"The Fury and the Mire of Human Veins": On Bloom's "Endlessly Elaborating Poem"

In the closing pages of his latest, and surely most personal, work, Harold Bloom poses a question that may serve as the book's theme. He asks:

Is there a relation between a writer's immortality and a reader's search for consolation in regard to the death of friends or family and intimations of the reader's own impending mortality?

(2019, 505)

This question comes at the end of a prolonged discussion of Proust, whose very appearance as the subject of the book's coda is hardly this work's least curious aspect. Bloom takes up the novelist's famous epiphanies, a corollary of the romantic sublime. For Bloom, these Wordsworthian "spots of time" are, however brief, intimations of immortality, and, as such, death-defying; they also contain "Proust's truth," which is "compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of atheistic mysticism" (497). These are more than just aspects of Proust's work; the near five hundred pages that precede this observation portray a critic who, too, is in search of lost time and achieves a similar effect. But Bloom's reverie on Proust finally gives way to the explicit statement of the book's theme cited above—which, in its remaining few pages, solely becomes, with reference to Samuel Johnson, "intimations of the reader's [Bloom's] own impending mortality."

In his use of poetry as consolation in the face of death, late Bloom is all too human. This preoccupation, though, has simultaneously and strikingly led the criticism to literalize the poetic imagination. Bloom's critical memoir, perhaps inevitably, literalizes tropes such as time and death, which are so central to the earlier work. Whereas Bloom's well-known theory of poetic relations emerges from his consideration of a poet's sense of "lateness" and the necessity of "lying against time," Possessed by Memory is haunted by the physical actuality of these concepts. If the exigencies of a critic's life can so easily transform the function of his central tropes, such a phenomenon raises the question: how do these tropes understood in the context of Bloom's theory of poetry formulate a theory of life?¹

This question has alternate origins in the ending to Wallace Stevens' 1950 poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven":

This endlessly elaborating poemDisplays the theory of poetry,As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporizeSubtler, more urgent proof that the theoryOf poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

(2015, xx)

Stevens' romantic understanding of a poem as ars poetica and as "the life of poetry" is no longer especially romantic, for we as readers and writers have unconsciously internalized such assumptions, owing in no small part to Bloom's work over the last half century. Our poems are both statements about, and demonstrations of, our conceptions of poetry. "A more severe, more harassing master," Stevens goes further, allying the theory of poetry with the theory of life. The poem's final tercet ends with rich ambiguity: is poetry or lived experience the referent? Put differently, are the poem's final figurations tropes of writing or of living? Are "the intricate evasions of as" metaphor itself or artful human action?

I find it nearly impossible to read Stevens' magnificent ending without thinking of the theory of creative misprision Bloom develops over the course of two decades, beginning in 1970 with his book on Yeats. For instance, what are intricate evasions if not a poet's swerves, his defense mechanism vis a vis the past? And what are such worlds (importantly, encompassing both heavens and hells) that a poet creates if not demiurgic? Recall Bloom's exchanges with de Man in the late seventies, which more than anything forces him to clarify his theory of poetic influence against those of his fellow intertextualists.² The telling difference between Bloom's work...