The Bloom Cosmology

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 THE BLOOM COSMOLOGY The Art of the Critic: Literary Theory and Criticism from the Greeks to the Present: Later Nineteenth Century. Vol. 7. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. $60.00 The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. The Critical Perspective: Late Victorian. Vol. 9. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. $60.00 THE MIND BOGGLES when faced with a critical project of the scope that Harold Bloom has undertaken. If the current book jacket is accurate, the project will encompass eleven volumes of The Art of the Critic, 37 volumes of The Chelsea Library of Literary Criticism, 210 volumes of Modern Critical Views, 151 volumes of Modern Critical Interpretations, and 60 volumes of The Critical Cosmos. If Bloom's volumes bring essential primary texts to a new audience and if his collections of secondary material help new readers understand what they are reading, then he has performed a service. The Critical Perspective volume of the late Victorian period is part of The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. Without favoring post-structuralism with which he has been associated—often mistakenly—or stressing one school at the expense of others, Bloom has brought together a selection of excellent literary criticism on American and British authors; his selection generally represents the diverse approaches on the current critical mindscape. Indeed, one might wish for more feminist, Marxist, and New Historical criticism. Some of his more surprising and inspired selections, such as Borges on Whitman or Adrienne Rich on Dickenson, supplement our understanding of the creative imagination of both subject and essayist. Thus Borges writes eloquently about his first encounter with Whitman: [W]hen I read Walt Whitman I got the feeling that all the poets who had written before him, Homer and Shakespeare and Hugo and Quevedo, and so on, had been trying to do, and failing to do, what Whitman had done. I thought of Whitman as having at last discovered how poetry should be written. ... I spoke of Whitman as being a personal friend, but he is more than that. In a sense we are all of us Whitman, we are part of Whitman, and we should strive to be worthy of him. ... If we could rekindle in democracy the fire it once held for Whitman, we should be less unworthy of and, incidentally, we might save the world (5486-5488). Bloom balances such a personal testimony as Borges's with more traditional views such as that of the entry that follows by Thomas Edward Crawley: "Whitman saw the humanism inherent in the 391 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 Christian tradition as the chief inspiration and source of our democratic ideals" (5494). The volume contains valuable material for ELT readers on writers such as Stevenson, Pater, and Hopkins. While volume nine of The Critical Perspective series contains a generous selection of important criticism, it lacks any introduction which would relate these selections to the "Late Victorian" period or which would discriminate between, on the one hand, English literary and cultural history, and, on the other, American. What is the average undergraduate to do with a volume in which Bulwer Lytton is sandwiched between Melvüle and Whittier, apparently because authors are listed chronologically in the order of their death from 1882 to 1896. Indeed, even that principle of organization is not articulated in the volume and has to be discerned. Apparently that is why Froude is included and Disraeli who died in 1881 is excluded. One can debate the mixing of American and British authors as well as inclusions, and omissions. With the shift in canon, who is reading Patmore, Froude, and Bulwer-Lytton? Bloom simply anthologizes critical essays without any discussion of how these diverse approaches relate to one another or even why these particular items were selected. It would be helpful if Bloom prefaced the critical selections of each writer with a brief survey of approaches to that writer and of how the ensuing criticism represents those approaches. He might have shown how, from a diachronic perspective, various approaches reflect the period in which the criticism was written, as well as how the diverse approaches, from a...