Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African-American George Orwell Norman Mailer Poets: Volume 1 G.K. Chesterton Octavio Paz African-American Gwendolyn Brooks Oscar Wilde Poets: Volume 2 Hans Christian Paul Auster Aldous Huxley Andersen Philip Roth Alfred, Lord Tennyson Henrik Ibsen Ralph Ellison Alice Munro Henry David Th oreau Ralph Waldo Emerson Alice Walker Herman Melville Ray Bradbury American Modernist Hermann Hesse Richard Wright Poets H.G. Wells Robert Browning American Women Hispanic-American Robert Frost Poets: 1650–1950 Writers Robert Hayden American Women Homer Robert Louis Poets: 1950 to the Honoré de Balzac Stevenson Present Jack London Th e Romantic Poets Amy Tan Jamaica Kincaid Salman Rushdie Anton Chekhov James Joyce Samuel Beckett Arthur Miller Jane Austen Samuel Taylor Coleridge Asian-American Writers Jay Wright Stephen Crane August Wilson J.D. Salinger Stephen King Th e Bible Jean-Paul Sartre Sylvia Plath Th e Brontës John Donne and the Tennessee Williams Carson McCullers Metaphysical Poets Th omas Hardy Charles Dickens John Irving Th omas Pynchon Christopher Marlowe John Keats Tom Wolfe Contemporary Poets John Milton Toni Morrison Cormac McCarthy John Steinbeck Tony Kushner C.S. Lewis José Saramago Truman Capote Dante Alighieri Joseph Conrad Twentieth-Century David Mamet J.R.R. Tolkien British Poets Derek Walcott Julio Cortázar Victorian Poets Don DeLillo Kate Chopin Walt Whitman Doris Lessing Kurt Vonnegut W.E.B. Du Bois Edgar Allan Poe Langston Hughes William Blake Émile Zola Leo Tolstoy William Faulkner Emily Dickinson Marcel Proust William Gaddis Ernest Hemingway Margaret Atwood William Shakespeare: Eudora Welty Mark Twain Comedies Eugene O’Neill Mary Wollstonecraft William Shakespeare: F. Scott Fitzgerald Shelley Histories Flannery O’Connor Maya Angelou William Shakespeare: Franz Kafka Miguel de Cervantes Romances Gabriel García Milan Kundera William Shakespeare: Márquez Nathaniel Hawthorne Tragedies Geoff rey Chaucer Native American William Wordsworth George Bernard Shaw Writers Zora Neale Hurston Bloom’s Modern Critical Views AMERICAN MODERNIST POETS Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: American Modernist Poets Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Learning Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informa tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Learning 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American modernist poets / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-275-5 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3653-0 (e-book) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—United States. I. Bloom, Harold. PS310.M57A64 2011 811'.509112—dc22 2010041435 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: February 2011 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Paterson and Epic Tradition 43 Peter Schmidt The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the Truth in Contradiction 73 Jerome J. McGann Marianne Moore: Idiom and Idiosyncrasy 103 Robert Pinsky Taming the Socialist: Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems and Its Critics 117 Mark Van Wienen Modernism Comes to American Poetry: 1908–1920 131 Roger Mitchell From Etymology to Paronomasia: Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Others 159 Eleanor Cook Robert Frost and the Poetry of Survival 175 Jay Parini vi Contents Uncanny Millay 199 Suzanne Clark So Many Selves: The “I” as Indeterminate Multiplicity 219 Martin Heusser Chronology 241 Contributors 245 Bibliography 247 Acknowledgments 251 Index 253 Editor’s Note My introduction surveys the major modernist poets, from the Emersonian religion of Frost to the late flowering of Stevens. Peter Schmidt views Paterson as an epical summation of the various modes of writing Williams explored throughout his life, followed by Jerome J. McCann’s suggestion that the Cantos are the greatest achievement of mod- ern poetry in any language. Robert Pinsky turns his attention to the sociable writings of Marianne Moore, after which Mark Van Wienen detects the socialist bent in the early work of Sandburg. Roger Mitchell provides an overview of moderism’s influence on the century’s early decades, followed by Eleanor Cook’s examination of puns and word play primarily in the work of Stevens and Bishop. Jay Parini offers a shrewd assessment of Frostian poetics, after which Suzanne Clark unlocks the uncanny endurance of Millay’s high modernist strivings. The volume concludes with Martin Heusser’s analysis of the mul- tiple selves present in the poetry of Cummings. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction Robert Frost Frost died two months short of his eighty-ninth birthday in 1963. That he was the major poet of twentieth-century America can be both affirmed and disputed. But even the admirers of his strongest rivals—Wallace Ste- vens, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop—concede Frost’s unique eminence as a poet both popular and sophisticated. There is a mountain in Ripton, Vermont, named after Robert Frost; no one is going to name a mountain after Wallace Stevens or Thomas Stearns Eliot. Frost, read by hundreds of thousands, is a great poet by all the aesthetic and cognitive standards that have been crucial to the Western canon at least since Dante and Petrarch. Robert Frost’s poetry, invulnerable to the tides of resent- ment, becomes stronger with each passing year. Its values indeed are aesthetic and cognitive: It gives diffi cult pleasure, implicitly urging us to abandon easier pleasures, and it educates us up to Frost’s own high standards. Frost himself, whom I met a few times, at Yale and at Breadloaf, was a diffi cult personality, at least in his old age. A superb monologist, he held one by his bursts of eloquence and his poetic authority. Some of the later poetry is self-indulgent, but always there are moments of vitalizing realization, as here in “Pod of the Milkweed,” the opening poem in Frost’s fi nal volume, In the Clearing (1962): But waste was the essence of the scheme. And all the good they did for man or god To all those fl owers they passionately trod Was leave as their posterity one pod With an inheritance of restless dream. 1 2 Harold Bloom If a single pod is of the essence, the vision might seem minimalist, but Frost is too shrewd and too large for such ironic reductiveness, even when it is his own. Like Walt Whitman, with whom he has nothing else in common, he was an Emersonian. Frost placed Emerson’s “Uriel” fi rst among Western poems. Th at is sublime overpraise, but reading “Uriel” now, one uncannily hears the poetic voice of Robert Frost: Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn. Frost’s voice, at its strongest, can be found in a plethora of his poems: “A Servant to Servants,” “Th e Wood-Pile,” “Th e Oven Bird,” “Putting in the Seed,” “Two Watches,” “Once by the Pacifi c,” “Th e Flower Bust,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Design,” “Provide, Provide,” “Th e Most of It,” “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” “Th e Subverted Flower,” “A Cabin in the Clearing.” Th at is a personal list of 14; the fi fteenth and best seems to me “Directive,” for it has the whole of Frost in it. “Directive” is the fourth poem in the later volume, Steeple Bush (1947). It is a retrospective vision of his life by a man of 73 and is animated by an aston- ishing harshness, both toward the poet and the reader. Opening with a pow- erfully monosyllabic line—“Back out of all this now too much for us”—Frost takes his reader and himself on a journey to the interior, past and inward: Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather. We go back to a house, farm, town all now obliterated by time, and we take a road that is more like a quarry. Th e going back is a “serial ordeal,” an Arthurian testing to see if we are worthy to quest for the Holy Grail, a quest wholly ironized in “Directive”: Your destination and your destiny’s A brook that was the water of the house, I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside Introduction 3 A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t fi nd it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. Th e Gospel of Mark (4:11–12) gives us, just this once, a Jesus incredibly harsh: Th at seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear, and not understand, lest at any time, they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. But if we are among Frost’s elect, to be saved by the poet, then: Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. The poem is only a “momentary stay against confusion,” Frost had said elsewhere. With a desperate irony, he hopes for something more, for himself and for us, here at the conclusion of “Directive.” Wallace Stevens Since I find myself in what William Butler Yeats called “the Autumn of the Body,” I write this introduction as a conscious farewell to the poet who formed my mind, as I am not likely ever to find occasion to meditate again in print upon him. I will confi ne these remarks to what may be Stevens’s masterwork, the magnifi cent Th e Auroras of Autumn, composed when Stevens was 68, in 1947. One could argue that Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) is Stevens’s formal attempt at his major poem, and I have moods when I favor An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1949). And yet, on balance, Th e Auroras of Autumn is Stevens’s version of the American sublime, a worthy companion to the Walt Whitman of the great elegies “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “As Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I have been teaching, and writing about, Th e Auroras of Autumn for nearly a half century and will not attempt a comprehensive commentary here. Walter Pater called a superb volume of critical essays Appreciations, and in my old age increasingly I want to write “appreciations” of the great works of imaginative literature. Th e Auroras of Autumn, at fi rst, can seem a rather diffi cult poem, though after so many decades of possessing it by memory, the complexities smooth