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Apr. 30th, 2011 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception39. The Essential Browning
40. The Anatomy of Influence
The Browning weeks ago, can't remember what I had to say about it. I found him mildly disappointing for the religious bits, which I'm tolerating less well in pretty much everyone as I age; I wonder if he did too, they always feel strangely unintegral, but perhaps that's just because he forces so many poems to the point where you have to choose between life being something too hard for us to lift or the lightening prospect of an Autocorrecting heaven at its end. Fitzgerald/Omar's "He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well" always feels aimed at this consoling shoulder-clap attitude of his. A much juster spearing than Hopkins', who claimed Browning's poetic voice was like someone beating on the table with their mouth full of bread shouting they'll stand for no blasted nonsense. Which describes the kind of person who would say such a thing, and a lot else in oft-pissy Hopkins, but never Browning.
I forget most of the many things I wanted to say about Bloom too, excepting about the bits I read this last week. But I do remember noting that the book isn't what his several introductions make it out to be - it's not a career capstone or literary biography or even a retrospective, it's just more Bloom. An essay volume like so many of the others, where the ostensible theme (genius, western canonicity etc.) isn't any more relevant than it is to all his other writings. Some of the pieces are very worked over, some casual - again, as usual. He does throw in more personal anecdotes this time, and explains his relationships with Ashbery, Ammons, and Merrill more fully than he has in the past. I wrote a paper once running through Ashbery's <i>Self-Portrait</i> volume analyzing his ambivalent responses to Bloom, who'd pretty much single-handedly crowned him poet-king in the years previous, beginning the avalanche of awards <i>S-P</i> contributed to - and I broke off after the first four because I was out of space. Bloom writes with some amusement about a later attack in <i>Flow Chart</i>, which I never got to. Ashbery fought him, Ammons embraced him, Merrill dodged him, basically. Bloom does admit there are many poets in Ashbery, of which he happily cedes several to the Language poets.
As usual he makes me much more excited about Crane's verse than most of Crane's verse does, and he wrestles with Whitman's 'tally' concept across several essays. It finally starts to sound like it was to Whitman what 'influence' is for Bloom, a word meaning pretty much everything at once.
Though a couple of his introductions do help clarify this concept, and what he feels poetry to be, finally. Lucretius takes over from Wordsworth, who perhaps he's burnt out on, as the chief influence on Romantic poetry here (including pre- and post). He still isn't ever quite sure what to say about Ovid, relying mostly on Thomas Greene, who I've actually read some of and like, for pre-Shakespeare stuff. Angus Fletcher is his guru for the American essays - someone I definitely need to read.
Weakest points were probably a couple short essays recapping his understanding of poems as "lies against time," which he means very literally now - and to which he's subsumed Stevens' notion of a necessary fiction, I think unfairly. It leads him to overvalue Leopardi as chief or co-chief Romantic, in an otherwise good essay about his Lucretianism. His several Shakespeare essays are pretty out there - not unentertainingly so, but you sense he's trying a bit too hard to outdo himself. I disapprove of overstatements where Shakespeare is concerned, though Hamlet Unlimited did have me convinced the way Freud has me convinced of whatever Freud's talking about till I sleep on it. Still, all fascinating.
40. The Anatomy of Influence
The Browning weeks ago, can't remember what I had to say about it. I found him mildly disappointing for the religious bits, which I'm tolerating less well in pretty much everyone as I age; I wonder if he did too, they always feel strangely unintegral, but perhaps that's just because he forces so many poems to the point where you have to choose between life being something too hard for us to lift or the lightening prospect of an Autocorrecting heaven at its end. Fitzgerald/Omar's "He's a good fellow, and 'twill all be well" always feels aimed at this consoling shoulder-clap attitude of his. A much juster spearing than Hopkins', who claimed Browning's poetic voice was like someone beating on the table with their mouth full of bread shouting they'll stand for no blasted nonsense. Which describes the kind of person who would say such a thing, and a lot else in oft-pissy Hopkins, but never Browning.
I forget most of the many things I wanted to say about Bloom too, excepting about the bits I read this last week. But I do remember noting that the book isn't what his several introductions make it out to be - it's not a career capstone or literary biography or even a retrospective, it's just more Bloom. An essay volume like so many of the others, where the ostensible theme (genius, western canonicity etc.) isn't any more relevant than it is to all his other writings. Some of the pieces are very worked over, some casual - again, as usual. He does throw in more personal anecdotes this time, and explains his relationships with Ashbery, Ammons, and Merrill more fully than he has in the past. I wrote a paper once running through Ashbery's <i>Self-Portrait</i> volume analyzing his ambivalent responses to Bloom, who'd pretty much single-handedly crowned him poet-king in the years previous, beginning the avalanche of awards <i>S-P</i> contributed to - and I broke off after the first four because I was out of space. Bloom writes with some amusement about a later attack in <i>Flow Chart</i>, which I never got to. Ashbery fought him, Ammons embraced him, Merrill dodged him, basically. Bloom does admit there are many poets in Ashbery, of which he happily cedes several to the Language poets.
As usual he makes me much more excited about Crane's verse than most of Crane's verse does, and he wrestles with Whitman's 'tally' concept across several essays. It finally starts to sound like it was to Whitman what 'influence' is for Bloom, a word meaning pretty much everything at once.
Though a couple of his introductions do help clarify this concept, and what he feels poetry to be, finally. Lucretius takes over from Wordsworth, who perhaps he's burnt out on, as the chief influence on Romantic poetry here (including pre- and post). He still isn't ever quite sure what to say about Ovid, relying mostly on Thomas Greene, who I've actually read some of and like, for pre-Shakespeare stuff. Angus Fletcher is his guru for the American essays - someone I definitely need to read.
Weakest points were probably a couple short essays recapping his understanding of poems as "lies against time," which he means very literally now - and to which he's subsumed Stevens' notion of a necessary fiction, I think unfairly. It leads him to overvalue Leopardi as chief or co-chief Romantic, in an otherwise good essay about his Lucretianism. His several Shakespeare essays are pretty out there - not unentertainingly so, but you sense he's trying a bit too hard to outdo himself. I disapprove of overstatements where Shakespeare is concerned, though Hamlet Unlimited did have me convinced the way Freud has me convinced of whatever Freud's talking about till I sleep on it. Still, all fascinating.
