(no subject)

[proximoception]

Reading Song of Myself in my car aloud put the trees back. You know how I spoke of Bunyan's blank spaces? We all have those, just past our circle of focus and work. The nearer trees were the only trees I had, but then the rest were back, layer after layer but all one forest. I love how most cities are forests.

Getting home I found the box of amazon books I can't afford: The Road, Grief Lessons, Hart Crane, American Religious Poems, with Dawkins' book and Grant's Memoirs for Julie. Bloom's introduction to his anthology makes higher claims for Whitman than ever before--he's the future, he's God, he's Christ, he's almost but not quite Shakespeare. And reading these claims he makes, in the past, I was always respectful and felt it was probably so but DUDE, it is SO so. Hearing it discussed in class was profanation--though I had an amiable attitude toward profanation at the time, having just read Walt Whitman.

(I'm made deeply happy also by the new version of Bloom's ubiquitous "the great American poets are..." list: Melville and Robinson, two of my favorites--whose verse I did know he admired--get made full members, as does Richard Wilbur, which no one could have seen coming. I like what I've read of Wilbur's original verse and of course love all his translations...must read more. After more graded things. But those after more Walt Whitman.)

Comments

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Public opinion's inevitably based on absurdly limited information, even in expert circles. Crane would surely be as shocked as you about Robinson, who was king in his day and needed no praise--likewise you won't find many poets praising Frost in the '50s. Probably he accepted Tate & Winters' Virgilian-Horatian version of Robinson, also, hence failed to notice a fundamental kinship. I wonder what Bloom's ultimate rep will be, in academia. He's far too personal for full compatibility with those who feel grownup criticism should sound like science, or philosophy, or at the very worst history.

Something satisfying about "The _____" titles.