Modern American Poetry

(^24) Harold Bloom
never ceased to share with the elegiac Whitman and the Virgilian Tennyson:
“Lilac and brown hair; / Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the
mind over the third stair.” The figurative movement is metonymic, as in the
displacement of poetic power from the speaker to the curiously Pre-
Raphaelite “broadbacked figure drest in blue and green,” who is anything but
a possible representation of Eliot’s own poetic self.
(IV) This is the daemonic vision proper, allowing a sequence that
denies sublimity, to reattain a Romantic Sublime. In the transition between
sections 3 and 4, Eliot appears to surmount the temptations of solipsism, so
as to ask and answer the question, “Am I capable of loving another?” The
unnamed other or “silent sister” is akin to shadowy images of desire in
Tennyson and Whitman, narcissistic emblems certainly, but pointing beyond
the self’s passion for the self. Hugh Kenner, indubitably Eliot’s best and most
Eliotic critic, suggestively compares Ash-Wednesdayto Tennyson’s “The Holy
Grail,” and particularly to the fearful death-march of Percivale’s quest in that
most ornate portion of The Idylls of the King. Kenner of course awards the
palm to Eliot over what he dismisses as a crude “Victorian ceremony of
iterations” as compared to Eliot’s “austere gestures of withdrawal and
submission.” A quarter of a century after he made them, Kenner’s judgments
seem eminently reversible, since Tennyson’s gestures are, in this case,
palpably more austere than his inheritor’s. Tennyson has, after all, nothing
quite so gaudy as “Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream / While
jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.”
(V) Percivale’s desert and the wasteland of Browning’s Childe Roland
join the Biblical wildernesses in this extraordinary askesis, a self-curtailing
rhapsody that truncates Romantic tradition as much as it does Eliot’s
individual talent. One could assert that this section affirms all the
possibilities of sublimation, from Plato through Nietzsche to Freud, except
that the inside/outside metaphor of dualism confines itself here only to “The
Word without a word, the Word within.” Eliot, like all his Romantic
ancestors from Wordsworth to Pater, seeks a crossing to a subtle
identification with an innocent earliness, while fearing to introject instead
the belatedness of a world without imagination, the death-in-life of the poet
who has outlasted his gift.
(VI) This is one of Eliot’s triumphs, as an earliness is recovered under
the sign of contrition. The “unbroken wings” still flying seaward are a
beautiful metalepsis of the wings of section I, which were “merely vans to
beat the air.” A characteristic pattern of the Romantic crisis lyric is extended
as the precursors return from the dead, but in Eliot’s own colors, the “lost
lilac” of Whitman and the “lost sea voices” of Tennyson joining Eliot’s “lost