War of the Winds: Shelley, Hardy, and Harold Bloom

Central to the efforts of some major Hardy critics to promote their varied theoretical agendas in recent decades has been a shared emphasis on the affinities and influence linking the poetry of Percy Shelley to that of Thomas Hardy. Poet-critic Joseph Brodsky thinks that if T. S. Eliot had read Hardy instead of Laforgue, English poetical history in this century "might be somewhat more absorbing": "For one thing, where Eliot needs a handful of dust to perceive terror, for Hardy, as he shows in 'Shelley's Skylark,' a pinch is enough." ¹ Since Brodsky has written his Hardy essay largely to defend the sort of traditional verse craft he personally excels in, the Shelley-Hardy "pinch" may symbolize what Brodsky considers the more-than-Eliotic emotional power of these two kindred poets' technical mastery and Brodsky-like formal control. For J. Hillis Miller, by contrast, Shelley is Hardy's worthy precursor as Millerian deconstructor. Hardy's work "might almost be defined as from beginning to end a large-scale interpretation of Shelley, one of the best and strongest we have," offering "a double reading of Shelley," seeing him "as both idealist" and "skeptic," much the same kind of open-ended deconstructor as Hardy, or as Miller himself. ²

For Harold Bloom, finally, Hardy (grouped with Wallace Stevens as the only two "strong poets" writing in English during the twentieth century) has Shelley as his "prime precursor." ³ Hardy's "During Wind and Rain, as good a poem as our century has given us," is "grandchild of the Ode to the West Wind" (Misreading, p. 20). As Bloom sees it, the influence between these two strong poets "works in the depths, as all love antithetically works"(Misreading, p. 21). The Shelley-Hardy dynamic of attachment and rebellion is presented as a revealingly pervasive instance of the Bloomian father-son effect of anxiety-arousing influence. For the neo-Freudian Bloom, as for the formal traditionalist Brodsky and the deconstructive Miller, Shelley and Hardy are poets of a very high order, and the depth of their kinship will add conviction to whatever literary theory it is taken to illustrate.

I choose to focus here on some features of Bloom's presentation, and I do so for two reasons, one relating to Bloom and the other to Shelley and Hardy. The first reason is that Bloom's rhetoric regarding the Shelley-Hardy filiation is a fascinating psychoanalytical crux in the essay where it appears, "Poetic Origins and Final Phases," Chapter I of A Map of Misreading. We will see that when the topic of Hardy's reaction to Shelley is introduced, Bloom's rhetoric grows suddenly so heated in its pre-emptive attack on possibly unsympathetic or unconvinced readers, that it raises questions: Why the Bloomian defensiveness? What vulnerability might it shield? An attempt to answer these queries will disclose the second reason why Bloom's arguments are so striking: they can lead us, in ways of which Bloom is not consciously aware, to detailed evidence for a new kind of precursor-disciple tension in the Shelley-Hardy relationship, one involving more playful parody than Bloom has found there. In the process of learning about Bloom, we discover a new dimension of Hardy's response to Shelley.

Bloom introduces his Shelley-Hardy section (about five pages in "Poetic Origins") by emphasizing that the two poets' kinship must not be sought in shared features of style such as rhymes and meters but in the likeness-and-difference of their underlying thinking, what Emerson would call their "meter-making arguments." Stylistic parallels are an ineffective key to real affinity, an inadequate indicator of true indebtedness-and-rebellion:

Poets need not look like their fathers, and the anxiety of influence more frequently than not is quite distinct from the anxiety of style. Since poetic influence is necessarily misprision, a taking or doing amiss of one's burden, it is to be expected that such a process...