Modern American Poetry

(^8) Harold Bloom
Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air,
But as in the powerful mirror of my wish and will.”
The principal difference between Stevens and Whitman appears to be
that Stevens admits his mind is alone with its own figurations, while
Whitman keeps inaccurately but movingly insisting he wants “contact” with
other selves. His “contact” is an Emersonian term, and we know, as
Whitman’s readers, that he actually cannot bear “contact,” any more than
Emerson, Dickinson, Frost, or Stevens can tolerate it. “Poem with
Rhythms,” like so much of Stevens, has a hidden origin in Whitman’s “The
Sleepers,” particularly in a great passage apparently describing a woman’s
disappointment in love:
I am she who adorn’d herself and folded her hair expectantly,
My truant lover has come, and it is dark.
Double yourself and receive me darkness,
Receive me and my lover too, he will not let me go without him.
I roll myself upon you as upon a bed, I resign myself to the dusk.
He whom I call answers me and takes the place of my lover,
He rises with me silently from the bed.
Darkness, you are gentler than my lover, his flesh was
sweaty and panting,
I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me.
My hands are spread forth, I pass them in all directions.
I would sound up the shadowy shore to which you are journeying.
Be careful, darkness! already, what was it touch’d me?
I thought my lover had gone, else darkness and he are one,
I hear the heart-beat, I follow, I fade away.
This juxtaposition of major Whitman to relatively minor Stevens is not
altogether fair, but then I don’t think I hurt Stevens by granting that
Whitman, upon his heights, is likely to make his descendant seem only a
dwarf of disintegration. Whitman-as-Woman invokes the darkness of birth,
and blends himself into the mingled Sublimity of death and the Native
Strain. Stevens-as-Interior-Paramour invokes only his mind’s own