Modern American Poetry

(^10) Harold Bloom
the imagination is only decaying sense, must ask himself: Why is he so
moved by this transfiguration of language into acutest speech? He may
remember, in this connection, the prose statement by Stevens that moves
him most:
Why should a poem not change in sense when there is a
fluctuation of the whole of appearance? Or why should it not
change when we realize 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.
The doctrinal voice of Walter Pater, another unacknowledged
ancestor, is heard in this passage, as perhaps it must be heard in any modern
Epicureanism. Stevens, I suggest, is the Lucretius of our modern poetry, and
like Lucretius seeks his truth in mere appearances, seeks his spirit in things
of the weather. Both poets are beyond illusions, yet both invest their
knowing of the way things are with a certain grim ecstasy. But an American
Lucretius, coming after the double alienation of European Romanticism and
domestic Transcendentalism, will have lost all sense of the communal in his
ecstasy. Stevens fulfilled the unique enterprise of a specifically American
poetry by exposing the essential solipsism of our Native Strain. No American
feels free when he is not alone, and every American’s passion for Yes affirms
a hidden belief that his soul’s substance is no part of the creation. We are
mortal gods, the central strain in our poetry keeps saying, and our aboriginal
selves are forbidden to find companionship in one another. Our ecstasy
comes only from self-recognition, yet cannot be complete if we reduce
wholly to “the evilly compounded, vital I ... made ... fresh in a world of
white.” We need “The Poems of Our Climate” because we are, happily,
imperfect solipsists, unhappy in a happily imperfect and still external
world—which is to say, we need Stevens:
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.