Contemporary Poets, New Edition

218 Pages·1.384 MB·English

by  Bloom, Harold

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African-American Geoffrey Chaucer Norman Mailer
Poets: Volume I George Orwell Octavio Paz
African-American G.K. Chesterton Paul Auster
Poets: Volume II Gwendolyn Brooks Philip Roth
Aldous Huxley Hans Christian Ralph Ellison
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Andersen Ralph Waldo
Alice Munro Henry David Thoreau Emerson
Alice Walker Herman Melville Ray Bradbury
American Women Hermann Hesse Richard Wright
Poets: 1650–1950 H.G. Wells Robert Browning
Amy Tan Hispanic-American Robert Frost
Anton Chekhov Writers Robert Hayden
Arthur Miller Homer Robert Louis
Asian-American Honoré de Balzac Stevenson
Writers Jamaica Kincaid Salman Rushdie
August Wilson James Joyce Stephen Crane
The Bible Jane Austen Stephen King
The Brontës Jay Wright Sylvia Plath
Carson McCullers J.D. Salinger Tennessee Williams
Charles Dickens Jean-Paul Sartre Thomas Hardy
Christopher Marlowe John Irving Thomas Pynchon
Contemporary Poets John Keats Tom Wolfe
Cormac McCarthy John Milton Toni Morrison
C.S. Lewis John Steinbeck Tony Kushner
Dante Aligheri José Saramago Truman Capote
David Mamet J.R.R. Tolkien Walt Whitman
Derek Walcott Julio Cortázar W.E.B. Du Bois
Don DeLillo Kate Chopin William Blake
Doris Lessing Kurt Vonnegut William Faulkner
Edgar Allan Poe Langston Hughes William Gaddis
Émile Zola Leo Tolstoy William Shakespeare:
Emily Dickinson Marcel Proust Comedies
Ernest Hemingway Margaret Atwood William Shakespeare:
Eudora Welty Mark Twain Histories
Eugene O’Neill Mary Wollstonecraft William Shakespeare:
F. Scott Fitzgerald Shelley Tragedies
Flannery O’Connor Maya Angelou William Wordsworth
Franz Kafka Miguel de Cervantes Zora Neale Hurston
Gabriel García Milan Kundera
Márquez Nathaniel Hawthorne

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
CONTEMPORARy POETS
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Contemporary Poets—New Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contemporary poets / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New
ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-588-6 (hardcover)
1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. I. Bloom, Harold.
PS325.C67 2009
811’.5’09—dc22
2009025032
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Apocalypse Then:
Merwin and the Sorrows of Literary History 9
Marjorie Perloff
Periodizing Ashbery and His Influence 31
Stephen Paul Miller
Re-Versing the Past:
Adrienne Rich’s Outrage Against Order 55
Barbara L. Estrin
Contemporary American Poetry 79
Roger Gilbert
Treasure Box 93
Anthony Hecht
The Sower Against Gardens 109
Linda Gregerson
Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge
in John Hollander’s Poetry 129
David Bromwich
vi Contents
Jorie Graham’s “New Way of Looking” 137
Willard Spiegelman
Hall of Voices: Richard Howard 167
Langdon Hammer
The Modern Element in Criticism 185
Adam Kirsch
Chronology 191
Contributors 195
Bibliography 197
Acknowledgments 201
Index 203
Editor’s Note
The introduction is a revised and condensed version of an essay written in
partnership with David Bromwich more than a quarter century ago. It sets
the background of American poetic tradition that still informs the poets
surveyed here: Merwin, Ashbery, Rich, Simic, Glück, Hollander, Graham,
and Howard.
Marjorie Perloff precisely and sympathetically finds in W.S. Merwin our
equivalent of Thomas Gray, who is a permanent poet, after which Stephen
Paul Miller attempts to see John Ashbery as a political poet, which I find sur-
prising. Adrienne Rich, who most certainly is political, is studied by Barbara
L. Estrin as a poet of outrage.
Roger Gilbert gives a broad survey of the contemporary scene, while the
late Anthony Hecht, one of our major poets, welcomes Charles Simic to that
company and Linda Gregerson celebrates the originality of Louise Glück.
David Bromwich returns with a subtle appreciation of John Hollander’s
extraordinarily heightened poetic consciousness, after which Jorie Graham’s
perceptiveness is detailed by Willard Spiegelman.
Richard Howard’s reincarnation of Robert Browning is praised by
Langdon Hammer, while Adam Kirsch completes this volume by analyzing
current fashions in the criticism of verse.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
“A
sk the fact for the form,” Emerson said, but the history of American
poetry has tended to illustrate a rival quest, which is to beg the form for the
fact. Emerson urged the American bards to emulate his Merlin, who mounted
to paradise by the stairway of surprise, but even the greatest among Emerson’s
immediate progeny, Whitman and Dickinson, chose to present their poetic
selves through repetitive modes of continuous and overwhelming formal
innovation. American poetry since the end of World War II is an epitome of
this reverse Emersonianism: No other poets in Western history have so self-
deceivingly organized themselves along the supposed lines of formal divisions.
The mimic wars of “closed” against “open” formers have masqueraded as con-
flicts between spiritual stances and ideological commitments: Closed form,
governed by metric and stanza, could thus be writ large as a settled insulation
from experience, whereas open form, freestyle and full of vatic self-confidence,
reduced all experience to a chaos. And yet if we stand back now, we behold
mostly a welter of wholly shared anxieties that unite the feuding camps.
The poets who were gathered together at their first full strength circa 1945
would include Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, Theodore Roethke,
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, J.V. Cun-
ningham, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan.
They had as predecessors the most formidable group of poets in the American
tradition, one that began with Edwin Arlington Robinson and Frost and pro-
ceeded through Pound, Eliot, Moore, Williams, Stevens, Ransom, and Jeffers
down to a somewhat younger trio of e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, and Allen Tate.
Almost all the poets born in the first two decades of the twentieth century seem
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