Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth;

  Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

  If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,

  And in due time you shall repay the same service to me;

  For after we start we never lie by again.

  This day before dawn I ascended a hill….

  This spirited declaration of American quest is unmatched. One hears in it generations of American song and striving. Ascending the hill returns to the imagery of a city on a hill, the American New Jerusalem.

  The past and present wilt….I have filled them and emptied them,

  And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

  Listener up there! Here you….what have you to confide to me?

  Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

  Talk honestly, for no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then….I contradict myself;

  I am large….I contain multitudes.

  I concentrate toward them that are nigh….I wait on the door-slab.

  Who has done his day’s work and will soonest be through with his supper?

  Who wishes to walk with me?

  Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me….he complains of my gab and my loitering.

  I too am not a bit tamed….I too am untranslatable,

  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  The last scud of day holds back for me,

  It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds,

  It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

  I depart as air….I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

  I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

  I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

  If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

  And filter and fibre your blood.

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

  Missing me one place search another,

  I stop some where waiting for you

  Walt Whitman dissolves himself, flesh into air, identity into the grass. He will perpetually be up ahead of us, the American Christ waiting for his disciples to catch up with him. This has proved to be too accurate a prophecy.

  Fletcher, Whitman, and

  The American Sublime

  ANGUS FLETCHER was born June 23, 1930, in New York City. Eighteen days later, I was born in the East Bronx. We met as Yale graduate students in September 1951, and remained very close friends until Angus died, on November 28, 2016, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Of all the literary critics in my own generation, I was always most allied to Angus. I cannot accept that he is gone. When I write, read, and teach, he is with me.

  Angus published seven books, of which the first was the extraordinary Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964, 2012). There followed The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (1971), The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus (1972), Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (1991), A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (2004), Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (2007), and The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands (2016). He left in manuscript an almost finished book relating the wave theories of physicists to the ebb and flow of Shakespearean and allied poetic imaginations.

  Angus Fletcher’s mind was endlessly speculative and original. When I consider the entire span of modern literary criticism, I think of Fletcher as the peer of William Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye. Like them, he broke the vessels.

  In the sixty-five years of our friendship, Angus and I shared a passion for the highest imaginative literature. Increasingly, we centered on Shakespeare and on Walt Whitman. We possessed many other holy books in common: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, Spenser, Milton, the English Bible, and the entire Romantic tradition in English and American poetry, from Blake and Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, Browning and Tennyson, on to Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and John Ashbery.

  Angus had a high regard for the poetry of John Clare, who represented for him a particular vision of the human horizon, as did the work of Walt Whitman and of John Ashbery. By “horizon,” Fletcher meant actual horizons rather than the boundaries of thought. Horizon, as he studied it, is a guide to natural limitations, and not a gateway to aspirations.

  Only now, after Angus’s death, have I begun to understand a crucial difference between us. I have never been at home in the natural world. Angus, who spent his childhood and youth sailing around Long Island, was always alert to environmental splendors and the possibility that we would lose them.

  For Angus, Walt Whitman broke with High Romanticism, and returned to something like the descriptive poetry of the eighteenth century. There is a lovely sentence in A New Theory for American Poetry: “The Americans are somehow troubled by the fact that Nature is simply bigger than we are, so that by artificial means we must acquire the same magnitude.” I can recognize Walt Whitman in that, though Angus and I agreed that there was always more in Whitman than either he or his readers could comprehend. What I find in Whitman is his perpetually growing inner self. For Angus, that was held in balance by the Whitmanian concern for everyday experience. Fletcher’s Whitman is not Homeric but is akin to Hesiod’s Works and Days.

  * * *

  —

  In the end, the loving agon between Angus and me turned on the nature of the American Sublime. We both agreed that it was daemonic, yet Angus urged caution lest all Enlightened measure and balance break. But that is what I had learned from the Hebrew Bible and from William Blake. You had to break measure and balance, in order to restore the image of the fully human. Emerson and Melville, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, for all their differences, were as strenuous as Blake in longing for an unfallen American Adam and Eve. Walt Whitman, as Fletcher reminded me, was less dialectical, because he was large and contained multitudes.

  As of this writing, it is more than seven months since Angus departed. Ten weeks ago, I suffered a dreadful accident and broke my hip. Major surgery had to be followed within a week by a second operation on my gastrointestinal system. Recuperating at home, I long for Angus.

  I hope in this brief discussion to warm myself again with his marvelous presence. Beyond that, Fletcher is a constant challenge for me. For decades, we discussed Walt Whitman, and my reading of Leaves of Grass changed and is still changing under his stimulus.

  In Specimen Days, Whitman recounts a train journey through the Rocky Mountains:

  “I have found the law of my own poems,” was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass’d, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon—this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel’d play of primitive Nature—the chasm, the gorge, the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles—the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness—the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high—at their tops now and then huge masses pois’d, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible.

  “An Egotistical ‘Find’”

  Angus granted that this was an experience of the American Sublime, akin to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and to Wordsworth’s epiphanies. He argued that Whitman’s dream of America was to fuse ideas of nature’
s sublimity with the authentically wild forms of American imagination. The result would be the “environment-poem,” of which “Song of Myself” is the masterpiece and some of the longer poems of A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery the worthy descendants.

  Though Fletcher devotes much of his A New Theory for American Poetry to expounding what he calls the environment-poem, something in his conception evades me. Angus has a wonderful sentence: “Voice in Whitman is intended to surround us.” That seems to me exactly right. Whitman’s theater depends upon a curious effect of humming:

  Loafe with me on the grass….loose the stop from your throat,

  Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,

  Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

  “Song of Myself,” Section 5

  I think of Wallace Stevens in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” speaking of “The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.” Fletcher’s environment-poem is a kind of humming wave where boundaries, edges, and horizons abound and yet are endlessly metamorphic. It increases knowledge, but this is only secondarily a learning of fact:

  The environment-poem, by attending to nature’s cyclical system, assures a place for the animate aspect of the life process. In antiquity a personification such as Iris—the rainbow—bridges thoughts of material and spiritual worlds, by voicing or imaging the messages her power enables her to carry between regions. Personifying figures generally prevent fact from having the last word, as if poets using them knew that no fact were sufficient without a spiritual and in that sense symbolic spin of some kind. As a Neoplatonist would claim, the poem and the scene mimetically encode the same phenomena as two modes of emanation, as of course all living creatures emanate from their own identities, as we now know, by virtue of a genetic code.

  One problem with this is that the poem is always in a condition of waiting. Whitman is immensely gifted at persuading the reader that the poet is somewhere up ahead, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Fletcher, like all great critics, was at work writing a defense of poetry. His purpose was to demonstrate what forms of thought and action came into being when we think in allegorical terms. In the afterword to his 2012 edition of Allegory, he brooded on what he called “the crisis of scale.” He warned prophetically that any sense of sublime transcendence is going to vanish in our technological world. What is coming is the emptiness of allegory without ideas.

  For Angus, the poet’s point of departure was always the horizon. No one knows what lies beyond the horizon. Fletcher celebrated what he regarded as the great poems of natural limits, such as John Ashbery’s “A Wave,” or Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I join my departed friend in such celebration, though I think that Ashbery and Whitman at their strongest verge on transcendence. The American Sublime survives, and with it the hope of moving beyond limits.

  The Freshness of Last Things:

  Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

  IN WHAT FOLLOWS, I will revisit a sequence of poems I have had to heart from late childhood on to this moment in old age. Some I have discussed in earlier books, but I trust the freshness of last things reveals new perspectives upon them. I will begin with the chant I repeat obsessively to myself, usually in a murmur:

  Not less because in purple I descended

  The western day through what you called

  The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

  What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

  What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

  What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

  Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

  And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

  I was myself the compass of that sea:

  I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

  Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

  And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

  Stevens gave this the jocund title “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Writing to my colleague Norman Holmes Pearson, he said that “Hoon” was a cipher for the expanse of sky and space. I read that as a screen for Walt Whitman, a “kosmos,” who speaks here with a sublime insouciance in the guise of the setting sun. It is what William Blake called the Idiot Questioner in each of us that seeks to diminish this imperial descent with the verbs sprinkled, buzzed, swept through. Walt/Hoon grandly turns this to “rained,” “blowing,” and the wonderful “I was myself the compass of that sea.” The fourfold repetition of “myself” alludes to “Song of Myself,” whose singer defies the rising sun in section 25:

  Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

  If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

  Whenever I recite aloud or whisper Hoon’s affirmation, I invariably go on to Walt’s magnificent epiphany in Stevens:

  In the far South the sun of autumn is passing

  Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.

  He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,

  The worlds that were and will be, death and day.

  Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.

  His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

  Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak.

  I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill.

  Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.

  Those last three lines are yet another tribute to Whitman, since deliberately they follow his verve and beat. What Louis Armstrong was to jazz, Whitman was to his nation’s poetry: a founder and preserver. Possessing Hoon’s poem and Stevens’s tribute enhances and enlarges my troubled midnights and the dead hours that linger afterward until a surprisingly cold late-August dawn sweeps through that city of ordinary evenings, New Haven.

  Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

  TWO-THIRDS OF A CENTURY ago, I had a solitary conversation with Wallace Stevens after he read a shorter version of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” to a small audience at Yale. An odd, awkward nineteen-year-old, I mostly listened but did ask a few questions about Shelley. It surprised me how many passages from “The Witch of Atlas” and Prometheus Unbound Stevens possessed by memory. If I could return to 1949, I would want to ask him if the leaves in the “Ode to the West Wind” cried out. Though he knew the poem by heart, I suspect he would have answered that they did.

  At the age of seventy-one, Stevens composed “The Course of a Particular,” a culmination of his lifelong obsession with the figure of the leaves:

  Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,

  Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.

  It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

  The leaves cry…One holds off and merely hears the cry.

  It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.

  And though one says that one is part of everything,

  There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;

  And being part is an exertion that declines:

  One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

  The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,

  Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.

  It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,

  In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more

  Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing

  Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

  Now in my high eighties, I am disconcerted when I keep hearing things, yet they are not there. When he was forty-two, Stevens wrote “The Snow Man”:

  One must have a mind of winter

  To regard the frost an
d the boughs

  Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

  And have been cold a long time

  To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

  The spruces rough in the distant glitter

  Of the January sun; and not to think

  Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

  In the sound of a few leaves,

  Which is the sound of the land

  Full of the same wind

  That is blowing in the same bare place

  For the listener, who listens in the snow,

  And, nothing himself, beholds

  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

  A single sentence sustained through fifteen lines, this initially appears to be in agreement with John Ruskin’s formulation of what he called the “pathetic fallacy,” in which a false life is attributed to the object world. Ruskin must have known he contradicted himself, since he defined a poet as a man to whom things speak. A natural Freudian like Stevens wishes to live by the Reality Principle that accepts our need to make friends with the necessity of dying. Yet there is always a conflict in Stevens, who was both a Keatsian poet and also Shelleyan and Whitmanian. The glory of Keats is his heroic dismissal of all illusion: death is absolute and imminent. Shelley’s skepticism was tempered by his idealism, and Whitman’s epicureanism still allowed transcendental yearnings. “The Snow Man” doubles back upon itself and concludes with a nihilism worthy of Hamlet.

  Three times the leaves cry out in “The Course of the Particular.” Stevens hears it and holds it off. At seventy-one, the exertion of being part of everything declines: “One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.” That massive monosyllabic line should settle the uncanny cry, but it cannot. Neither we nor Stevens believe him when he insists this is not a human cry. Charmingly, he contradicts himself in the remarkable “It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves.” Leaves lacking transcendence cannot cry out. The course of this particular, the cry of the human, at last means the final finding each of us experiences as we die: “until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.”