anointing Cole the best of the younger poets while reassuring Le Guin that Cole’s poems, and those of Louise Glück, “do not interest me as much as your poetry does.”
No wonder all the poets love him right back. “You may not be a muse,” Ammons says, “but you are an inspiration.” More than that, Ammons writes, Bloom is himself a poet, whose words “are really gigantic, multidisciplinary metaphors and possess just the fuzziness and clarity, inexhaustibility, emotional range, of metaphor.” And compared to the eminent Victorians Ruskin and Pater, Bloom is “a poet of more deeply-wielded constructs” and therefore “a more essential, crucial, archetypal poet.” Ashbery marvels that “your essay is the only one that has made me think creatively about my poetry—it is so full of ideas that make me want to go on. I think this is because most criticism makes one aware of the dead quality one’s work has for one merely by being completed.” Despite the reiteration of “ones,” that’s beautifully articulated: whatever reservations you might have about Bloom’s ideas, his reading of poetry—of the rare poetry that interested him, anyway—had a vivifying effect. In looking for its origin in the creative struggle with what already exists, he brought poetry back to life.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.