Harold Bloom and Poetic Influence

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. Bloom, employing Freudian concepts, describes a poet's relation to his influences as the struggle between father and son. He breaks down this struggle into six different possible dynamics: swerving, completing, purging, daemonizing, curtailing, and flooding. (Of course he gives suitably arcane names to these processes, which I have a hard time remembering, so I utilize some of his secondary terminology). In all of these processes, the later poet reacts to the power and authority of the earlier poet(s).

I suppose this theory of poetry is useful in keeping the critic focused on literary history rather than approaching a poet with a naive sense of that poet's originality, but I find in Bloom a more interesting underlying argument. Foundational to the primary notion of the oedipal struggle is the argument that poetry "takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death" (34). He values the poet's struggle not just against his poetic forebears, but also the struggle for individuation, the attempt to establish the subject apart from nature's laws. So, for example, he praises William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" because it "awakens into failure, and into the creative mind's protest against time's tyranny" (9). I find this a persuasive argument not just because it's emotional implications can be discovered in so many poetic texts, but because it characterizes the process of individuation that compels a tentative and endangered subjectivity that remains open to the anxieties Bloom describes.

William Empson, New Criticism, and Dream-Worlds

There's no doubt much to say about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, but I want to hone in specifically on what he has to say about the English Romantic poets because I think it highlights a problem about criticism that I will have to solve if I ever hope to make sense of contemporary poetry. Before even getting into his description and exemplification of the first type of ambiguity, Empson takes the time to viciously (though humorously) dismiss the English Romantics. His primary complaint seems to be that these poets mine their childhood for private experiences and perspectives upon which they reflect as adults:

"Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration."

The psychological material of childhood is not, for Empson, a suitable subject for poetry. And if the above quote isn't slighting enough, his specific charge against Wordsworth turns blistering: "Wordsworth frankly had no inspiration other than his use, when a boy, of the mountains as a totem or father-substitute." Ouch. Snarky. But I don't believe it's as damning as it seems. Empson unknowingly confesses his shortcoming when he continues his sharp criticism:

"One might expect, then, that [these poets] would not need to use ambiguities of the kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language, or even ambiguities with which the student of language, as such is concerned; that the mode of approach to them should be psychological rather than grammatical" (emphasis added).

In essence, he admits that it is his critical perspective that fails to respond to the poem. He reveals that his contempt is based on the inapplicability of his tools for the job at hand.

But I think this is an unfortunate admission. I don't think that psychology and grammar necessarily oppose one another. The poetry of quality that uses the "tap-root" he describes still creates the ambiguities and ironies that New Critics love to uncover, but they happen at a different level.

I could probably only prove this point by mobilizing a full interpretation of the type I'm describing, but I don't have that kind of time. Instead, I'll suggest that a poem like Wordsworth's Prelude is not a direct route to the past; it is a speech act like an analysand's, full of its own grammar of desire and restriction.

William Wordsworth and the Double

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is justly read and reread by generations of literature students. Each time I read it I find more to contemplate; the things I thought I understood develop new complexities. The idea that strikes me this time through the text is Wordsworth's attempt to define what a poet is:

"[...] a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which [...] resemble the passions produced by real events [...]."

The part that grabs my attention is Wordsworth's claim that poets are "impelled to create" passions. Poets are naturally expected to be creative, but Wordsworth allows them a level of imagination that borders on fabrication. Poets are "delighted" to recognize the manifestation of their passions in the natural world, and their poems recreate the passions. But what does such a recreation entail?

Wordsworth's use of the term "conjure" is particularly subtle, suggesting one the one hand that something is merely recollected and on the other hand that it is actually brought forth. He says that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Both the poet, who is temporally separated from the original experience, and the reader, who never experienced it, gain an emotion that actually exists in the mind.

This "existence" can either be viewed as either obvious or radical. I believe it's radical. Those who favor the belief that the existence of emotion in the reader is obvious are perhaps mistaking emotion for "understanding." Language conveys information (in complicated ways, of course), but to encounter something through the distance of the intellect, to confront an idea, is different than to experience emotion.

There's a bit from the second book of "The Prelude" that exhibits how thoroughgoing this creation is:

A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days,
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That, musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.

This brings me to the double, of course. Two Wordsworths interact with one another, the later shaping the earlier through recollection, but the earlier always shaping the later by the addition of experiences. How often do we see this figuration in literature? It seems foundational to poetry as well as subjectivity itself. Doubling reenacts the process of individuation. And, if doubling is forever occuring, then individuation is not an act safely relegated to the past but an ongoing process. We are not individuals; we are perpetually individuating, experiencing whatever joys or traumas accompany this process.