BOOKS Wrestling with the dead
ANN WORDSWORTH
Myth—scholarly myth too, as Professor Bloom adds—is revealed by time to be gossip grown old. By time, which is a slow process, or better by iconoclastic books, like Bloom's beautiful, radical and unreductive Yeats (out. 5 gns).
The changes of thought this book demands involve our sense of the creative process, and our accepted attitudes towards Yeats and Romanticism: the two are linked. Bloom's central discussion is about poetic influence: seen pedantically as mere transmission, the passing-on of themes and images; seen by Bloom as an un-naming, a misrepresentation by means of which a new imagination frees itself from domination by its precursors. This is a different sense of poetic relation- ships from Northrop Frye's 'We belong to something before we are anything, nor does growing in being diminish the link of belong- ing.' Instead, according to Bloom, all poets resist this subsuming and assert their creative autonomy. 'As scholars we can accept what grieves us as isolate egos, but poets do not exist to accept grief.' Once they have recog- nised their true predecessors, poets must pro- tect themselves against engulfment. The great influence becomes an anxiety-principle, the antagonist blocking the poet from his own creativity. Only by a 'creative swerve' can poets release themselves from domina- tion, remake their own predecessors: Blake's Milton, Shelley's Wordsworth, Browning's Shelley, Pater's Plato, Yeats's Blake and Shelley, Wallace Stevens's Pater.
This revisionary work by new poets is im- portant to critics and readers since it restores for them the creativity of the past. Instead of studiously tracing simple lines of influ- ence, we have to wrestle imaginatively, as successive poets have had to, with the too great, too seductive powers of the dead. The disturbing, vivid quality of Bloom's book comes from this creative clash of opposed imaginations, and it involves the reader in emphatic excitement at a very deep level.
Yeats's incarnation of the poetical char- acter was through two Shelleyan selves: 'a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy in some lonely tower', and 'an old man, master of all human know- ledge, hidden from human sight, in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore'. (Maud Gonne was a Shelleyan 'law- less woman', though Shelley knew nothing of unrequited love.) Yeats baulked at Shelley's agnostic sense that 'the deep is meaningless'. The clutter of magic and the occult which he so needed was no part of Shelley; and if this was not to be a weakness in Yeats, it had to be one in Shelley—'He was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished, and was content merely to write verses . . .' This defensive reductiveness leaves Yeats with a new poetic father to find, a version of Blake, through whom he managed to authorise his Gnostic yearnings, his dualism and a bitter theory of sexual love.
The extent of these creative relationships makes this a difficult book to unthread, for Yeats's use of his precursors reveals tensions In Romanticism from Spenser to Wallace, Stevens. Easier material to control is the discussion of Yeats's immediate contempor,
aries, chiefly Pater and the Tragic Genera- tion, Lionel Johnson, Dowson and Wilde. Pater is their dangerous guide, scolded by Yeats for teaching us `to walk upon a rope tightly stretched in serene air' until 'we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm'. Yet Pater held his own balance easily in clear disdain of nostalgias, and in the exaltation of 'the privileged moment'. Yeats and Stevens each learn from Pater: Stevens's most icy severities are from that source—'Why should a poem not change in sense when there is a fluctuation of the whole of experience? Or why should it not change when we realise that the indifferent experience of life is the unique experience, the item of ecstasy which we have been isolating and reserving for another time and place, loftier and more secluded?' Praise of Wallace Stevens is one of the incidental pleasures of Bloom's book.
Placed in creative context, Yeats stands out as poet. The judgments here are new and controversial—their gist: 'current criti- cism has been unfair to the early Yeats, too kind to the middle Yeats, and most uncriti- cally worshipful of the later Yeats.' Bloom's disagreement with Richard Ellmann over MacNeice's interpretation shows how radi- cally different his concept of Romanticism is. MacNeice writes, 'Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, each of them had a remarkable eye, and an ear for verbal effects, but they looked at the world through glasses coloured with self-pity, and their music is sultry . . The world they saw is recognised by Bloom as their vision of a dangerous and entranc- ing Lower Paradise, and 'where there is self-pity anywhere in this labyrinth, it is the controlled, thematic, necessary self-pity demanded for the presentation of why this is a Lower Paradise' The heroes of Yeats's early poetry live uneasily at the edges of this world, like Alastor and Endymion, That Yeats surpasses the stage of doomed Prometheanism is the ground of Bloom's great claim: 'In the long perspective, Yeats will be seen as the first Romantic poet after Browning to succeed in the enormous, almost Titanic task of weathering his own Romanticism without losing it, and thus losing his authenticity.'
Against this achieved Romanticism Bloom sets Yeats's distracting idiosyncrasies— chiefly his need to make occult what is purely romantic. Shelley held fast to his `visionary scepticism', but Yeats to our loss is poet and necromancer in turn. Yet even this can be gain: Yeats's credulity could make a gap in nature just as Sir Thomas Browne's could. It is the rigid systematising, and the absurdity of Mrs Yeats's 'Instructors' which suspend our belief and lead us to
look vainly for human relevance in the beautiful, stifling mythologies of A Vision. Measured against Shelley, whom he self- protectingly accused of lacking a sense of evil, Yeats shows a deliberate anti-humanism which disfigures A Vision and some of the most praised of the later poems.
A poet's relationship with his own sub- jectivity, his mythology of self, in Yeats his projection as antithetical (anti-natural) man, contains the generous or the reductive qual- ities of his vision. Rather tauntingly, Bloom offers this crux to 'the Higher Criticism of Yeats, when it is more fully developed'. Yeats's own conclusion about it in the Auto- biographies is that 'in the end the creative energy of men depends upon their believing that they have within themselves something immortal and imperishable, and that all else is but an image in a looking glass'. Yet the poems that Bloom persuasively finds the most moving are those which speak against the antithetical and are chastened and self- revealing : 'Vacillation', 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul', The Man and the Echo', 'Demon and Beast'. Where he reverses favourable critical opinion, Bloom faces both Yeats's own rhetoric and 'the awed piety of the exegetes'—and also the rough support of Yvor Winters, whose anti-roman- ticism often makes his hatchet-work too brutal to be reliable as criticism.
Bloom's Years is not a destructive book. When he criticises the much-praised 'Second Coming' for, amongst other things, its Gnostic quasi-determinism, it is squarely in the context of his theory of poetic influence. By deliberately misrepresenting apocalyptic poems like Blake's 'Mental Traveller' and 'Prometheus Unbound' Yeats is serving his own ends. Shelley and Blake defy despair, maintain freedom even in the face of apocalypse. Yeats, however, finds apocalypse very much to his Gnostic taste, a satisfying fiction of despair. By recognising this Bloom criticised Yeats—justly it must seem to some, though not to all—for_the oracular presenta- tion of a partial view.
Yeats's rhetoric forces assent. Critics as wary and clear as Bloom restore the con- text of the poetry, its struggle with 'ecstatic and reductive solipsism', with a lifetime's frustration both sexual and creative, with Yeats as necromancer and with Yeats as a great poet, 'neither humane nor humanistic'. One of the many sides of Bloom's book not followed up here for want of space is the biographical—Yeats's relationship with his vehement father, with Maud Gonne, and with the other sybils less creatively powerful than her, the women 'good as bread'. -
The last of these was Margot Ruddock, whom he met in 1934 and worked with in setting up a poetic theatre in London. He was moved by her, and wrote her poems: `Margot', now published for the first time in Ah, Sweet Dancer: A Correspondence, edited by Roger McHugh (Macmillan 35s), 'A Crazed Girl', and the one briefly dismissed by Dorothy Wellesley, 'No, I do not care for your poem "Sweet Dancer"' The corre- spondence is fairly uninteresting, though the letters show Yeats trying (not overhand) to find Eliot and Auden worthy of a place in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and become touching when uncertainty pushes Margot into fragile and self-destructive de- fiance. Yeats found her 'power of expression of spiritual suffering unique in her genera- tion', but documents of breakdown easily date, and hers has. Distanced from her actual pain, it is easier to sympathise frivo- lously with her trials as amanuensis to Yeats's Swami, who could compose '52 poems of sheer ecstasy in a day'.
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