The late Harold Bloom, 25 years ago, was asked by David Lehman—who recently ‘liked’ one of my poems on FB—to compile a Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 — 1997 and Bloom complied, but his compilation completely omitted the 1996 Best American Poetry volume by the late lesbian poet, Adrienne Rich. Bloom wrote a scathing introduction saying political correctness was ruining poetry and destroying universities.
Bloom’s 10 year BAP anniversary anthology considered 10 volumes by these 10 guest editors: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Glűck, A. R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate, 1988 to 1997.
There are several stories here.
The headline grabber, obviously: Bloom snubbed every choice by Adrienne Rich (she did find a few good poems: Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada)—Rich, a distinguished poet who was awarded the Yale Younger Poet prize by king-maker W.H. Auden.
Bloom could have included one or two poems and moved on, but the most famous literary critic of his day decided to make a statement. Series editor Lehman suggested what he thought were worthy poems from 1996, but succumbed to Bloom’s editorial fiat. Lehman has turned out to be a wise editor for BAP. He doesn’t encourage controversy, but he doesn’t run from it, either.
Are you sitting down? Here is Bloom, from his introduction:
“That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this introduction, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. I ardently wish that I were being hyperbolical, but in fact I am exercising restraint…”
“Sincerity, as the divine Oscar Wilde assured us, is not nearly enough to generate a poem. Bursting with sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose.”
“[Literary] Criticism…is dying…replaced…by ‘cultural criticism,’ a would-be social science.”
“When I was a young teacher of poetry at Yale, the English Romantic poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, as well as Blake and Shelley, whose place in the canon I helped restore. On hundreds of campuses now, these poets have to share attention with the ‘women Romantic poets.'”
Bloom doesn’t help himself here. Why can’t women poets (or poets of color, etc) be studied, too? Poems ought to matter as much as poets—there is no such thing as a small group of poets—even if it’s the magnificent Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Blake—who wrote only perfect poems. Women writers sold as well as their male counterparts in the 19th century. If Shelley is being canceled, that’s one thing; to ostentatiously lock the clubhouse door—on some lesser known women poets (some of whom are worth reading)—seems a bit much.
“I have seen my profession dying for over a quarter century now, and in another decade it may be dead.”
“Walt Whitman was not only the strongest of our poets…but…the most betrayed…Whitman’s poetry does the opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is reclusive, evasive, hermetic, nuanced, and more onanistic even than homoerotic, which critics cannot accept, particularly these days when attempts are made to assimilate the Self-Reliant Whitman into what calls itself the Homosexual Poetic.”
“Authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect. ‘We live in the mind,’ Stevens said, and our poetry is either Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but either way is informed by Emerson’s dialect of power:”
And here Bloom quotes a passage from Emerson’s “Experience” which takes no prisoners in its radical assertion that within the sanctity of the self, everything is allowed. Emerson: “We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated…For there is no crime to the intellect.”
Whoa. Mr. Emerson. Are you really saying this?
But let us be alive to what Emerson (and Bloom, who astutely rode to profit two or three important ideas) is saying here: 1) Human beings are wicked 2) Poetry’s highest calling is to energize itself by both using and getting to the bottom of, human wickedness. Poetry is best when it is an uncompromising vessel for every kind of expression, encouraging a divine individuality of which the “good” and the “fit” and the “beautiful” have no necessary part (though they may). This echoes Plato’s embrace of “madness” as ultimately necessary for creativity (and love).
Poe thought Emerson, and broad, cultural, poetry formulas like this, crazy, recommending instead “method” in the hands of a calm practitioner—think of the “escape from personality” per Eliot. “Beauty” (non-violent madness) was necessary in poetry for Poe—“beauty” wasn’t just one arrow in the quiver; it was the arrow. Emerson, seen through the Poe lens, was hyperbolic and unrealistic, like an ugly guy trying to get laid, enforcing fantastic laws on the universe. One can see here the Poe/Emerson divide which was so important to Bloom (who also apparently thought of himself as an ugly guy trying to get laid). Bloom embraced Emerson-as-Faust—and had zero patience for Poe’s buzzkill.
Bloom couldn’t reconcile.
Back to Bloom’s introduction:
“Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader…”
The “solitary art” for the “solitary reader” recalls what Bloom just said above: his “onanistic” (it means masturbation) description of Whitman.
Bloom prefers the poetry of the private and squishy, objecting to broader political amorousness. The Yale professor is quite certain that concern for the “injured” belongs to him. Is he right?
“The Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed.”
Bloom ends his introduction by quoting from “The Poet,” in which Emerson lauds “insanity,” “questionable facts,” “angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and…departure from routine.” According to Emerson, the best is when the poets, “liberating gods,” have it that “dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.”
The radical individualist will have his private, drunken, transcendent dream. This is the essence of Bloom and Emerson (kind of like geniuses on LSD). Here, then, is their democratic, demonic, elitism of lonely difficulty, where the morals of political correctness declaimed by those like Adrienne Rich are cast out as too “sincere” (Wilde).
Bloom is correct. One cannot have the wayward freedom of the private dream and moralizing politics at the same time; they are too antithetical.
But, in the end, there’s nothing really politically intransigent or personally bitter about this quarrel. (As far as I can tell, Rich never responded to Bloom’s attack.) It’s an academic disagreement only, except Bloom’s academy isn’t some 19th century prison: Bloom protests too much; his and Emerson’s pleas for “drunkenness” are more than satisfied in the Humanities, today—which is no longer a Latin-and-Greek, theological, boot camp. Bloom’s political beliefs (leftist, liberal) mirror Rich and the “Resenters”—who, according to Bloom, hate real poetry.
Adrienne Rich, in her introduction, lays out the method for her selections in the very first paragraph:
“This is a gathering of poems that one guest editor, reading through mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry, found especially urgent, lively, haunting, resonant, demanding to be reread.” (Italics mine)
What could be more bland? “mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry…” It sounds quaint. Especially next to this by Bloom, which is how his introduction begins, and which made Rich smile, I’m sure:
“My epigraph [They have the numbers; we, the heights.] is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multi-culturalists, the hordes of camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commisars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of “cultural studies.” For just a little longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic.”
Wow. 25 years ago—this actually rang across the book marts and the halls of academe.
Bloom ends his first paragraph by defining his criterion for the 75 poems he chose (leaving out Rich’s selections):
“These pass my personal test for the canonical: I have reread them with pleasure and profit.” (Italics mine)
Neither Bloom nor Rich is an Einstein. This is not Baudelaire. Or Edgar Poe. Or T.S. Eliot. This BAP battle has one professor imagining himself as a Spartan commander against another professor who thinks L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poems written by people of color would be an improvement for a Best American Poetry volume. (She writes “Language” with the stars. Do people still do that?)
Here’s Rich, again, from her introduction:
“We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall.”
What say you, commander?
Rich and Bloom are both Emersonian—so no sparks flew, or could fly. Rich’s hip, “living language” pastiche is just Waldo sounding a little more like Paul Simon.
Still, there is a gulf, and here it is:
Bloom wants to preside over the chaotic dream of poetry and be its psychiatrist/critic—the Resenters (they care about freedom, too) don’t want to give Bloom that power; he represents to them exactly what their politics-meddling-with-poetry represents to him; both sides are radicals who differ only where the limited authority should be placed; Bloom wants it placed in him—who will decide which difficult, radical-individual, dream is in fact a good poem; Rich wants authority situated in a set of politically enlightened principles under which poetry can aspire, but not compete.
The final consideration is: how are Bloom’s selections? In his introduction, Bloom names four “major” poets represented in his Best of 1988 to 1997 anthology: Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and May Swenson—who are no longer living, adding Ashbery and Ammons (then living) as worthy to be in their company.
But as Marjorie Perloff (she agreed with Bloom that Rich’s 1996 volume was aesthetically weak) pointed out (I paraphrase her) in her general response to Bloom in the Boston Review:
1) In his introduction, Bloom did not bring himself to mention any other poets in his Best anthology, focusing instead on Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Stevens, Hart Crane, and especially Emerson. (Bloom loves to quote the dead—who invariably make his points far better than he does.)
2) Bloom, like Rich, is mostly a culture critic, and therefore deserves blame for what he laments: the decline of hard-nosed, close-reading, aesthetics.
Two good points from Marjorie Perloff.
Bloom champions Ashbery—which would seem, at first blush, a little strange. Professor Bloom began his career defending Blake and Shelley; the traditional canon suits him, Bloom quotes Tennyson in his Best introduction as an example of beautiful poetry which transcends politics; Emerson, whom he adores, is always making easily understood (if sometimes snide and psychotic) points; and Shakespeare leads the Bloom parade—so what is it which attracts Bloom so much to this grinning, nonsensical, prose poetry, jokester, Ashbery? Isn’t Bloom afraid the Ashbery hipsters are laughing at him, and not with him?
Bloom was wise to include Ashbery in his canon.
First, Ashbery is apolitical. Bloom had to like that.
Second, Bloom’s avant-garde creds rose enormously by embracing the Harvard poet, who was liked by W.H. Auden. With Ashbery on his side, Bloom, from a distance at least, looks less like a dour, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy.
Third, Ashbery is never guilty of the dreaded “sincerity”—in his poems, John Ashbery, the real person, is always hiding. If you hide who you are, well of course you can never be sincere. Ashbery learned this hide-John-Ashbery trick from the beginning and stuck to it—in a steady, unassuming manner, to the end of his career.
Finally, Ashbery’s stream-of-conscious, meandering, prose, poetry, is rhapsodic rather than digressive. Especially in lengthier pieces, the line between rhapsodic (good) and digressive (bad) is very fine, indeed; to pull off the former takes a real, but difficult-to-define, skill.
If this is a legitimate poetic talent—I’ve put my finger on it precisely with these two opposite terms (rhapsodic, digressive) which nevertheless hint at being one—then here is where the whole modern poetry experiment (dubious everywhere else) succeeds: in the strange rhapsody of Ashbery.
We can see this quality clearly in one of Ashbery’s shorter poems, selected by Bloom:
The Problem Of Anxiety
Fifty years have passed
since I started living in those dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can’t figure out
how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.
Suppose this poem were about you—would you
put in the things I’ve carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that’s,
all in some book, it seems. For you
I’ve saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
This might be the best poem in the whole volume, but I also love “litany” by Carolyn Creeden, “Histoire” by Harry Matthews, “Manifest Destiny” by Jorie Graham, “Prophecy” by Donald Hall, “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, “Morning, Noon, and Night” by Mark Strand, “One Train May Hide Another” by Kenneth Koch, and “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” by Galway Kinnell.
There is something to be said for the compilers art, for these extraordinary poems come from poets who also have published (never mind written) poems which are less than good.
The vanity of poets (who think all their poems are good) will get in the way of truly good poems, such that it may be said the honest anthologist is really the one person to whom poetry gives itself.
One “major” poet of Bloom’s, who to this author is overrated, is Ammons—his long poem included, “Garbage,” feels digressive, not rhapsodic. The reason? It’s sincere (Oscar Wilde—and Bloom agreeing with him—get this right).
From “Garbage:”
…(I hope) to live
from now on on in elegance and simplicity—
or, maybe, just simplicity—why shouldn’t I
at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of
leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way
from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed)
and in need of an hour’s simmering boil
to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, .65$ lb. dry: they
have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours—but
they’re welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
more protein by weight than meat, more”…
This is too sincere by half. Ammons is sharing. This is not rhapsodic. It’s digression.
Why Bloom could not tell the difference I am not really sure. But since Bloom was not a poet himself, and found no elegance except in quoting others—either the dead, or his colleague W. Jackson Bate, from whom he lifted his anxiety of influence theory—perhaps the Yale professor was finally an emotional, miserable, copying machine?
If we don’t separate out Ammons, we can’t see Ashbery clearly. The rhapsody of Ashbery and the digression of Ammons get confused. Aesthetics is blurry without the surgeon’s knife. Casual readers don’t get together and consult each other. Poems don’t talk. The Critic is necessary.
In a bit of irony, I am going to quote a definition of poetry from the 19th century, which answers to that rhapsody we sometimes get from Ashbery, a definition which Edgar Poe, of all people, said of it that this definition of poetry “embodies the sole true definition of what has been a thousand times erroneously defined.”
Here is the definition. It happens to likewise come from an anthologist in a preface to a poetry anthology:
“He who looks on Lake George, or sees the sun rise on Mackinaw, or listens to the grand music of a storm, is divested, certainly, for a time, of a portion of the alloy of his nature. The elements of power in all sublime sights and heavenly harmonies, should live in the poet’s song, to which they can be transferred only by him who possesses the creative faculty. The sense of beauty, next to the miraculous divine suasion, is the means through which the human character is purified and elevated. The creation of beauty, the manifestation of the real by the ideal, ‘in words that move in metrical array,’ is poetry.”
The author of this poetry definition is a man who called Whitman’s poetry “filth” and betrayed his friend, Edgar Poe.
Rufus Griswold.
If you don’t think the lyric Ashbery poem quoted above is sublime in the way Griswold describes, what do you think the “dark towns” are meant to invoke, or the unseen “you,” and what do you think the “eye” represents? As for “metrical array,” it is there, too: spondees pair up brilliantly with anapests in Ashbery’s sonnet-like work.
Well this is nuts. Bloom and Griswold, (along with Emerson) will long be remembered as deeply hostile to Poe. But here is Bloom, with the help of Griswold (and Poe nodding in agreement) hoisting Ashbery high over Adrienne Rich, guest editor of BAP 1996—who did not include Ashbery, or Ammons in her selections. But what I have outlined is really no crazier than anything poetry has given us since America became a nation (one which Rich did not like), including Spartan commander Bloom (from the “heights”) glowering down at professor Rich, the “people’s” 1996 BAP guest editor.
Are all the poems in the 1996 BAP, Rich, ed. inferior to those in the Best of BAP 1988-1997, Bloom, ed.? It would make things easier for critics if it were true. Suffice it to say there are poems Bloom chose from the first 10 volumes—he tended to choose longer poems (going for “difficulty,” I imagine)—which, like “Garbage” by Ammons, have their moments, but which ultimately strike me as pedantic, digressive and yawn-producing (though perhaps this merely indicates I’m not able to appreciate poetry on the “heights.”)
I think it’s safe to say that poems (which are not book-length epics) should be good to us immediately—we shouldn’t need to read a poem on and on for a “story” to develop.
Aesthetics should hit us in the face, and then, and only then, can the story “develop” in a way that pleases us.
Or, how about this? Arresting start, turn, great end: the sonnet.
There’s not much in the way of sonnet-like poems in these competing BAP volumes—except the Ashbery poem quoted (the “Naw” is the turn) from Bloom’s selection. “Like Most Revelations” by Richard Howard (16 lines) is admirable, but the turns are multiple and a little abstract. Richard Howard might be called Oscar Wilde-lite; he had some of the manner but not all of the wit of the great Wilde; unfortunately for 20th century poetry, there is not so much a difference—as the 20th century (great in the horrors of war, certainly) holds its own, but is mostly the 19th century—watered down.
Wouldn’t that be something if the “champion” in this instance were a traditional form poem—by John Ashbery? (Though the wise money is on Kinnell or Carolyn Creedon—stunning poems, really.)
Adrienne Rich’s 1996 volume avoids what Rich explicitly doesn’t like: “the columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line,” like the poem by W. S. Merwin, “Lament for the Makers” which Rich chose. Or Ammons, which she did not. Her selections, compared to Bloom’s, are shorter, edgier, conversational, graffiti-like, shape-y, too consciously attempting not to be digressive, perhaps.
Rich or Bloom? Academic brevity or academic length. It’s basically Emerson, either way.