Modern American Poetry

(^22) Harold Bloom
virtually enslaved not only by Eliot’s insights but by the entire span of his
preferences and prejudices. If one’s cultural position was Jewish, Liberal, and
Romantic, one was likely to start out with a certain lack of affection for
Eliot’s predominance, however much (against the will) the subtle force of the
poetry was felt. If a young critic particularly loved Shelley, Milton, Emerson,
Pater, and if that same critic did not believe that Blake was a naive and
eccentric genius, then regard for Eliot seemed unnecessary. Whatever he
actually represented, a neochristian and neoclassic Academy had exalted him,
by merit raised, to what was pragmatically rather a bad eminence. In that
critical climate, Hopkins was considered the only valid Victorian poet,
greatly superior to Browning and Tennyson, while Whitman seemed an
American nightmare and Wallace Stevens, if he passed at all, had to be
salvaged as a Late Augustan. Thirty years on, these views have a kind of
antique charm, but in 1954 they were at least annoying, and if one cared
enough, they had some capacity for infuriating.
I resume these matters not to stir up waning rancors, but to explain why,
for some critics of my own generation, Eliot only recently has ceased to
represent the spiritual enemy. His disdain for Freud, his flair for demonstrating
the authenticity of his Christianity by exhibiting a judicious anti-Semitism, his
refined contempt for human sexuality—somehow these did not seem to be the
inevitable foundations for contemporary culture. Granted that he refrained
from the rhetorical excesses of his ally Ezra Pound; there is nothing in him
resembling the Poundian apothegm: “All the jew part of the Bible is black
evil.” Still, an Academy that found its ideology in Eliot was not a place where
one could teach comfortably, or where one could have remained, had the Age
of Eliot not begun to wane. The ascendancy of Eliot, as a fact of cultural
politics, is something many among us could not wish to see return.
Eliot asserted for his poetry a seventeenth-century ancestry, out of
Jacobean dramatists and Metaphysical lyricists. Its actual forerunners are
Whitman and Tennyson, and Eliot’s strength is felt now when we read
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “Maud: A Monodrama,”
and find ourselves believing that they are influenced by The Waste Land. It is
a neglected truth of American poetic history that Eliot and Stevens are more
Whitmanian than Hart Crane, whose allegiance to Whitman was overt.
Though Eliot and Stevens consciously did not feel or know it, their poetry is
obsessed with Whitman’s poetry. By this I mean Whitman’s tropes and
Whitman’s curious transitions between topics, and not at all the example of
Whitman, far more crucial for Crane and many others.
It is the pattern of Eliot’s figurations that is most High Romantic, a
pattern that I suspect he learned from Tennyson and Whitman, who derived