bloom's critical approach to the romantic poetry

Upload: siddhartha-singh

Post on 30-Oct-2015

63 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

DESCRIPTION

This research paper offers Harold Bloom's defense of the romantic poetry and vision which was under scathing attack in the early twentieth century. Bloom's way is via contrary to T. S. Eliot and the followers.

TRANSCRIPT

  • ISSN 0974-0368

    Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry

    Siddhartha Singh

    Harold Bloom begins his career of antithetical criticism, directly opposing the critical inheritance of T. S. Eliot, in the late fifties with his published dissertation Shelley's Mythmaking (1959). Bloom begins developing his own vision of the nature and value of literature, which is both intellectually unique and socially daring. It is his intense predilection for the Romantic tradition which formulates his entire critical writings. . Unlike his predecessors, who challenged the romantic Inheritance in the name of classical ideals. Bloom installs Romanticism at the centre of post-renaissance English literature. Matthew Arnold advanced critical opposition to the Romantic Inheritance In the 1850s. Some later critics under his Influence, Including the American scholar In/Ing Babbitt, whose book Rousaeau and Romanticism (1919), condemned the Romantic Movement as an Irresponsible "pilgrimage In the void that had licensed self-indulgent escapism and rationalist aggression." (Drabble, 2005: 873)Hls student T.S. Eliot continued the anti-romantic campaign, which was further intensified by Eliot's followers.

    The basic concern of this paper is to shed light on Bloom's defence of the romantic poetry and consequently to highlight the tendency to humanize and secularize art in Romantic poetry - an endeavour that seems to guide Bloom's critical thought. The concept of humanism, which Bloom explores, is apocalyptic. "Apocalypse", from the Greek word "apokalypsis" meaning "revelation", or "disclosure". Is associated with the New Testament. The Book of Revelation contains a series of visions and prophecies concerning the "end of the world". (A Dictionary, 1989: 492)Bloom intents to highlight the concept of apocalyptic humanism as the strength of the romantic poet. It makes the romantic poet liable to the status and role of the poet seer or poet prophet.

    In his famous 'Preface' of 1853, Arnold declares that the eternal object of poetry is "action", or more precisely human action (Wimsatt and Brooks,1957: 440) In his Augustan tone, which favours form of poetry, Arnold, as a "strenuous champ of cultural classicism", (ibid., 440) proposes, "All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situation; this done, everything else will follow". (Ibid., 438). Arnold's chief critical doctrines as Ut0ny Ptnp0otlv$ Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 30

    Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry Saintsburry observes, are in fact a fresh formation of the classical restraint, definiteness, proportion, and form, against the romantic vogue, the Romantic Fantasy. (1911: 477) Arnold was dangerously close to the Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century to see it impartially. Arnold's emphasis on the classical restraint of form does not allow him to evaluate the imaginative and visionary power of romantic poetry. Harold Bloom does not entirely reject Arnoldian criticism. In Shelley's Mythmaking, Bloom Is quite conscious of the Arnoldian formulation. He begins with the mythopoeic form and craftsmanship in Shelley's poetry, which according to Bloom, reaches a higher level of expression because of the fusion of the poet's vision with it. (Bloom, 1959:1-10) Thus the importance of form is not altogether neglected by Bloom.

    It is T. S. Eliot who mounts a scathing attack on the romantic poets. T.S. Eliot, echoing Aristotle, proposes an "impersonal" conception of art, which is almost belligerently anti-Romantic. In the famous essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent", (2001 )which first appeared in the Egoist, Oct-Dec, 1919 (in two parts) and was reprinted in The Sacred M/ood (1920) and Selected Essays (1932), he lays down the concept:

    ... the poet has not a "personality" to express but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impression and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. (2001:7)

    Eliot, In the same essay challenges Wordsworthian formula that "emotion recollected In tranquility" Is an Inexact fonmula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility, (ibid., 8) Eliot does not leave any possibility for the Romantic poet as he finally concludes:

    ... poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.... The emotion of art is impersonal, (ibid., 8-9)

    Eliot fixes the guideline for critics also: Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry, (ibid., 5)

    Eliot sees progress of an artist in his complete surrender of the self to "the tradition". He wants to propose that if the poet does not surrender to the tradition he is immature. Thus Eliot declares that romanticism is an immature form of art as it puts the poetic self at its at its center. (See "What is a Classic"). Eliot proposes that romanticism, being opposite to classicism, lacks in classicist qualities such as maturity of mind, manners and language. Eliot finds classicism leading to "the perfection of the common style" (Ibid.,102). Eliot's apposition between the poet and his poem can be seen as a leading idea that governs the Literary Perspectives Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 31

  • siddhartha Singh New Criticism. Eliot can be considered a precursor of the New Criticism. Eliot says in "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama":

    ... Wordsworth and Browning hammered out forms for thcmMlvet -personal forms,..; but no man can Invent a form, areata a tastt tor It, and perfect It too. Tennyson, who might unquestionably havs been a consummate master of minor forms, tooK to tuming out large patterns on a machine. As for Keats and Shelley, they were too young to be Judged, and they were trying one after another. (Ibid., 51)

    Eliot raises very significant Issues; the Invention of a personal form, the creation of a taste for It and the perfection of the personal form. It means that, for Eliot form Is a prerequisite for the content, whereas In the romantic poetry content Is the prerequisite to the form. This Issue Is the starting point of Bloom, whose endeaveour Is to show that fomi In the romantics Is a trope; It Is a rhetorical or figurative device. Thus Eliot becomes a new prophet of the "canonization". "Canon Is a body of writing established as authentic. The \em usually refers to biblical writings accepted as authorized. The temi Is applied to authors' work, which art accepted as genuine." (Cuddon,, 1996:108). In 'The Metaphysical Poets", Eliot proves the supsriorlty of ths metaphysical poets, who possessed a unification of sensibility over the English poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: "In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set In, from which we have never recovered".(2001:76) The phrase "dissociation of sensibility" Is seen In the poets who 'Ihink" but "do not feel their thought Immediately as the odour of rose". (Ibld.76) Thus, by this criterion Donne is being canonized: "A thought to Donne was an experience; It modified his sensibility". (Ibid. 76). But after Donne, If language of the poets Is "refined", feeling becomes crude or sometimes some poets think and feel by fits; therefore unbalanced. Thus the feeling, "the sensibility expressed In the 'Country Churchyard'," Eliot says," Is cruder than that In 'The Coy Mistress'," and In "one or two passages of Shelley's THumph of Ufa, In the Second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated". (Ibid., 77)Contrary to Eliot, Bloom from the very beginning attempts to demonstrate that the feeling of the romantic poets was visionary and the language and form were "Invented" according to that vision. Thus Bloom follows a different parameter to grade the romantic poetry and emerges as a critic antithetical to the earlier critical taste. After Eliot the New Critical theory contributes significantly to damage the romantic Inheritance.

    New Criticism Is a practice that Is expressed most cogently In

    Uttnry Pr$potlvt$ Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 32

    Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry the three important books: Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) by the English critic, I.A. Richards, and Understanding Poetry (1938) by the Americans Cieanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. These are foundational texts in their shared insistence on the special nature of the literary artifact. The New Critics emphasize that readers need to adjust their reading strategy to accommodate the difference between literary and non-literary language. Thus the poet's role Is pushed back and what remains is the autonomy of the literary text and Its language. Stephen Matterson puts it thus%

    When approaching the text, readers need to focus on the "system of relationships" that are operating within the text, rather than on those that may operate between the text and the world beyond Its boundaries... this system ensures that the literary artifact Is autonomous. (2006: 170-171)

    Thus for the New Critics the poem cannot be translated from one medium to another. It implies that the act of "paraphrasing is a heresy". Matterson further explains, "A poem's meaning is specific to the system of relationship within that poem". (Ibid., 171 )This idea is an anathema to Harold Bloom who later develops a full-fledged theory of "intertextuallty" of other major textual approaches, associated with the New Criticism, the "intentional fallacy" and the "affective fallacy" developed in the essays published in 1946 and 1949 by Wimsatt in collaboration with Monroe Beardsley, attack the romantic theory of poetic selfhood. Matterson nicely summarizes their arguments:

    The tttiolc on both of that* paroalvad fallacies' was very much In Una with the Naw Critical ballaf In the autonomy of the text. In The Intantlonal Fallacy (1948) Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that what an author intended was Irrelevant to Judgment of a literary text. Intention, they said, was neither available nor desirable In the formation of literary judgement. That Is, there were two grounds for the attack on Intentlonallty. The first is that authorial intention Is never clear and may always be a matter of dispute. The second ground, and a more important one for the New Critics, was that to Invoke Intention was to threaten the Integrity of the text by Introducing the figure of the author. Once the text's boundaries were threatened, then the text could not to be seen as a system of language operating with its own rules. (Ibid., 171)

    Thus for the New Critics, removing authorial intentlonallty is a part of the strategy of sealing off the boundaries of the text and ensuring that only the words on the page are the true focus of the critical judgment. Structuralists and post-structuralists develop this idea of the removal of authorial intention to the extreme of the "death of the author". (A phrase made famous by Roland Barthes). But Structuralism and Post-Structuralism differ from New Criticism in the sense that in Literary Perspectives VoL I, No. II, July 2006 33

  • I I

    Siddhartha Singh the former two the text can be scrutinized in the context supplied by the historical and social discourses, and the languages outside the text.

    Bloom is contrary to T.S. Eliot and the New Critics. He begins his career as a critic of British Romantic literature in the afterglow of the New criticism. His first three published books, Shelley's Mythmaking, The Visionary Company (1961) and Blake's Apocalypse (1963) are devoteH to tlie study of English Romantic tradition. The use of the Jewish theology of Martin Buber and the dialogic readings of Shelley's poem in Shelley's Mythmaking stand in defiant contrast to the New Criticism's praise of verbal iconism, metaphysical wit, and the consequent devaluation of Shelley and the Romantics. If we employ the Saussurian distinction between diachronic and synchronic : "diachronic denoting the historical, study of the growth and development of a language", and "synchronic denoting the study of a language as a

    tern at any given moment of Its life", (Cuddan, 1998:869) it will be .odr that contrary to the New Critics and Structuralists who insist on

    the synchronic rhetoric, Bloom shows a marked tendency to swen/e towards an extended use of diachronic rhetorical terms; the historical study and growth of the tropes.

    However, Bloom is not all alone in this defence of Romanticism. Bloom's contemporaries are also involved in reinterpreting romanticism. 'The great Romantic poems," Abrams says in his great essay "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" (1963), "were not written in the mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the later mood of revolutionary disillusionment or despair". (53) Abrams goes on to say that these Romantic poems 'lurn on the theme of hope and joy and the temptation to abandon all hope and fall into dejection and despair." (Ibid., 55)Abrams proposes, especially in the context of Wordsworth, that the militancy of the overt political action has been transformed into the paradox of a spiritual quietism or in a wise passiveness and "the hope has been shifted from the history of mankind of the single individual, from militant external action to an imaginative act; and the marriage between the Lamb and the New Jerusalem has been converted into a marriage between subject and object, mind and nature, which creates a new world out of the old world of senses." (Ibid., 59)Abram thus puts the focus on the individual, the imaginative act, and the fusion of the subject and object (as well as mind and nature). Here lies the origin of what Harold Bloom would later call the "Internalization of Quest Romance" in his book The Ringer in the Tower(^ 971:1). Abrams provides a deep Literary Perspectives VoL /, No. II, July 2006 34

    Bioom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry psycho-spiritual vision of romantic poetry, which is achieved at the highest level of experience. Throughout his critical project Bloom maintains this aspect of romantic poetry where the poet is a prophet or a seer. Indeed the romantic poet sustains belief in the basic human values. Leaving aside or more precisely, reacting against the eighteenth century emphasis on reason, the romantic pofet turns to the primitivism and the mythopoeic mode of poetry. There is a kind of conscious effort to save primitivism, which has been decreasing in the world in which the romantic poet lives. When Bloom talks about Shelley's mythopoeic vision or the Imaginative power of the romantic poets he brings out this humanistic approach of the romantic poets. Mythopoeic, in the context of romantic poetry, can be defined as the process of the poetic invention of a myth. During this process the poet reveals his own apocalyptic vision of the "revolutionary disillusionment and despair". However, the mythic creation of the poet is different from the already established creations because he does not project his myth within the limited penumbrae of any orthodox religion. It is through the power of his imagination that he perceives the vision, which is secular, humanist and therefore of universal significance. The romantic poet localizes his vision into a universe of his own mythopoeic creation.

    However the mythopoeic element in the romantic poetry has been most brilliantly discussed by Northrop Frye in his book Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), in which he discusses the mythological concerns of William Blake. However, the estimation of the romantic poets as mythopoeic, and therefore revolutionary, is deeply projected In his famous essay "The Drunken Boat: The Revdiutlonary Element In Romanticism" (1963:1-20). Frye proposes that the romantic poet is a part of the total process, engaged with and united to a creative power greater than his own because it includes his own self. The entire romantic poetry is mythopoeic and the tone of primitivism Is dominant in it. This is a "by-product of the internalizing of the creative impulse". Frye maintains that though the romantic poet imitates nature but nature is inside him, just as it is outside and this mythopoeic mode of poetry unites his experience with a greater power. Thus myth, a story of the god, is also a story of a sun god or tree god or ocean god or more precisely of the human in the form of god. Frye suggests that this is a revolutionary element in the Romantic poetry. Thus in the romantic poet a myth is a matter of the creation of his own system; a creation of a cosmology- 'lor myth is the language of concern: It Is cosmology in movement, a living form and not a mathematical Literary Perspectives VoL I, No. II, July 2006 35

  • Siddhartha Singh one." (1969'.ii). Bloom elaborates it in Shelley's Mythmaking thaXe^ery romantic poet iias tlie power to create a universe of his own myth. (1959:1 -8) it implies that Bloom sees a profound change in the romantic poets' response to reality. This change is not primarily in belief but in the spatial projection of reality. The romantic poet does not localize the various levels of reality in the spheres, which are already explained either in theology or in science. He relocalizes his experience into an imaginative universe of his own myths. This act is bound to cause chanyG in belief and attitude. (1959:1 -5)

    Thus the romantic poetry, as Geoffrey H. Hartman obsen/es in "Romanticism and Antiself- Consciousness", should be valued in contradiction to the analytic or purely conceptual mode of thought. (1962:553-65) In order to understand Bloom's position there Is need to summarize this discussion of Hartman. Hartman argues that In romantic poetry Intelligence is seen as a perverse though necessary specialization of the whole soul of man. Art Is seen as a means to

    i^st the Intelligence Intelligently. Therefore, romantic poetry deviates rrom the eighteenth century emphasis on sense. It emphasizes the constructive power of the mind where reality Is brought Into being by experience. The reality Is apocalyptic revelation of a void and the knowledge and guilt of the fallen state of mankind. Hartman charts out the romantic poet's development of this vision. The Romantic poet Is not enslaved by his self but his vision is extended from consciousness (knowledge) and self-consciousness (guilt), or knowledge and guilt as expressed in the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to anti-self-conscious-ness. Hartman believes that the romantic poet is doomed to live in the "guilt-conscious" fallen state as the process of maturation brings the knowledge of the loss of innocence. (Ibid.,554-556) It means that knowledge brings painful experience of maturation. The sensitive mind of the romantic poet explores this painful experience. He neither escapes from this situation nor does yield to it. He seeks to draw the antidote to self-consciousness from consciousness. This is a return to a state of innocence; but only after eating again the fruit of knowledge. Since he has lost his "innocent state" he desires a kind of organized innocence. Hartman explains this process through the dialectical method of Hegel that the guilt-conscious mind, which was Innocent before the nrocess of maturation, must be separated from the selfhood to become spiritually perfect. The same is the destiny of Imagination In the English romantics. The imagination must be separated from nature and Its own lesser form. It means that the strength of the

    LItanry Pampaotlvaa Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 36

    Bioom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry poet's mind depends upon its separation from his life and thus he is to comfort his own self-alienation. Hartman gives an analogy of the wandering Jew; a solitary figure in exile, who is to suffer the despair since he cannot achieve the unity of Being and yet he is compelled to repeat the experience. The romantic poet, a solitary or self-alienated figure is to live a purgatorial existence. (Ibid., 559)

    This apocalyptic vision does not necessarily belong just to one religion but Is a matter of an experience at a higher psycho-spiritual level. The heroism of the romantic poet to face this apocalyptic situation compels Bloom to reconsider the strength of the romantic poetry in order to recanonize it. David Fite, in Haro/cf Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, comments -

    Bloom is drawn to Romantic poetry by the "moral heroism" of its "agnostic faith" In the "mythopoeic mode," by the heroism, that Is, of Its refusal "to be anything but poetry, anything but mythmaking". (1965: 9)

    'The Agnostic is one", says Leslie Stephen," who asserts, what no one denies that there are limits to the sphere of human intelligence." (2003:1) It implies that an agnostic believes that nothing can be known about the existence of God or anything except material things. Thus the romantic poet is agnostic In the sense that for him the only faith lies In the creation of his own mythopoeic cosmos. Bloom, as a fierce canonlzer of the romantic poets, projects the aspects of humanizing and secularization of art through mythmaking and visionary imagination. Though Bloom is Indebted to Frye, Fredrick Pottle and IVI.H. Abrams the last two are Bloom's teachers to whom he dedicates respectively Sh0ll9y'a Mythmaking and The Visionary Company. Yet his voice of canonization is so passionate and logically applied that from his first book he emerges as a champion of Shelley who has been underrated during the time when T.S. Eliot was influential. Bloom advances the same subtle critical conception of Romantic vision in The Visionary Company an6 Blake's Apocalypse. Bloom again insists on the freedom of the Romantic poet who creates new myth from "old" or "revises Milton and the Bible" in a transcendent way.

    In the "Preface" to The Visionary CompanyBoom frankly declares that the "central contention of the book is that Romantic poets are not poets of nature", he does not translate the six romantic poets into Blakean categories, rather he seeks out "the crucial analogues and rivalries that connect these poets".(1961: vii)And what connects these poets so different in their reactions to the common theme of imagination Is a quality of passion and largeness in speech and response to life: Utarary Panpactlves Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 37

  • siddhartha Singh "All of them knew Increasingly well what Stevens seems to have known best among the poets of our time, that the theory of poetry Is the theory of life". (Ibid., 3)They are allied by their Protestant temper and what distinguishes Romantic poetry from most of English poetry is the expression of a Radical Protestantism, which is:

    one of the great traditions of English poetry, the prophetic and Protestant line of Spenser and Milton, which reaches its radical limits in the generation after Wordsworth. (Ibid., 7-8)

    For a romantic poet Protestantism provides a vision of secularism. The Protestant liberty mingles with a Gnostic theme of the poet's suspicion of both imagination, and nature. It also incorporates the poet's anxiety of literary influence. Bloom argues that-

    When the Romantics, from Blake onto Shelley and Keats, talk about the relation of poetry to other areas of culture, they make the direct claim that poetry is prior, to theology or moral philosophy and by 'prior' they mean both more original and more intellectually powerful. (Ibid., xxlli)

    As an assertion, Romantic self-exaltation has been viewed by critics like In/Ing Babbitt and T E . Hulme and through TS. Eliot down to the American New Critics, as mere megalomania. But this assertion is not Just an assertion, It a metaphysics, a theory of history, "a vision, a way of seeing, and of living a more human life". (Ibid., xxiii-xxiv)That vision which is imaginary is the human is "Existence" itself. Bloom rightly says in Blake's Apocalypse (1970); that "visionary forms are not merely projection onto the already given of the phenomenal world"; at their best, as Blake's attempt to build a myth of the man regenerated through the "Human from Divine" of the active imagination, shows the life-in-life of vision. Here again Bloom subverts the New Critics' claim that those Romantic poets long for a oneness with nature that could save them; Blake rejects any such tendency. Blake's rejection of the natural world, Bloom says, is "dialectical or promised", insofar as the "unorganized innocence" of the state of Beulah depicts to a "limited but genuine extent" a nature that is "paradisal". (1970:336)"Unorganized innocence" is the state of l-Thou, or as Hartman would say the state of self-consciousness in which there is a oneness with nature. But when the vision is attained by the romantic poet and there is disillusionment with the "paradise", he is to pass through the l-lt relationship or anti-self-consciousness and thus he has to achieve an "organized Innocence." Therefore, early the vision of Blake is later transcended in the much greater and more authentic long prophetic poems whose emphasis Is on "the extent to which nature is fallen", the extent to

    Utarary Panpactlves Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 ^

    Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry which "the attractions of Beulah" begin "to be eclipsed by its dangers". (Ibid., 298). It is important to refer to the French Revolution. The outward form of the inward grace of the Romantic imagination was the French Revolution which was a failure and so the vision of its followers also failed. But the ultimate effect of the revolution was that it left a vast visionary hope In humanism and every nation later on followed its principals. The Romantics also expressed their faith in humanism. Though their vision faiied but the hope is still alive. Wordsworth's movement to tilt interior gradually ends in defeat. Coleridge fails as a poet as hit vision fades very early. Blake understands his own quest as being a displacement of antinomlan desire for an outer actuality that has ceased to be very extraordinary. Shelley makes an attempt to live with the world but fails and moves instead with his own conception of it. Byron the most social is the least Romantic. Keats is free of apocalyptic desire because he has an urgency to create. Of Course the romantic vision failed, but not destroyed. It is still solace to a troubled heart. It tears out the fake faith in orthodoxy. All these poets can be put into one category of being "Secular and Humanists". Bloom confirms that what separates us from the Romantics is our loss of their faithless faith, which few among them could sustain even in their lives and poems". (1961:1) The term "faithless faith" can be best understood by Keats' notion of the "Negative Capability" appropriated with the visionary hope of humanism. The search for the truth begins with the search for the self. This search does not rely on the rational energy but on the power of Imaginaiton;

    Tha Imagination la radamptlve because it can operate like a later rtaaon, bacausa It can take a momentary apprehension of release and build that apprahanalon into a faith, because again it can follow tha Romantic path of moving from the privileged moment to a declaration of mind's autonomy, to a casting-out of remorse and a freedom from outworn conceptions of the self. (1971: 334)

    Thus the object of the search of the romantic poet is the self, which is a micro-god, and the poetry is the sacred shrine. Their poetry never sen/ed any orthodox belief:

    Spenser and l\^ ilton were Christian poets. The Romantics were not. Wordsworth and Coleridge died as Christians, but only after they have died as poets. Byron rejected no belief, and accepted none, Shelley lived and died agnostic, and Keats never wavered in believing religion an imposture. Blake thought himself a Christian, but was not a theist in any orthodox sense. If the divine is the human released from every limitation that impedes desire, then Blake is a believer in the divine reality. (1961: 5)

    Utarary Perspectives Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 39

  • siddhartha Singh So It is neltlier nature nor Orthodox Christianity, which holds Romantic belief. Rousseau's Naturalism fails here. Bloom remarl