Table Of ContentBloom’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,
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Bloom’s Literary Criticism
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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
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Contributing editor: Pamela Loos
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Date printed: February 2011
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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
