Modern American Poetry

(^14) Harold Bloom
Shakespeare himself freed a single word “to be a fact in its own right.”
William Carlos Williams was, at his best, a strong American poet, far better
than his hordes of imitators. Like Ezra Pound’s, Williams’s remains a fairly
problematical achievement in the traditions of American poetry. Some
generations hence, it will become clear whether his critics have canonized
him permanently or subverted him by taking him too much at his own
intentions. For now he abides, a live influence, and perhaps with even more
fame to come.
EZR APOUND
I have brought the great ball of crystal; who can lift it?
—Canto 116
I do not know many readers who have an equal affection for the Cantosand
for, say, Wallace Stevens’s An Ordinary Evening in New Havenor his The
Auroras of Autumn. Doubtless, such differences in poetic taste belong to the
accidents of sensibility, or to irreconcilable attitudes concerning the relation
of poetry to belief. They may indeed belong to more profound distinctions;
in judgments as to value that transcend literary preferences. I do not desire
to address myself to such matters here. Nor will I consider Pound’s politics.
The Cantoscontain material that is not humanly acceptable to me, and if that
material is acceptable to others, then they themselves are thereby less
acceptable, at least to me.
My subject here, in necessarily curtailed terms, is Pound’s relation to
poetic tradition in his own language, and to Whitman in particular. Pound’s
critics have taken him at his word in this regard, but no poet whatsoever can
be trusted in his or her own story of poetic origins, even as no man or woman
can be relied on to speak with dispassionate accuracy of his or her parents.
Perhaps Pound triumphed in his agon with poetic tradition, which is the
invariable assertion of all of his critical partisans. But the triumph, if it
occurred, was a very qualified one. My own experience as a reader of the
Cantos, across many years, is that the long poem or sequence is marred
throughout by Pound’s relative failure to transume or transcend his
precursors. Their ancestral voices abound, and indeed become more rather
than less evident as the sequence continues. Nor is this invariably a
controlled allusiveness. Collage, which is handled as metaphor by Marianne
Moore and by the Eliot of The Waste Land, is a much more literal process in
Pound, is more scheme than trope, as it were. The allusive triumph over
tradition in Moore’s “Marriage” or The Waste Landis fairly problematical, yet