Bloom The Epic
Bloom The Epic
Bloom The Epic
EPIC
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Dramatists and Dramas
The Epic
Essayists and Prophets
Novelists and Novels
Poets and Poems
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
LITERARY
CRITICISM BLOOMS ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION 20
TH
THE
EPIC
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
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Table of Contents
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PREFACE
Harold Bloom
ix
INTRODUCTION
Harold Bloom
xii
Genesis and Exodus
1
Homer (c. 8th cen. B.C.E)
The Iliad / The Odyssey
18
Virgil (c. 8454 B.C.E)
Aeneid
29
Anonymous (written c. 700750)
Beowulf
39
Lady Murasaki (9781014)
The Tale of Genji
43
Dante Alighieri (12651321)
The Divine Comedy
49
Geoffrey Chaucer (13431400)
The Canterbury Tales
69
Edmund Spenser (c. 15521599)
The Faerie Queene
83
John Milton (16081674)
Paradise Lost
99
William Wordsworth (17701850)
The Prelude
110
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
140
Herman Melville (18191891)
Moby-Dick
162
Walt Whitman (18191892)
Song of Myself
168
Leo Tolstoy (18281910)
War and Peace
182
Marcel Proust (18711922)
In Search of Lost Time
187
Thomas Mann (18751955)
The Magic Mountain
203
James Joyce (18821941)
Ulysses
217
T.S. Eliot (18881965)
The Waste Land
224
Hart Crane (18991932)
The Bridge
238
FURTHER READING 254
INDEX 257
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 266
ix
Harold Bloom
Preface
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INTRODUCTION xiv
almost never says what he means and only rarely means what he says. Jacob
who becomes Israel is an ironist, even when heroically he wrestles all the
night, holding off the angel of death, to win the blessing of more life into
a time without boundaries.
What defines epic, ancient and modern, for me is heroism, which
transcends irony. The heroism of Dante the Pilgrim, of Milton in Paradise
Losts four great invocations, of Ahab and Walt Whitman as American
questers, can be defined as persistence. Call it the persistence of vision, in
which everything beheld is intensified by a spiritual aura. I never under-
stood why Captain Ahab, Promethean defier of the tyranny of nature, is
regarded by so many as a Macbeth-like villain, though he indeed echoes
Macbeth. The epic hero is contra naturam: his quest is antithetical, from
Jacobs refusal of dying through the violence of Achilles, who kills because
he is not immortal, or to Hart Crane the Pilgrim, making his song one
Bridge of Fire in defiance of Americas failure to fulfill the prophecies of
Walt Whitman.
Proust and Joyce, as creators, are more heroic than their protago-
nists, but so was Tolstoy, until he found an ultimate hero in the Chechen
Hadji Murad, in a late short novel that, for me, is the culmination of hero-
ic tradition. Even the confused amorist, Murasakis Genji, is heroic in his
persistent longing. A longing for sustained vision may be the authentic
mark of achieved epic.
TO MY BEST KNOWLEDGE, IT WAS THE HARVARD HISTORIAN OF RELIGION
George Foot Moore who first called the religion of the rabbis of the sec-
ond century of the Common Era normative Judaism. Let me simplify by
centering on one of those rabbis, surely the grandest: normative Judaism is
the religion of Akiba. That vigorous scholar, patriot, and martyr may be
regarded as the standard by which any other Jewish religious figure must
be judged. If your faith and praxis share enough with Akibas, then you too
are a representative of normative Judaism. If not, then probably not. There
is a charming legend in which Moses attends Akibas seminar, and goes
away baffled by the sages interpretationof Moses! But the deepest impli-
cation of the legend, as I read it, is that Akibas strong misreading of Moses
was in no way weakened by the Mosaic bafflement.
The Great Original of the literary and oral traditions that merged
into normative Judaism was the writer scholarly convention rather won-
derfully chose to call J. Since Kafka is the most legitimate descendant of
one aspect of the antithetical J (Tolstoy and the early, pre-Coleridgean
Wordsworth are the most authentic descendants of Js other side), I find it
useful to adopt the formula from J to K, in order to describe the uncan-
ny or antithetical elements in Js narratives. The J who could have written
Hadji Murad or The Tale of Margaret was the inevitable fountainhead of
what eventually became normative Judaism. But this first, strongest, and
still somehow most Jewish of all our writers also could have written The
Hunter Gracchus or even Josephine the Singer and the Mouse Folk.
Indeed he wrote uncannier stories than Kafka lived to write. How those
stories ever could have been acceptable or even comprehensible to the P
authors or the Deuteronomist, to the Academy of Ezra or the Pharisees, let
alone to Akiba and his colleagues, is a mystery that I have been trying to
1
Genesis and Exodus
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The Epic 19
the death in the high places of the field.
Judges 5:1518
SIMONE WEIL LOVED BOTH THE ILIAD AND THE GOSPELS, AND RATHER ODDLY
associated them, as though Jesus had been a Greek and not a Jew:
The Gospels are the last marvelous expression of the Greek
genius, as the Iliad is the first ... with the Hebrews, misfortune
was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of
contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God
himself and condemned to expiate all sorts of crimesthis is a
view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable.
And no text of the Old Testament strikes a note comparable to
the note heard in the Greek epic, unless it be certain parts of
the book of Job. Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity,
the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitat-
ed, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an
appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he
wanted to justify.
Though vicious in regard to the Hebrew Bible, this is also merely
banal, being another in that weary procession of instances of Jewish self-
hatred, and even of Christian anti-Semitism. What is interesting in it how-
ever is Weils strong misreading of the Iliad as the poem of force, as when
she said: Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from
the subjections of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to
matter. Of what human spirit did Weil speak? That sense of the spirit
is of course Hebraic, and not at all Greek, and is totally alien to the text of
the Iliad. Cast in Homers terms, her sentence should have ascribed justifi-
able bitterness, the bitterness of Achilles and Hector, to the subjections of
the human force to the gods force and to fates force. For that is how
Homer sees men; they are not spirits imprisoned in matter but forces or
drives that live, perceive, and feel. I adopt here Bruno Snells famous
account of Homers view of man, in which Achilles, Hector and all the
other heroes, even Odysseus, consider themselves a battleground of arbi-
trary forces and uncanny powers. Abraham, Jacob, Joseph and Moses
clearly do not view themselves as a site where arbitrary forces clash in bat-
tle, and neither of course does David or his possible descendant, Jesus. The
Iliad is as certainly the poem of force as Genesis, Exodus, Numbers is the
poem of the will of Yahweh, who has his arbitrary and uncanny aspects but
whose force is justice and whose power is also canny.
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 20
II
The poet of the Iliad seems to me to have only one ancient rival, the
prime and original author of much of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, known as
the Yahwist or J writer to scholars. Homer and J have absolutely nothing
in common except their uncanny sublimity, and they are sublime in very
different modes. In a profound sense, they are agonists, though neither
ever heard of the other, or listened to the others texts. They compete for
the consciousness of Western nations, and their belated strife may be the
largest single factor that makes for a divided sensibility in the literature and
life of the West. For what marks the West is its troubled sense that its cog-
nition goes one way, and its spiritual life goes in quite another. We have no
ways of thinking that are not Greek, and yet our morality and religion
outer and innerfind their ultimate source in the Hebrew Bible.
The burden of the word of the Lord, as delivered by Zechariah
(9:1213) has been prophetic of the cultural civil war that, for us, can never
end:
Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope: even today
do I declare that I will render double unto thee;
When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow of Ephraim,
and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and
made thee as the sword of a mighty man.
Like the Hebrew Bible, Homer is both scripture and book of general
knowledge, and these are necessarily still the prime educational texts, with
only Shakespeare making a third, a third who evidences most deeply the
split between Greek cognition and Hebraic spirituality. To read the Iliad in
particular without distorting it is now perhaps impossible, and for reasons
that transcend the differences between Homers language and implicit
socioeconomic structure, and our own. The true difference, whether we are
Gentile or Jew, believer or skeptic, Hegelian or Freudian, is between
Yahweh, and the tangled company of Zeus and the Olympians, fate and the
daemonic world. Christian, Moslem, Jew or their mixed descendants, we
are children of Abraham and not of Achilles. Homer is perhaps most pow-
erful when he represents the strife of men and gods. The Yahwist or J is as
powerful when he shows us Jacob wrestling a nameless one among the
Elohim to a standstill, but the instance is unique, and Jacob struggles, not
to overcome the nameless one, but to delay him. And Jacob is no Heracles;
he wrestles out of character, as it were, so as to give us a giant trope for
Israels persistence in its endless quest for a time without boundaries.
The Epic 21
The Iliad, except for the Yahwist, Dante, and Shakespeare, is the
most extraordinary writing yet to come out of the West, but how much of
it is spiritually acceptable to us, or would be, if we pondered it closely?
Achilles and Hector are hardly the same figure, since we cannot visualize
Achilles living a day-to-day life in a city, but they are equally glorifiers of
battle. Defensive warfare is no more an ideal (for most of us) than is
aggression, but in the Iliad both are very near to the highest good, which
is victory. What other ultimate value is imaginable in a world where the
ordinary reality is battle? It is true that the narrator, and his personages,
are haunted by similes of peace, but, as James M. Redfield observes, the
rhetorical purpose of these similes is not to describe the world of peace
but to make vivid the world of war. Indeed, the world of peace, in the
Iliad, is essentially a war between humans and nature, in which farmers rip
out the grain and fruit as so many spoils of battle. This helps explain why
the Iliad need not bother to praise war, since reality is a constant contest
anyway, in which nothing of value can be attained without despoiling or
ruining someone or something else.
To compete for the foremost place was the Homeric ideal, which is
not exactly the biblical ideal of honoring your father and your mother. I
find it difficult to read the Iliad as the tragedy of Hector, as Redfield and
others do. Hector is stripped of tragic dignity, indeed very nearly of all dig-
nity, before he dies. The epic is the tragedy of Achilles, ironically enough,
because he retains the foremost place, yet cannot overcome the bitterness
of his sense of his own mortality. To be only half a god appears to be
Homers implicit definition of what makes a hero tragic. But this is not
tragedy in the biblical sense, where the dilemma of Abraham arguing with
Yahweh on the road to Sodom, or of Jacob wrestling with the angel of
death, is the need to act as if one were everything in oneself while know-
ing also that, compared to Yahweh, one is nothing in oneself. Achilles can
neither act as if he were everything in himself, nor can he believe that,
compared even to Zeus, he is nothing in himself. Abraham and Jacob
therefore, and not Achilles, are the cultural ancestors of Hamlet and the
other Shakespearean heroes.
What after all is it to be the best of the Achaeans, Achilles, as con-
trasted to the comparable figure, David (who in Yahwehs eyes is clearly the
best among the children of Abraham)? It is certainly not to be the most
complete man among them. That, as James Joyce rightly concluded, is cer-
tainly Odysseus. The best of the Achaeans is the one who can kill Hector,
which is to say that Achilles, in an American heroic context, would have
been the fastest gun in the West. Perhaps David would have been that also,
and certainly David mourns Jonathan as Achilles mourns Patroklos, which
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 22
reminds us that David and Achilles both are poets. But Achilles, sulking in
his tent, is palpably a child, with a wavering vision of himself, inevitable
since his vitality, his perception, and his affective life are all divided from
one another, as Bruno Snell demonstrated. David, even as a child, is a
mature and autonomous ego, with his sense of life, his vision of other
selves, and his emotional nature all integrated into a new kind of man, the
hero whom Yahweh had decided not only to love, but to make immortal
through his descendants, who would never lose Yahwehs favor. Jesus, con-
tra Simone Weil, can only be the descendant of David, and not of Achilles.
Or to put it most simply, Achilles is the son of a goddess, but David is a
Son of God.
III
The single modern author who compels comparison with the poet
of the Iliad and the writer of the J text is Tolstoy, whether in War and Peace
or in the short novel which is the masterpiece of his old age, Hadji Murad.
Rachel Bespaloff, in her essay On the Iliad (rightly commended by the
superb Homeric translator, Robert Fitzgerald, as conveying how distant,
how refined the art of Homer was) seems to have fallen into the error of
believing that the Bible and Homer, since both resemble Tolstoy, must also
resemble one another. Homer and Tolstoy share the extraordinary balance
between the individual in action and groups in action that alone permits
the epic accurately to represent battle. The Yahwist and Tolstoy share an
uncanny mode of irony that turns upon the incongruities of incommensu-
rable entities, Yahweh or universal history, and man, meeting in violent
confrontation or juxtaposition. But the Yahwist has little interest in groups;
he turns away in some disdain when the blessing, on Sinai, is transferred
from an elite to the mass of the people. And the clash of gods and men, or
of fate and the hero, remains in Homer a conflict between forces not whol-
ly incommensurable, though the hero must die, whether in or beyond the
poem.
The crucial difference between the Yahwist and Homer, aside from
their representations of the self, necessarily is the indescribable difference
between Yahweh and Zeus. Both are personalities, but such an assertion
becomes an absurdity directly they are juxtaposed. Erich Auerbach, com-
paring the poet of the Odyssey and the Elohist, the Yahwists revisionist,
traced the mimetic difference between the Odysseys emphasis upon fore-
grounding and the Bibles reliance upon the authority of an implied
backgrounding. There is something to that distinction, but it tends to
fade out when we move from the Odyssey to the Iliad and from the Elohist
The Epic 23
to the Yahwist. The Iliad may not demand interpretation as much as the
Yahwist does, but it hardly can be apprehended without any readers con-
siderable labor of aesthetic contextualization. Its man, unlike the Yahwists,
has little in common with the psychological man of Freud.
Joseph, who may have been the Yahwists portrait of King David,
provides a fascinating post-Oedipal contrast to his father Jacob, but
Achilles seems never to have approached any relation whatever to his
father Peleus, who is simply a type of ignoble old age wasting towards the
wrong kind of death. Surely the most striking contrast between the Iliad
and the J text is that between the mourning of Priam and the grief of Jacob
when he believes Joseph to be dead. Old men in Homer are good mostly
for grieving, but in the Yahwist they represent the wisdom and the virtue
of the fathers. Yahweh is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God
of Jacob, even as He will be the God of Moses, the God of David, the God
of Jesus. But Zeus is nobodys god, as it were, and Achilles might as well
not have had a father at all.
Priams dignity is partly redeemed when his mourning for Hector is
joined to that of Achilles for Patroklos, but the aged Jacob is dignity itself,
as his grandfather Abraham was before him. Nietzsches characterization is
just. A people whose ideal is the agon for the foremost place must fall
behind in honoring their parents, while a people who exalt fatherhood and
motherhood will transfer the agon to the temporal realm, to struggle there
not for being the best at one time, but rather for inheriting the blessing,
which promises more life in a time without boundaries.
Yahweh is the source of the blessing, and Yahweh, though frequent-
ly enigmatic in J, is never an indifferent onlooker. No Hebrew writer could
conceive of a Yahweh who is essentially an audience, whether indifferent
or engrossed. Homers gods are humanall-too-humanparticularly in
their abominable capacity to observe suffering almost as a kind of sport.
The Yahweh of Amos and the prophets after him could not be further from
Homers Olympian Zeus.
It can be argued that the spectatorship of the gods gives Homer an
immense aesthetic advantage over the writers of the Hebrew Bible. The
sense of a divine audience constantly in attendance both provides a fasci-
nating interplay with Homers human auditors, and guarantees that
Achilles and Hector will perform in front of a sublimity greater even than
their own. To have the gods as ones audience enhances and honors the
heroes who are Homers prime actors. Yahweh frequently hides Himself,
and will not be there when you cry out for Him, or He may call out your
name unexpectedly, to which you can only respond: Here I am. Zeus is
capricious and is finally limited by fate. Yahweh surprises you, and has no
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 24
limitation. He will not lend you dignity by serving as your audience, and
yet He is anything but indifferent to you. He fashioned you out of the
moistened red clay, and then blew his own breath into your nostrils, so as
to make you a living being. You grieve Him or you please Him, but fun-
damentally He is your longing for the father, as Freud insisted. Zeus is not
your longing for anyone, and he will not save you even if you are Heracles,
his own son.
IV
In Homer, you fight to be the best, to take away the women of the
enemy, and to survive as long as possible, short of aging into ignoble
decrepitude. That is not why you fight in the Hebrew Bible. There you
fight the wars of Yahweh, which so appalled that harsh saint, Simone Weil.
I want to close this introduction by comparing two great battle odes, the
war song of Deborah and Barak, in Judges 5, and the astonishing passage
in book 18 of the Iliad when Achilles reenters the scene of battle, in order
to recover his arms, his armor, and the body of Patroklos:
At this,
Iris left him, running downwind. Akhilleus,
whom Zeus loved, now rose. Around his shoulders
Athena hung her shield, like a thunderhead
with trailing fringe. Goddess of goddesses,
she bound his head with golden cloud, and made
his very body blaze with fiery light.
Imagine how the pyre of a burning town
will tower to heaven and be seen for miles
from the island under attack, while all day long
outside their town, in brutal combat, pikemen
suffer the wargods winnowing; at sundown
flare on flare is lit, the signal fires
shoot up for other islanders to see,
that some relieving force in ships may come:
just so the baleful radiance from Akhilleus
lit the sky. Moving from parapet
to moat, without a nod for the Akhaians,
keeping clear, in deference to his mother,
he halted and gave tongue. Not far from him
Athena shrieked. The great sound shocked the Trojans
into tumult, as a trumpet blown
The Epic 25
by a savage foe shocks an encircled town,
so harsh and clarion was Akhilleus cry.
The hearts of men quailed, hearing that brazen voice.
Teams, foreknowing danger, turned their cars
and charioteers blanched, seeing unearthly fire,
kindled by the grey-eyed goddess Athena,
brilliant over Akhilleus. Three great cries
he gave above the moat. Three times they shuddered,
whirling backward, Trojans and allies,
and twelve good men took mortal hurt
from cars and weapons in the rank behind.
Now the Akhaians leapt at the chance
to bear Patroklos body out of range.
They placed it on his bed,
and old companions there with brimming eyes
surrounded him. Into their midst Akhilleus
came then, and he wept hot tears to see
his faithful friend, torn by the sharp spearhead,
lying cold upon his cot. Alas,
the man he sent to war with team and chariot
he could not welcome back alive.
Exalted and burning with Athenas divine fire, the unarmed Achilles
is more terrible even than the armed hero would be. It is his angry shouts
that panic the Trojans, yet the answering shout of the goddess adds to their
panic, since they realize that they face preternatural powers. When
Yahweh roars, in the prophets Isaiah and Joel, the effect is very different,
though He too cries out like a man of war. The difference is in Homers
magnificent antiphony between man and goddess, Achilles and Athena.
Isaiah would not have had the king and Yahweh exchanging battle shouts
in mutual support, because of the shocking incommensurateness which
does not apply to Achilles and Athena.
I began this introduction by juxtaposing two epigraphs, Odysseus
shrewdly warning Achilles that this day, on which Hector may burn the
Achaean ships, will be remembered pain for you, if Achilles does not
return to the battle, and a superb passage from Deborahs war song in
Judges 5. Hectors ecstasy of power would produce remembered pain
for Achilles, as power must come at the expense of someone elses pain, and
ecstasy results from the victory of inflicting memorable suffering. Memory
depends upon pain, which was Nietzsches fiercely Homeric analysis of all
significant memory. But that is not the memory exalted in the Hebrew
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 26
Bible. Deborah, with a bitter irony, laughs triumphantly at the tribes of
Israel that did not assemble for the battle against Sisera, and most of all at
Reuben, with its scruples, doubts, hesitations: great searchings of heart.
She scorns those who kept to business as usual, Dan who remained in
ships, and Asher who continued on the sea shore. Then suddenly, with
piercing intensity and moral force, she utters a great paean of praise and
triumph, for the tribes that risked everything on behalf of their covenant
with Yahweh, for those who transcended great thoughts and great
searchings of heart:
Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives
unto the death in the high places of the field.
The high places are both descriptive and honorific; they are where
the terms of the covenant were kept. Zebulun and Naphtali fight, not to
be the foremost among the tribes of Israel, and not to possess Siseras
women, but to fulfill the terms of the covenant, to demonstrate emunah,
which is trust in Yahweh. Everyone in Homer knows better than to trust
in Zeus. The aesthetic supremacy of the Iliad again must be granted.
Homer is the best of the poets, and always will keep the foremost place.
What he lacks, even aesthetically, is a quality of trust in the transcendent
memory of a covenant fulfilled, a lack of the sublime hope that moves the
Hebrew poet Deborah:
They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera.
The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the
river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength.
The Odyssey
The Odyssey, though a clear sequel to the Iliad, is an immensely different
poem in the experience of all readers. If one author wrote both, then the
change from the Iliad to the Odyssey is as great as the difference between
War and Peace and Anna Karenina, or between Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained. Such comparisons suggest a darkening of vision in Homer, as in
Tolstoy or Milton, but of course the movement from Iliad to Odyssey is
from tragic to comic, from epic to romance, from the rage of Achilles
against mortality to the prudence of Odysseus in recovering wife, son,
father, home, and kingdom. The Iliad, in fierce agon with the Bible, has set
our standards for sublimity, but the Odyssey has been the more fecund
The Epic 27
work, particularly in modern literature. Joyce did not write a novel called
Achilles, nor did Pound and Stevens devote poems to the hero of the Iliad.
Like Dante and Tennyson before them, they became obsessed with
Ulysses, whose quest for home contrasts oddly with the role of anti-Aeneas
assigned to him by Dante and, more uneasily, by Tennyson.
A permanent mystery of the contrast between Iliad and Odyssey is that
the Iliad seems much farther away from us, though it has less of the fan-
tastic or the fabulous than the Odyssey. Achilles is a remote Sublime, where-
as Odysseus is the complete man of Joyces vision, coping with the every-
day. Realistic description of marvels is the romance formula of the Odyssey
and seems very different from the tragic world in which Achilles and
Hector strive to be the best. A literary critic who is not a classicist, and with
indifferent Greek, nevertheless takes away from both epics an overwhelm-
ing sense of the unity of very separate designs in the immense conscious-
ness of a comprehensive poet coming very late in a tradition. Samuel
Johnson, my critical hero, darkly judged every Western poet coming after
Homer to be belated. It is a productive irony that Johnson seems to me
correct as to the Iliad, but that the Odyssey overwhelmingly strikes me as
the epic of belatedness, the song of things-in-their-farewell.
We cannot envision Achilles existing in the day-to-day world of the
Odyssey, which cannot accommodate so single-minded a hero. You go west,
to the Islands of the Dead, to find the great Achilles or the frustrated spirit
of Ajax, doomed always to be the second best. The Odysseus of Homer,
superbly unlike the anti-Aeneas of Dante and Tennyson, is the true proto-
type of Aeneas, but Virgils priggish moralist is an involuntary travesty of the
hero of the Odyssey. Poor Aeneas actually must carry the emperor Augustus
on his back, while Odysseus is free of ideology, unless the desire to reclaim
what was once your own is to be considered a politics of the spirit.
Achilles, as critics note, is somewhat childlike, but Odysseus has had
to put away childish things and lives in a world where you can freeze to
death, as well as be devoured by one-eyed monsters. Self-control, a virtue
alien to Achilles, is hardly a poetic quality as such and in Odysseus seems
unallied to any system of morality. Americans justly find in Homers later
hero the first pragmatist, unimpressed by differences that do not make a
difference. Existence, for the necessarily cunning Odysseus, is a vast obsta-
cle course that has kept you away from home for a full decade and that will
exercise you for a second decade as you voyage back. When you get there,
your largest ordeal begins, since a slaughter in your own home, even with
yourself as shrewd slaughterer, is an altogether more daunting prospect
than even the most ferocious battling upon the windy plain of Troy.
Joyces Ulysses, the humane though masochistic Poldy, is the most
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 28
amiable personage in all literature, despite the absurd moralizings against
him of Modernist critics. Homers Odysseus is a very dangerous figure,
whom we admire and respect but do not love. He is a great survivor, the
one man who will stay afloat when all his shipmates drown. You would not
want to be in one boat with him then, but there is no one you would rather
read or hear about, because survival is the best of all stories. Stories exist
to defer death, and Odysseus is a grand evader of mortality, unlike the trag-
ic Achilles, who rages against being only half a god, yet who is pragmati-
cally doom-eager. The agon of Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, is thus
of a different order than the sensible ecstasy of Odysseus, who fights only
when he must and always for sharply delineated ends. The desire for the
foremost place recedes, and the will to live another day takes on its own
aura of heroism.
The enmity of Poseidon is so great a burden for an island-king who
needs to voyage back that Odysseus has only the two choices: heroic
endurance or death, unless he wishes to forget household and hearth and
yield to one of the manifold temptations that are made available to him.
He is not exactly a yielder, and consequently he has provided a model for
every striver since. The model, as Dante and even Tennyson show, is a dan-
gerous one, since it encourages the development of the ability to deceive
others. But if the cosmos of water and wind is against you and you cannot
stay on the mainland, then you must choose the remaining element and
speak out of the fire, as Dantes Ulysses does. Fire, which in the Iliad is
associated with death in battle, becomes in the Odyssey a trope for survival,
the light not of flashing arms and armor but of the hearth where Penelope
holds court, delaying the suitors while waiting for the pragmatic or belat-
ed hero to return to her, never forgetting him that kept coming so close:
Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidons blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big surf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
(Translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
When Aeneas is sent by Virgil to the shades, he meets Dido the Queen
of Carthage, whom his perfidy had hurried to the grave; he accosts her
with tenderness and excuses; but the lady turns away like Ajax in mute
disdain. She turns away like Ajax, but she resembles him in none of
those qualities which give either dignity or propriety to silence. She
might, without any departure from the tenour of her conduct, have
burst out like other injured women into clamour, reproach, and denun-
ciation; but Virgil had his imagination full of Ajax, and therefore could
not prevail on himself to teach Dido any other mode of resentment.
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Rambler, no. 121
TO BE EMPLOYED AS THE KEY INSTANCE OF THE DANGERS OF IMITATION
by the greatest Western literary critic is the saddest of all Virgils melan-
choly-ridden posthumous vicissitudes. It is unhappy enough that the exces-
sively noble Aeneas should be considered by many readers to be a prig, a
Trojan version of George Eliots Daniel Deronda, as it were. But to read
Virgil while keeping Homer too steadily in mind is clearly to impose upon
the strongest Latin poet a burden that only a few Western writers could
sustain. Virgil is not Dante or Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Joyce. He has his
affinities with Tennyson, and with other poets in the elegiac mode, down
to Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot, both of whom celebrated Virgil as a
beautiful inadequacy (Arnold) and a mature poet of unique destiny
(Eliot), two apparently antithetical judgments that actually say much the
same thing, which is not much. Like Arnold and Eliot, poor Virgil has
become the poet of professors, many of whom praise Virgil as a splendid
revisionist of Homer, a very different view from Dr. Johnsons.
Other classicists have given us a more Tennysonian Virgil, a knowing
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HOWDO YOU CHRONICLE THE PRINCIPAL DATES IN THE LIFE OF THE PREMIER
writer in English of the twentieth century? Dublins James Joyce might have
mentioned February 2, 1882, when he was born, or June 16, 1904, when he
took his first walk with Nora Barnacle, a date that became Bloomsday,
when all of Ulysses is enacted. Doubtless, he would have added July 26, 1907,
when their daugther Lucia was born, and the earlier birth of their son,
Giorgio, on July 27, 1905. We must record Joyces death on January 13, 1941,
not yet fifty-nine, and the death of Nora Barnacle Joyce on April 10, 1951.
From a readers perspective, the crucial dates are the publication of
Joyces major works: Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), Ulysses (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939). No narrative prose fiction in
English since Charles Dickens could be judged to equal that sequence in
aesthetic eminence, though partisans of Henry James might dispute the
point, I suppose. I myself would turn to Dante and to Shakespeare as Joyces
true precursors, and masters. Certainly only they, Cervantes, and Chaucer
transcend Joyce in the arts of representation. Blind Milton, and Jonathan
Swift, might be brought forward also, but no others, I think, in English.
Only the authentic though mostly surface difficulties of Finnegans
Wake, which have prevented a general readership, pragmatically result in
the solitary eminence of Ulysses among all writings in English, possibly
since the seventeenth century. How can we describe the influence of Ulysses
upon James Joyce himself, except to say that, to surpass himself, Joyce had
to compose Finnegans Wake.
Samuel Beckett, writing about Work in Progress a decade before it was
published as Finnegans Wake, charmingly compared the earthly paradises of
Dante and Joyce:
(18821941)
James Joyce
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 218
Dantes Terrestrial Paradise is the carriage entrance to a
Paradise that is not celestial: Mr. Joyces Terrestrial Paradise is
the tradesmens entrance on to the sea-shore.
Beckett, who began as Joyces most eminent disciple, favors neither Dante
nor Joyce over the other. Ulysses is too comprehensive to be primarily an
Inferno, and the Wake is too cheerful to be a Purgatorio. Had Joyce lived,
his old age would have been given to an epic on the sea, presumably not a
Paradiso.
Mary T. Reynolds, writing about Joyce and Dante, wisely remarked
that: Art, for Joyce, is fatherhood. Leopold Blooms son, Rudy, is dead,
and Stephen, whatever the scheme of Ulysses, is not an apt substitute.
Fatherhood, in Joyce and in Shakespeare, is a mystery: the image of cuck-
oldry haunts both. Shakespeare wisely gives us not the slightest clue
whether he himself personally was Catholic, Protestant, skeptic, nihilist, or
Hermetist. Joyce, we need doubt, was a totally lapsed Catholic. For Joyce,
God is a hangman, as he is in Jos Saramagos The Gospel According to Jesus
Christ. I bring this forward only to point out that God the Father is the
least Joycean of all possible phrases.
I propose instead: Ulysses the father, which returns us to the father-
hood of the marvelous Poldy Bloom. Poldy is Joyce, Shakespeare, and a
God purged of the hangmans stigma. That also makes Poldy the Ghost in
Hamlet, and we should remember that Stephen quotes the subtle Sabellian
heresy that the Father was Himself His Own Son.
The effect of Joyces masterworks upon his own life was uncanny:
Ulysses and the Wake reject Dantes attempt to reconcile poetry and reli-
gion. In turn, they rendered Joyce yet more himself. More than any other
modern writer, Joyce fathered himself through his own work.
Ulysses
It is an odd sensation to begin writing an introduction to a volume of Joyce
criticism on June 16, 1985, particularly if ones name is Bloom. Poldy is, as
Joyce intended, the most complete figure in modern fiction, if not indeed in
all Western fiction, and so it is appropriate that he have a saints day in the
literary calendar: Bloomsday. He is, thankfully, no saint, but a mild, gentle
sinner; in short, a good man. So good a man is he that even the critic Hugh
Kenner, who in his earlier commentary saw Poldy as an instance of mod-
ern depravity, an Eliotic Jew as it were, in 1980 could call Joyces hero fit
to live in Ireland without malice, without violence, without hate. How
many are fit to live, in fact or fiction, in Ireland or America, without
The Epic 219
malice, without violence, without hate? Kenner, no sentimentalist, now
finds in Poldy what the reader must find: a better person than oneself.
Richard Ellmann, Joyces biographer, shrewdly says of Poldy that he
is not afraid that he will compromise his selfhood. Currently fashionable
criticism, calling itself Post-Structuralist Joyce, oddly assimilates Joyce
to Barthes, Lacan, Derrida; producing a Poldy without a self, another
floating signifier. But Joyces Poldy, as Ellmann insists, is heroic and imag-
inative; his mimetic force allies him to the Wife of Bath, Falstaff and
Sancho Panza, and like them his presence is overwhelming. Joyces pre-
cursors were Dante and Shakespeare, and Poldy has a comprehensiveness
and immediacy worthy of his ancestry. It is good to remember that, after
Dante and Shakespeare, Joyce cared most for Wordsworth and Shelley
among the poets. Wordsworths heroic naturalism and Shelleys visionary
skepticism find their way into Poldy also.
How Jewish is Poldy? Here I must dissent a touch from Ellmann,
who says that when Poldy confronts the Citizen, he states an ethical view
more Christian than Judaic. Poldy has been unbelieving Jew, Protestant
and Catholic, but his ethical affirmations are normative Jewish, as Joyce
seems to have known better than Ellmann does. When Poldy gazes upon
existence, he finds it good. The commonplace needs no hallowing for
Poldy. Frank Budgen, taking the hint from Joyce, emphasizes how much
older Poldy seems than all the other inhabitants of Joyces visionary
Dublin. We do not think of Poldy as being thirty-eight, prematurely mid-
dle-aged, but rather as living in what the Hebrew Bible called olam: time
without boundaries. Presumably, that is partly why Joyce chose to make his
Ulysses Jewish rather than Greek. Unlike a modern Greek, Poldy is in sur-
prising continuity with a lineage of which he has little overt knowledge.
How different would the book have been if Joyce had centered on a Greek
living in Dublin? The aura of exile would not be there. Joyce, the Dubliner
in exile, tasting his own stoic version of a Dantesque bitterness, found in
Poldy as wandering Jew what now seems his inevitable surrogate. Poldy,
not Stephen, is Joyces true image.
Yet Poldy is certainly more like Homers Ulysses than like the
Yahwists Jacob. We see Poldy surviving the Cyclops, but not wrestling
with one among the Elohim in order to win a new name for himself. Truly
Jewgreek, Poldy has forsworn the Covenant, even if he cannot escape from
having been chosen. Joyce, too, has abandoned the Church, but cannot
escape the intellectual discipline of the Jesuits. Poldys sense of election is
a little more mysterious, or perhaps it is Joyces sense of his heros election
that is the true mystery of the book. At the end of the Cyclops episode,
Joyce evidently felt the necessity of distancing himself from Poldy, if only
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 220
because literary irony fails when confronted by the heroic pathos of a cre-
ation that defies even Joyces control.
Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
Im talking about injustice, says Bloom.
Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
But that is of course not Poldys way. No interpolated sarcasm, how-
ever dramatically wrought, is able to modify the dignity of Poldys rejoin-
der:
But its no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. Thats
not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody
knows that its the very opposite of that that is really life.
What, says Alf.
Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
Twelve delirious pages of hyperbole and phantasmagoria follow,
detailing the forced exit of the noble Poldy from the pub, and ending in a
grand send-up indeed:
When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and
they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven.
And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory
of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon
and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And
there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he
answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him
even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to
the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over
Donohoes in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.
It is all in the juxtaposition of ben Bloom Elijah and like a shot off
a shovel, at once a majestic deflation and a complex apotropaic gesture on
Joyces own part. Like Falstaff and Sancho Panza, Poldy runs off with the
book, and Joyces strenuous ironies, dwarfing the wit of nearly all other
authors, essentially are so many reaction-formations against his love for (and
identity with) his extraordinary hero. Homers Ulysses may be as complete
as Poldy, but you wouldnt want to be in one boat with him (you would
drown, he would survive). Poldy would comfort you in every sorrow, even as
he empathizes so movingly with the pangs of women in childbirth.
The Epic 221
Joyce was not Flaubert, who at once was Madame Bovary and yet was
wholly detached from her, at least in aesthetic stance. But how do you
maintain a fixed stance toward Poldy? Falstaff is the monarch of wit, and
Sancho Panza the Pope of innocent cunning. Poldys strength, as Joyce evi-
dently intended, is in his completeness. The complete man is necessari-
ly a trope, but for what? On one side, for range of affect, like Tennysons
Ulysses, Poldy is a part of all that he has met. His curiosity, his suscepti-
bility, his compassion, his potential interest these are infinite. On another
side, for cognitive activity, Poldy, unlike Stephen, is certainly not brilliant,
and yet he has a never-resting mind, as Ulysses must have. He can be said
to have a Shakespearean mind, though he resembles no one in Shakespeare
(a comparison of Poldy and Shylock is instructive). Poldy is neither
Hamlet nor Falstaff, but perhaps he is Shakespeare, or Shakespeare reborn
as James Joyce, even as Stephen is the younger Dante reincarnated as
Joyce. We can think of Poldy as Horatio to Stephens Hamlet, since
Horatio represents us, the audience, and we represent Shakespeare. Poldy
is our representative, and it is Joyces greatest triumph that increasingly we
represent him, as we always have and will represent Shakespeare.
Post-Structuralist Joyce never wearies of reminding us that Poldy is
a trope, but it is truer to say that we are tropes for Poldy, who as a super-
mimesis of essential nature is beyond us. I may never recover from a walk
through a German park with a dear friend who is the most distinguished
of post-Structuralists. When I remarked to him, in my innocent cunning,
that Poldy was the most lovable person in Western fiction, I provoked him
to the annoyed response that Poldy was not a person, but only language,
and that Joyce, unlike myself, knew this very well. Joyce knew very well
that Poldy was more than a person, but only in the sense that Poldy was a
humane and humanized God, a God who had become truly a bereft father,
anguishing for his lost Rudy. Poldy is not a person only if God is not a per-
son, and the God of the Jews, for all his transcendental sublimities, is also
very much a person and a personality, as befits his immanent sublimities.
Surely the uniqueness of Yahweh, among all the rival godlings, is that
Yahweh is complete. Yahweh is the complete God, even as Poldy is the
complete man, and God, after all, like Poldy, is Jewish.
II
French post-Structuralism is of course only a belated modernism,
since everything from abroad is absorbed so slowly in xenophobic Paris.
French Hegel, French Freud, French Joyce are all after the event, as it
were, just as French romanticism was a rather delayed phenomenon.
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 222
French Joyce is about as close to the text of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as
Lacan is to the text of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality or Derrida to
Hegel and Heidegger. Nor should they be, since cultural belatedness or
Alexandrianism demands the remedy of misprision, or creative misreading.
To say that meaning keeps its distance from Poldy is both to forget that
Poldy is the Messiah (though which Messiah is not clear) and that one
name (Kabbalistic) for Yahweh is language. The difference between
Joyce and French Joyce is that Joyce tropes God as language and the belat-
ed Parisians (and their agents) trope the Demiurge as language, which is to
say that Joyce, heroic naturalist, was not a Gnostic and Lacan was (perhaps
unknowingly).
As a knowing Gnostic, I lament the loss of Joycean heroic naturalism
and of Poldys natural heroism. Let them deconstruct Don Quixote; the
results will be as sorrowful. Literary criticism is a mode which teaches us
not only to read Poldy as Sancho Panza and Stephen as the Don, but more
amiably takes us back to Cervantes, to read Sancho as Poldy. By a
Borgesian blessing in the art of mistaken attribution, we then will learn to
read not only Hamlet and the Inferno as written by Joyce, but Don Quixote
as well, with the divine Sancho as an Irish Jew!
Joyce necessarily is closer to Shakespeare than to Cervantes, and
Joyces obsession with Hamlet is crucial in Ulysses. His famous reading of
Hamlet, as expounded by Stephen, can be regarded as a subtle coming-to-
terms with Shakespeare as his most imposing literary father in the English
language. Ellmann, certainly the most reliable of all Joyce scholars, insist-
ed that Joyce exhibits none of that anxiety of influence which has been
attributed to modern writers.... If Joyce had any anxiety, it was over not
incorporating influences enough. This matter is perhaps more dialectical
than Ellmann realized. Not Dante, but Shakespeare is Joyces Virgil, as
Ellmann also notes, and just as Dantes poetic voice matures even as Virgil
fades out of the Commedia, so Shakespeare had to fade out of Ulysses even
as Joyces voice matured.
In Stephens theory, Shakespeare is the dead king, rather than the
young Hamlet, who becomes the type of the Romantic artist, Stephen
himself. Shakespeare, like the ghost, has been betrayed, except; than Anne
Hathaway went Gertrude one better, and cuckolded the Bard with both his
brothers. This sexual defeat has been intensified by Shakespeares loss of
the dark lady of the sonnets, and to his best friend, a kind of third broth-
er. Shakespeares revenge is to resurrect his own dead son, Hamnet, who
enters the play as Prince Hamlet, with the purpose of vindicating his
fathers honor. Such a resurrected son appears to be free of the Oedipal
ambivalences, and in Joyces view does not lust after Gertrude or feel any
The Epic 223
jealousy, however repressed, for the dead father. So Stephen and Poldy, as
two aspects of Shakespeare/Joyce, during the Circe episode gaze into a
mirror and behold a transformed Shakespeare, beardless and frozen-faced
(rigid in facial paralysis). I do not interpret this either as the view that
Poldy and Stephen amount only to a paralytic travesty of a Shakespeare
(W.M. Schutte) or that Joyce warns us that he is working with near-iden-
tities, not perfect ones (Ellmann). Rather, I take it as a sign of influence-
anxiety, as the precursor Shakespeare mocking the ephebe Joyce: Be like
me, but you presume in attempting to be too much like me. You are mere-
ly a beardless version, rigid in facial paralysis, lacking my potency and my
ease of countenance.
The obscene Buck Mulligan, Joyces black beast, weakly misreads
Hamlet as masturbation and Poldy as a pederast. Joyce himself, through
Stephen, strongly misreads Hamlet as the cuckolds revenge, a play pre-
sumably likelier to have been written by Poldy than by Stephen. In a
stronger misreading still, I would suggest that Joyce rewrites Hamlet so as
to destroy the element in the play that most menaces him, which is the very
different, uncannily disinterested Hamlet of Act V. Stephen quotes the
subtle Sabellian heresy that the Father was Himself His Own Son. But
what we may call the even subtler Shakespearean heresy (which is also
Freudian) holds rather that the Son was Himself His Own Father. This is
the Hamlet of Act V, who refers to his dead father only once, and then only
as the king. Joyces Hamlet has no Oedipus complex. Shakespeares Hamlet
may have had one, but it passes away in the interval between Acts IV and
V.
Stephen as the Prince does not convince me; Poldy as the ghost of
the dead king, and so as Shakespeare/Joyce, is rather more troublesome.
One wishes the ghost could be exorcised, leaving us with the fine trinity of
Shakespeare/Poldy/Joyce, with Poldy as the transitional figure reconciling
forerunner and latecomer, a sort of Messiah perhaps. Shakespeare is the
original Testament or old aesthetic Law, while Joyce is the belated
Testament or new aesthetic dispensation. Poldy is the inter-Testamentary
figure, apocryphal and apocalyptic, and yet overwhelmingly a representa-
tion of life in the here and now. Joyce went on to write Finnegans Wake, the
only legitimate rival to Prousts vast novel in the Western literature of our
time. More than the difficulties, both real and imaginary, of the Wake have
kept Joyces common readers centered upon Ulysses. Earwicker is a giant
hieroglyph; Poldy is a person, complete and loving, self-reliant, larger and
more evocative even than his book.
224
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THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT IS A CENTRAL FIGURE IN THE WESTERN LITERARY
culture of this century. His undoubted achievement as a lyric and elegiac
poet in itself would suffice to establish him in the main Romantic tradition
of British and American poetry that moves from Wordsworth and
Whitman on to Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery, poets of our moment.
There is an obvious irony in such a judgment. Eliots professed sense of the
tradition, his tradition, was rather different, tracing as it did the true line of
poetry in English from its origins in medieval Provence and Italy through
its later developments in France. I borrow that remark from Northrop
Frye, whose sympathetic but dissenting analysis of Eliots cultural polemic
is reprinted in this collection. Eliots polemical stance as a literary critic can
be distinguished from his rhetorical stance as a poet, and both postures of
the spirit are fortunately quite distinct from his cultural position, self-pro-
claimed as Anglo-Catholic, Royalist and Classical.
An obsessive reader of poetry growing up in the nineteen thirties and
forties entered a critical world dominated by the opinions and example of
Eliot. To speak out of even narrower personal experience, anyone adopting
the profession of teaching literature in the early nineteen fifties entered a
discipline virtually enslaved not only by Eliots insights but by the entire
span of his preferences and prejudices. If ones cultural position was Jewish,
Liberal and Romantic, one was likely to start out with a certain lack of
affection for Eliots predominance, however much (against the will) the
subtle force of the poetry was felt. If a young critic particularly loved
Shelley, Milton, Emerson, Pater, and if that same critic did not believe that
Blake was a naive and eccentric genius, then regard for Eliot seemed
(18881965)
T.S. Eliot
The Epic 225
unnecessary. Whatever he actually represented, a neochristian and neo-
classic Academy had exalted him, by merit raised, to what was pragmati-
cally rather a bad eminence. In that critical climate, Hopkins was consid-
ered the only valid Victorian poet, greatly superior to Browning and
Tennyson, while Whitman seemed an American nightmare and Wallace
Stevens, if he passed at all, had to be salvaged as a Late Augustan. Thirty
years on, these views have a kind of antique charm, but in 1954 they were
at least annoying, and if one cared enough, they had some capacity for
infuriating.
I resume these matters not to stir up waning rancors, but to explain
why, for some critics of my own generation, Eliot only recently has ceased
to represent the spiritual enemy. His disdain for Freud, his flair for demon-
strating the authenticity of his Christianity by exhibiting a judicious anti-
Semitism, his refined contempt for human sexualitysomehow these did
not seem to be the inevitable foundations for contemporary culture.
Granted that he refrained from the rhetorical excesses of his ally Ezra
Pound; there is nothing in him resembling the Poundian apothegm: All
the jew part of the Bible is black evil. Still, an Academy that found its ide-
ology in Eliot was not a place where one could teach comfortably, or where
one could have remained, had the Age of Eliot not begun to wane. The
ascendancy of Eliot, as a fact of cultural politics, is something many among
us could not wish to see return.
II
Eliot asserted for his poetry a seventeenth century ancestry, out of
Jacobean dramatists and Metaphysical lyricists. Its actual forerunners are
Whitman and Tennyson, and Eliots strength is felt now when we read
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd and Maud: A
Monodrama, and find ourselves believing that they are influenced by The
Waste Land. It is a neglected truth of American poetic history that Eliot and
Stevens are more Whitmanian than Hart Crane, whose allegiance to
Whitman was overt. Though Eliot and Stevens consciously did not feel or
know it, their poetry is obsessed with Whitmans poetry. By this I mean
Whitmans tropes and Whitmans curious transitions between topics, and
not at all the example of Whitman, far more crucial for Crane and many
others.
It is the pattern of Eliots figurations that is most High Romantic, a
pattern that I suspect he learned from Tennyson and Whitman, who
derived it from Keats and Shelley, who in turn had been instructed by
Wordsworths crisis lyrics and odes, which go back yet further to
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 226
Spenserian and Miltonic models. Consider Eliots Ash-Wednesday, his
conversion-sequence of 1930. The poems six movements are not a
Dantesque Vita Nuova, despite Eliots desires, but a rather strict reenact-
ment of the Wordsworthian drama of experiential loss and compensatory
imaginative gain:
(I) This is an ironic movement that says I rejoice but means I
despair, which is the limited irony that Freud terms a reaction forma-
tion, or an emotion masking ambivalently as its opposite. Despite the
deliberate allusions to Cavalcanti and Dante, Ezekiel and the Mass, that
throng the poem, the presumably unintended echoes of Wordsworths
Intimations of Immortality Ode carry the reader closer to the center of
the poets partially repressed anxieties and to his poetic anxieties in partic-
ular. The infirm glory and the one veritable transitory power are stig-
mata of the visionary gleam in its flight from the poet, and if what is lost
here is more-than-natural, we remember that the loss in Wordsworth also
transcends nature. Though Eliot employs the language of mysticism and
Wordsworth the language of nature, the crisis for each is poetic rather than
mystical or natural. Eliots renunciation of voice, however ironical, leads
directly to what for many readers has been the most memorable and
poignant realization in the sequence: Consequently I rejoice, having to
construct something / Upon which to rejoice. No more illuminating epi-
graph could be assigned to Wordsworths Intimations Ode, or to
Tintern Abbey or Resolution and Independence. The absence lament-
ed in the first part of Ash-Wednesday is a once-present poetic strength,
whatever else it represented experientially. In the Shakespearean rejection
of the desire for this mans gift and that mans scope, we need not doubt
that the men are precursor poets, nor ought we to forget that not hoping
to turn again is also an ironic farewell to troping, and so to ones own quest
for poetic voice.
(II) The question that haunts the transition between the first two sec-
tions, pragmatically considered, is: Am I, Eliot, still a poet? Shall these
bones live? is a synecdochal question, whole for part, since the immortal-
ity involved is the figurative survival of ones poetry: As I am forgotten /
And would be forgotten, so I would forget. Turning around against him-
self, this poet, in the mode of Brownings Childe Roland, asks only to be
numbered among the scattered precursors, to fail as they have failed: We
have our inheritance.
(III) After such self-wounding, the poet seeks a kind of Pauline keno-
sis, akin to Christs emptying himself of his own Divinity, which here can
only mean the undoing of ones poetic gift. As inspiration fades away will-
fully, the gift wonderfully declares itself nevertheless, in that enchanted
The Epic 227
lyricism Eliot never ceased to share with the elegiac Whitman and the
Virgilian Tennyson: Lilac and brown hair; / Distraction, music of the
flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair. The figurative
movement is metonymic, as in the displacement of poetic power from the
speaker to the curiously Pre-Raphaelite broadbacked figure drest in blue
and green, who is anything but a possible representation of Eliots own
poetic self.
(IV) This is the daemonic vision proper, allowing a sequence that
denies sublimity, to re-attain a Romantic Sublime. In the transition
between sections III and IV, Eliot appears to surmount the temptations of
solipsism, so as to ask and answer the question: Am I capable of loving
another? The unnamed other or silent sister is akin to shadowy images
of desire in Tennyson and Whitman, narcissistic emblems certainly, but
pointing beyond the self s passion for the self. Hugh Kenner, indubitably
Eliots best and most Eliotic critic, suggestively compares Ash-
Wednesday to Tennysons The Holy Grail, and particularly to the fear-
ful death-march of Percivales quest in that most ornate portion of The
Idylls of the King. Kenner of course awards the palm to Eliot over what he
dismisses as a crude Victorian ceremony of iterations as compared to
Eliots austere gestures of withdrawal and submission. A quarter of a cen-
tury after he made them, Kenners judgments seem eminently reversible,
since Tennysons gestures are, in this case, palpably more austere than his
inheritors. Tennyson has, after all, nothing quite so gaudy as: Redeem /
The unread vision in the higher dream / While jewelled unicorns draw by
the guilded hearse.
(V) Percivales desert, and the wasteland of Brownings Childe
Roland, join the Biblical wildernesses in this extraordinary askesis, a self-
curtailing rhapsody that truncates Romantic tradition as much as it does
Eliots individual talent. One could assert that this section affirms all the
possibilities of sublimation, from Plato through Nietzsche to Freud, except
that the inside/outside metaphor of dualism confines itself here only to
The Word without a word, the Word within. Eliot, like all his Romantic
ancestors from Wordsworth to Pater, seeks a crossing to a subtle identifi-
cation with an innocent earliness, while fearing to introject instead the
belatedness of a world without imagination, the death-in-life of the poet
who has outlasted his gift.
(VI) This is one of Eliots triumphs, as an earliness is recovered under
the sign of contrition. The unbroken wings still flying seaward are a
beautiful metalepsis of the wings of section I, which were merely vans to
beat the air. A characteristic pattern of the Romantic crisis lyric is extend-
ed as the precursors return from the dead, but in Eliots own colors, the
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 228
lost lilac of Whitman and the lost sea voices of Tennyson joining
Eliots lost heart in the labor of rejoicing, having indeed constructed
something upon which to rejoice.
III
Eliot is hardly unique among the poets in having misrepresented either his
actual tradition or his involuntary place in that tradition. His cultural influ-
ence, rather than his polemic, was closer to being an unique phenomenon.
To have been born in 1888, and to have died in 1965, is to have flourished
in the Age of Freud, hardly a time when Anglo-Catholic theology, social
thought, and morality were central to the main movement of mind. Even
a few sentences of Eliotic polemic, chosen at random, seem unreal in the
world of 1984:
It would perhaps be more natural, as well as in better conform-
ity with the Will of God, if there were more celibates and if
those who were married had larger families ...
If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you
should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.
... a positive culture must have a positive set of values, and
the dissentients must remain marginal, tending to make only
marginal contributions.
These are excerpts from The Idea of a Christian Society and were writ-
ten in 1939. Frank Kermode, a distinguished authority on Eliot, writing in
1975, insisted that Eliot profoundly changed our thinking about poetry
and criticism without trying to impose as a condition of his gift the accept-
ance of consequences which, for him, followed as a matter of reason, as
well as of belief and personal vocation. It may well be that the largest dif-
ference between Kermodes critical generation, in England, and the next
generation, in America, is that we changed our thinking about poetry and
criticism in reaction against Eliots thinking, precisely because Eliots fol-
lowers had imposed upon us consequences peculiar to his belief and his
personal vocation. Whether Eliots discriminations were so fine as
Kermode asserts is yet another matter. Shelleys skeptical yet passionate
beliefs, according to Eliot, were not coherent, not mature, not founded
upon the facts of experience. Eliot once gave thanks that Walter Pater
never wrote about Hamlet; would that Eliot never had done so. We would
The Epic 229
have been spared the influential but unfortunate judgment that here
Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Eliot
doubtless is in the line of poet-critics: Ben Jonson, Dryden, Dr. Samuel
Johnson, Coleridge, Poe and Arnold are among those who precede him. As
a critic, he does not approach the first four, but surely equals Poe and
Arnold, equivocal praise, though he certainly surpassed Poe and Arnold as
poets. It is difficult to prophesy that Eliots criticism will prove to be of
permanent value, but perhaps we need to await the arrival of a generation
neither formed by him nor rebelling against him, before we justly can place
him.
IV
That Eliot, in retrospect, will seem the Matthew Arnold rather than the
Abraham Cowley of his age, is the sympathetic judgment of A. Walton
Litz. For motives admitted already, one might prefer to see Eliot as the
Cowley, and some celebrated passages in Four Quartets are worthy of com-
parison with long-ago-admired Pindarics of that forgotten wit, but
Arnolds burden as involuntary belated Romantic is indeed close to Eliots.
A direct comparison of Eliots elegiac achievement to Whitmans or
Tennysons seems to me both more problematical and more inevitable.
Gerontion contrasts unfavorably to Tithonus or Ulysses, while The
Waste Land, despite its critical high priests, lacks the coherence, maturity
and experiential authenticity of When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomd. And yet it must be admitted that Eliot is what the closing lines
of The Waste Land assert him to be: a shorer of fragments against his (and
our) ruins. The phantasmagoric intensity of his best poems and passages
can be matched only in the greatest visionaries and poets of Western liter-
ature. It is another paradox that the Anglo-Catholic, Royalist, Classical
spokesperson should excel in the mode of fictive hallucination and lyric
derangement, in the fashioning of nightmare images perfectly expressive
of his age.
Eliots influence as a poet is by no means spent, yet it seems likely
that Robert Penn Warrens later poetry, the most distinguished now being
written among us, will be the final stand of Eliots extraordinary effort to
establish an anti-Romantic counter-Sublime sense of the tradition to
replace the continuity of Romantic tradition. That the continuity now has
absorbed him is hardly a defeat; absorption is not rejection, and Eliots
poetry is securely in the canon. Eliots strength, manifested in the many
poets indebted to him, is probably most authentically commemorated by
the poetry of Hart Crane, which engages Eliots poetry in an agon without
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 230
which Crane could not have achieved his difficult greatness. One can pre-
fer Crane to Eliot, as I do, and yet be forced to concede that Eliot, more
than Whitman, made Crane possible.
V
The essays in this collection chronicle the agon that criticism has entered
into with Eliot, primarily with Eliots major poems. I have arranged them
in the order of their publication, with only the first two, by Kenner and
Frye, representing the literary climate while Eliot was still alive. Kenner,
then and now, is Eliots champion, to the extent of apparently preferring
Eliots verse dramas to Shakespeares:
None of the actors, deprived of fine lines to mouth, is allowed
to affirm a vision centered on himself, as Othello does, as
Hamlet does. And if they are deprived of that satisfaction, it is
because the plays are about privacy, not affirmation.
Shakespeares is for better or worse a universe of actors, strut-
ting and fretting; and so is the universe of The Waste Land; but
the universe of Eliots dramatic comedies is a universe of per-
sons who learn to discard the satisfactions of the imprisoning
role.
That is Kenner in 1962; reading him again after more than twenty
years is to team that modernism is only another defensive antiquarian-
ism. Northrop Frye, a year later, began the Romantic counter-offensive by
noting that Eliot rather disapproved of Shakespeare because Shakespeare
does not always take a maturely dim view of human nature. The remain-
ing critics in this volume wrote during the 1970s and the early 1980s, and
are none of them Eliotics, like Kenner or such allied figures as F.R. Leavis,
R.P. Blackmur, and Cleanth Brooks, all of whom placed Eliot with the
sages as well as with the poets. But the critics whom I reprint here are, like
Frye, in a more benign relation to Eliot than I can achieve. Olney,
Goldman, Donoghue, Ellmann, Gordon, Nevo and Jay do not read Eliot
as a cultural prophet or as a secular saint. They study him, with sympathy
and insight, as one of the representative poets of his time, and each of them
adds to our increasingly accurate sense of his authentic relation to poetic
history.
Eliot, writing in 1948, ended his Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture by affirming that the culture of Europe could not survive the dis-
appearance of the Christian faith, because: It is in Christianity that our
The Epic 231
arts have developed ... It is against a background of Christianity that all our
thought has significance. That seems to be the center of Eliots polemic,
and each reader must make of it what she or he can or will. The Age of
Freud, Kafka and Proust, of Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Beckett: somehow
these thoughts and visions suggest a very different definition of culture
than the Eliotic one. Perhaps it was fortunate for Eliot that he was a Late
Romantic poet long before he became, for a time, the cultural oracle of the
academies.
The Waste Land
I
Eliots Ara Vos Prec (London: The Ovid Press, 1920) contained a curious,
rather flat poem, oddly titled Ode, which he sensibly never reprinted. It
appears to lament or commemorate his failed sexual relationship with his
first wife, and strangely connects the failure with two Whitmanian allu-
sions (Misunderstood / The accents of the now retired / Profession of the
calamus and Io Hymen, Hymenae / Succuba eviscerate). Manifestly,
Ode mocks Whitmans erotic declarations, but the mockery is equivocal.
Eliots declared precursors form a celebrated company: Virgil, Dante, the
English Metaphysicals and Jacobean dramatists, Pascal, Baudelaire, the
French Symbolists, and Ezra Pound. His actual poetry derives from
Tennyson and Whitman, with Whitman as the larger, indeed the dominant
influence. Indeed, Shelley and Browning are more embedded in Eliots
verse than are Donne and Webster. English and American Romantic tra-
dition is certainly not the tradition that Eliot chose, but the poetic family
romance, like its human analogue, is not exactly an arena where the will
dominates.
The Waste Land is an American self-elegy masking as a mythological
romance, a Romantic crisis poem pretending to be an exercise in Christian
irony. Mask and pretence, like the invention of more congenial fathers and
ancestors, are customary poetic tropes, and certainly not to be censured.
They are part of any poets magic, or personal superstition, and they help
to get authentic poems written. The Waste Land, rather than Four Quartets
or the verse dramas, is Eliots major achievement, a grand gathering of
great fragments, and indisputably the most influential poem written in
English in our century. I read it, on evidence internal and external, as being
essentially a revision of Whitmans final great achievement, When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloomd, ostensibly an elegy for Lincoln, but more
truly the poets lament for his own poethood. Elegy rather than brief epic
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 232
or quest-romance, The Waste Land thus enters the domain of mourning
and melancholia, rather than that of civilization and its discontents.
Many of the links between Eliots and Whitmans elegies for the
poetic self have been noted by a series of exegetes starting with S.
Musgrove, and continuing with John Hollander and myself, and younger
critics, including Gregory S. Jay and Cleo McNelly Kearns, whose defini-
tive observations conclude the book I am now introducing. Rather than
repeat Cleo Kearns, I intend to speculate here upon the place of The Waste
Land in Romantic tradition, particularly in regard to its inescapable pre-
cursor, Whitman.
II
In his essay, The Penses of Pascal (1931), Eliot remarked upon
Pascals adversarial relation to his true precursor, Montaigne:
One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors
Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well
dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For
Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does
not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences.
Walt Whitman, too, is a fluid, insidious element, a poet who
insinuates, charms, and influences. And he is the darkest of poets,
despite his brazen self-advertisements, and his passionate hopes for his
nation. Song of Myself, for all its joyous epiphanies, chants also of the waste
places:
Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
Of the moon that descends the steeps of the
soughing twilight,
Toss, sparkles of day and dusktoss on the
black stems that decay in the muck,
Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.
No deep reader of Whitman could forget the vision of total self-
rejection that is the short poem, A Hand-Mirror:
Hold it up sternlysee this it sends back, (who is
it? is it you?)
Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth,
The Epic 233
No more a flashing eye, no more a sonorous voice
or springy step,
Now some slaves eye, voice, hands, step,
A drunkards breath, unwholesome eaters face,
venerealees flesh,
Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and
cankerous,
Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,
Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex;
Such from one look in this looking-glass ere you go
hence,
Such a result so soonand from such a beginning!
Rather than multiply images of despair in Whitman, I turn to the
most rugged of his self-accusations, in the astonishing Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry:
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seemd to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not
in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knotted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabbd, blushd, resented, lied, stole, grudgd,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly,
malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous
wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness,
none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was calld by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young
men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent
leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 234
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public
assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old
laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Playd the part that still looks back on the actor or
actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as
great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.
The barely concealed allusions to Miltons Satan and to King Lear
strengthen Whitmans catalog of vices and evasions, preparing the poet
and his readers for the darker intensities of the great Sea-Drift elegies and
Lilacs, poems that are echoed everywhere in Eliots verse, but particu-
larly in The Death of Saint Narcissus, The Waste Land, and The Dry
Salvages. Many critics have charted these allusions, but I would turn con-
sideration of Eliots agon with Whitman to the question: Why
Whitman? It is poetically unwise to go down to the waterline, or go to the
headland with Walt Whitman, for then the struggle takes place in an arena
where the poet who found his identifying trope in the sea-drift cannot lose.
An answer must be that the belated poet does not choose his trial by
landscape or seascape. It is chosen for him by his precursor. Brownings
quester in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is as overdetermined
by Shelley as Eliot is overdetermined by Whitman in The Waste Land,
which is indeed Eliots version of Childe Roland, as it is Eliots version
of Percivales quest in Tennysons The Holy Grail, a poem haunted by
Keats in the image of Galahad. Lilacs is everywhere in The Waste Land:
in the very lilacs bred out of the dead land, in the song of the hermit thrush
in the pine trees, and most remarkably in the transumption of Whitman
walking down to where the hermit thrush sings, accompanied by two com-
panions walking beside him, the thought of death and the knowledge of
death:
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one
side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other
side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as
holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks
not,
The Epic 235
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the
swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so
still.
The crape-veild women singing their dirges through the night for
Lincoln are hardly to be distinguished from Eliots murmur of maternal
lamentation, and Whitmans tolling tolling bells perpetual clang goes
on tolling reminiscent bells in The Waste Land as it does in The Dry
Salvages. Yet all this is only a first-level working of the influence process,
of interest mostly as a return of the repressed. Deeper, almost beyond ana-
lytical modes as yet available to criticism, is Eliots troubled introjection of
his nations greatest and inescapable elegiac poet. Lilacs has little to do
with the death of Lincoln but everything to do with Whitmans ultimate
poetic crisis, beyond which his strongest poetry will cease. The Waste Land
has little to do with neo-Christian polemics concerning the decline of
Western culture, and everything to do with a poetic crisis that Eliot could
not quite surmount, in my judgment, since I do not believe that time will
confirm the estimate that most contemporary critics have made of Four
Quartets.
The decisive moment or negative epiphany of Whitmans elegy cen-
ters upon his giving up of the tally, the sprig of lilac that is the synecdoche
for his image of poetic voice, which he yields up to death and to the her-
mit thrushs song of death. Eliots parallel surrender in What the Thunder
Said is to ask what have we given?, where the implicit answer is a
moments surrender, a negative moment in which the image of poetic
voice is achieved only as one of Whitmans retrievements out of the
night.
In his essay on Pascal, Eliot says of Montaigne, a little resentfully but
with full accuracy, that he succeeded in giving expression to the skepti-
cism of every human being, presumably including Pascal, and
Shakespeare, and even T.S. Eliot. What did Whitman succeed in express-
ing with equal universality? Division between myself and the real me
is surely the answer. Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, is
hardly identical with the Me myself who:
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come
next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and
wondering at it.
Blooms Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection 236
Thomas Stearns Eliot, looking with side-curved head, both in and out
of the game, has little in common with Walt Whitman, one of the roughs,
an American, yet almost can be identified with that American Me myself.
III
The line of descent from Shelley and Keats through Browning and
Tennyson to Pound and Eliot would be direct, were it not for the inter-
vention of the genius of the shores of America, the poet of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman enforces upon Pound and Eliot the American difference, which
he had inherited from Emerson, the fountain of our eloquence and of our
pragmatism. Most reductively defined, the American poetic difference
ensues from a sense of acute isolation, both from an overwhelming space
of natural reality, and from an oppressive temporal conviction of belated-
ness, of having arrived after the event. The inevitable defense against
nature is the Gnostic conviction that one is no part of the creation, that
ones freedom is invested in the primal abyss. Against belatedness, defense
involves an immersion in allusiveness, hardly for its own sake, but in order
to reverse the priority of the cultural, pre-American past. American poets
from Whitman and Dickinson onwards are more like Milton than Milton
is, and so necessarily they are more profoundly Miltonic than even Keats
or Tennyson was compelled to be.
What has wasted the land of Eliots elegiac poem is neither the mal-
ady of the Fisher King nor the decline of Christianity, and Eliots own psy-
chosexual sorrows are not very relevant either. The precursors strength is
the illness of The Waste Land; Eliot after all can promise to show us fear
in a handful of dust only because the monologist of Tennysons Maud
already has cried out: Dead, long dead, / Long dead! / And my heart is a
handful of dust. Even more poignantly, Eliot is able to sum up all of
Whitmans extraordinary As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life in the sin-
gle line: These fragments I have shored against my ruins, where the frag-
ments are not only the verse paragraphs that constitute the text of The
Waste Land, but crucially are also Whitmans floating sea-drift:
Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses,
Froth, snowy white, and bubbles,
(See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last,
See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,)
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments,
Buoyd hither from many moods, one contradicting
another.
The Epic 237
From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell,
Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of
liquid or soil,
Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented
and thrown,
A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves
floating, drifted at random,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud
trumpets,
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence,
spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.
Tufts of straw, sands, fragments are literally shored against
Whitmans ruins, as he wends the shores I know, the shores of America
to which, Whitman said, Emerson had led all of us, Eliot included.
Emersons essays, Eliot pugnaciously remarked, are already an encum-
brance, and so they were, and are, and evermore must be for an American
writer, but inescapable encumbrances are also stimuli, as Pascal learned in
regard to the overwhelming Montaigne.
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