. . . .

To continue with "good" and "strong": what has contributed to "a badness not be believed" in poetry: the PC ethical theme takeover, the loss of aesthetics: OR a reminder of what Marjorie Perloff said to Harold Bloom (in which Adrienne Rich gets flogged from the left and the right but good).

"If representation-by-category is to be the law of the universities," Bloom asks not unreasonably, "what 'minority' is to be excluded?" And again : "If what Walter Pater called 'Aesthetic criticism' dies, then what he termed 'Aesthetic poetry' must in time die also, since we will cease to know good from bad poetry."

Bloom's Exhibit A, in this particular instance, is the Best American Poetry 1996, the one volume he has refused to draw upon in selecting The Best of the Best. This is the volume edited by Adrienne Rich, whose name Bloom unaccountably refuses to so much as cite. "It is," he says of the 1996 anthology, "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." Here I think Bloom gives voice to the dismay many of us felt when Rich's selection appeared. Too many of the relentlessly PC poems in this volume are maudlin, self-righteous, boring, and ultimately just plain incompetent; I would add that Rich's rant against contemporary culture in her own introduction seems as unaware of the basic facts of economic life in late twentieth-century America as it refuses to acknowledge the genuinely radical poetry now being written.

I can understand, then, that Bloom is disheartened by such recent manifestations of what he calls the "Culture of Resentment." But I am not sure it is enough to respond to that culture by citing large chunks of Emerson and Whitman or by invoking Shakespeare as our tutelary spirit. To begin with, I would argue, Bloom is himself partly responsible for the shift from aesthetic (or formalist) criticism to the "cultural" model he denounces. For despite his current endorsement of the aesthetic position, Bloom's own perspective, at least from The Anxiety of Influence (1973) on down, has been much more thematic than formal or structural or linguistic; indeed, its central thrust has been primarily Freudian. Why Freud and not Marx? Why the vocabulary of clinamen and tessera and apophrades rather than, say, the Russian Formalist vocabulary of faktura and "making it strange" or the Bakhtinian vocabulary of dialogism and heteroglossia? And why the admission of Wordsworthian and Emersonian poets into the pantheon at the expense of poets of rival persuasions, beginning with Eliot, who, like it or not, has had such a seminal influence on Bloom's own favorite "spent seer," John Ashbery?

I would argue that the insistence on the Romantic paradigm as the paradigm has made Bloom curiously impervious to some of the most exciting poetry now being written. And that even in the case of his favorite modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, his refusal to deal with matters of sound, rhythm, and syntax in Stevens's "poems of our climate," has not exactly helped to pave the way for an aesthetic criticism. Indeed, the psychology of tropes that is central to Bloom's readings has a way of bringing us back to thematic motifs outside the materiality of the poetic language itself. Why is Ashbery's Three Poems written in prose, not verse? One would never know, reading Bloom on Ashbery. Such "technical" details are evidently judged to be irrelevant.

(The turn to Eliot "to pave the way to an aesthetic criticism"--well. That's a slightly offensive way of saying that the "minority" too could get with the program. But see the whole for yourself. Tell me about the "good".)

***