by Harold Bloom
harmonies (in my magnum hokum) I would speak of, though
chiefly as calling attention to neglected aspects of fairly
common, at least overreaching, experience: with considerable
rasping along the edges, bulgings of boundaries, we made
and tamed into play each of these States: if the States
kept falling into lesser cluster about lesser points of
focus (and then the long division, so costly), still we
checked and balanced and, incorporating as much sin as grace
with each holding, kept the mobile afloat, together, each
dangle with good range to dip and rise and convey itself
roundly with windy happenstance, communicating, though, its
position throughout the network and receiving from the sums
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of the network just adjustments: yes, we got it all together,
ocean to ocean, high temperate to low temperate, and took
in so much multiplicity that what we hold person to person
in common exists only in the high levels of constitution or
out to the neighbor’s fence, an extreme, an extreme pity,
with little consolidation in the middle after all: still,
it holds and moves within the established rigors: now, with
the same rasping and groaning, we try to put the nations and
communities of nations together and there, too, only by
joining tenuous extremes, asserting the dignity of the single
person above united nations: we pray this may succeed and
correct much evil in the dark edges of dislocation and
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distraction: lately, we’ve left out the high ranges of music,
the planetary, from our response, though the one sin is here
as usual and the planets continue to obey holy roads: the
galaxy is here, nearly too much to speak of, sagely and
tremendously observing its rotation: we do have something to
tune in with and move toward: not homogenous pudding but
united differences, surface differences expressing the common,
underlying hope and fate of each person and people, a gathering
into one place of multiple dissimilarity, each culture to its
own cloth and style and tongue and gait, each culture, like
the earth itself with commonlode center and variable surface,
designed-out to the exact limit of ramification, to discrete
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expression into the visible, specific congruence of form and
matter, energy moving into the clarification of each face, hand,
ear, mouth, eye, billions: still with the sense of continuous
running through and staying all the discretions, differences
diminished into the common tide of feelings, so that difference
cannot harden into aggression or hate fail to move with the
ongoing, the differences not submerged but resting clear at
the surface, as the surface, and not rising above the surface
so as to become more visible and edgy than the continuum:
a united, capable poem, a united, capable mind, a united capable
nation, and a united nation! capable, flexible, yielding,
accommodating, seeking the good of all in the good of each:
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to float the orb or suggest the orb is floating: and, with the
mind thereto attached, to float free: the orb floats, a bluegreen
wonder: so to touch the structures as to free them into rafts
that reveal the tide: many rafts to ride and the tides make a
place to go: let’s go and regard the structures, the six-starred
easter lily, the beans feeling up the stakes: we’re gliding: we
are gliding: ask the astronomer, if you don’t believe it: but
motion as summary of time and space is gliding us: for a while,
we may ride such forces: then, we must get off: but now this
beats any amusement park by the shore: our Ferris wheel, what a
wheel: our roller coaster, what mathematics of stoop and climb: sew
my name on my cap: we’re clear: we’re ourselves: we’re sailing.
Walt Whitman, at the close of “Song of Myself,” discards the past and identifies himself with our future. The cost is the present moment. Since Walt is somewhere up ahead of us and waiting, we need to catch up and find him. Ammons preserves the present moment but has no liberation to offer us. Archie is sailing with us. He floats along and is going to lose his cap. Walt Whitman might say that it is not enough to offer us an empty sublimity. In the earlier long poem “Hibernaculum,” Ammons has an extraordinary passage that gives us both his greatest strength and his ultimate vulnerability:
16
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
…to lean belief the lean word comes,
each scope adjusted to the plausible: to the heart
emptied of, by elimination, the world, comes the small
17
cry domesticating the night: if the night is to be
habitable, if dawn is to come out of it, if day is ever
to grow brilliant on delivered populations, the word
must have its way by the brook, lie out cold all night
along the snow limb, spell by yearning’s wilted weed till
the wilted weed rises, know the patience and smallness
of stones: I address the empty place where the god
that has been deposed lived: it is the godhead: the
yearnings that have been addressed to it bear antiquity’s
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sanction: for the god is ever re-created as
emptiness, till force and ritual fill up and strangle
his life, and then he must be born empty again: I
accost the emptiness saying let all men turn their
eyes to the emptiness that allows adoration’s life:
that is my whole saying, though I have no intention to
stop talking: our immediate staying’s the rock but
the staying of the rock’s motion: motion, that spirit!
The ancient religious discipline of theurgy, Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic, returns surprisingly in Ammons, who, like Whitman, is something of a shaman. In theurgy you draw down a god, maintain the god’s vitality, or strengthen a waning godhead. Confronting the empty place where the god once lived, Ammons asks only for a divine rebirth that will remain empty. I think of Hart Crane, the most intense of all American poets, who calls upon his Brooklyn Bridge to lend a myth to God. Crane, an absolutist of the imagination, quested for the fullness while lamenting emptiness. Ammons comes later, whereas Crane could not accept his own belatedness. I do Archie little service by comparing him to Walt Whitman and to Hart Crane, American demiurges. Ammons was content to be a man of this world, despite the intimations of transcendence that never quite abandoned him.
Hart Crane, “Possessions”
IN THE COURSE of a lifetime of reading, early possessions take on a particular aura. When I was twelve, I kept reciting to myself a poem by Hart Crane that I could not understand at all:
Witness now this trust! the rain
That steals softly direction
And the key, ready to hand—sifting
One moment in sacrifice (the direst)
Through a thousand nights the flesh
Assaults outright for bolts that linger
Hidden,—O undirected as the sky
That through its black foam has no eyes
For this fixed stone of lust…
Accumulate such moments to an hour:
Account the total of this trembling tabulation.
I know the screen, the distant flying taps
And stabbing medley that sways—
And the mercy, feminine, that stays
As though prepared.
And I, entering, take up the stone
As quiet as you can make a man…
In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,
Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,
I hold it up against a disk of light—
I, turning, turning on smoked forking spires,
The city’s stubborn lives, desires.
Tossed on these horns, who bleeding dies,
Lacks all but piteous admissions to be spilt
Upon the page whose blind sum finally burns
Record of rage and partial appetites.
The pure possession, the inclusive cloud
Whose heart is fire shall come,—the white wind rase
All but bright stones wherein our smiling plays.
As a child, I did not realize that the “bright stones” of the concluding line were an allusion to Revelation 2:17:
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.
I also did not know that “this fixed stone of lust” referred to the male genitalia. When Crane takes up the stone again, it implies the homoerotic desire that sends him out nightly to cruise the streets of Greenwich Village. So bitter is this poem “Possessions” that its ironies vacillate between a harshly reductive sexual realism and a phantasmagoria suggestive of Rimbaud. When Crane brings the fierce sufferings of this poem to a close, he plays upon his own name in the heart of fire that shall come when the bright stones of Revelation survive the white wind of erotic purgation.
As a poet consciously in Walt Whitman’s tradition, Hart Crane takes up the “stone” as a tally or an image of voice. A preternaturally careful craftsman, Crane builds his poem on substantives and verbal forms of counting: “sifting,” “a thousand nights,” “accumulate,” “account the total,” “tabulation,” “medley,” “blind sum,” “record.” His drive is to wound the tally until it becomes only a faint echo of a voice.
Why does Crane call the poem “Possessions” rather than “Possession”? As I remarked earlier the root meaning of “possession” is potency. The poem’s first possession is by lust: “undirected as the sky.” The second is “the pure possession” that in Revelation is named as Jesus Christ. Hart Crane was not a Christian, but he had a severely Catholic sensibility and might have been better off if his questing temperament had allowed him to convert to Roman Catholicism. But he believed only in poetry and lived and died by it.
Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge”
IN CONJUNCTION with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Walt Whitman is the American Sublime. We might speak either of the Passion of Captain Ahab or the Passion of Walt Whitman. Perhaps this could be extended. No one would want to chant the Passion of Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams. Yet it is possible to speak of the Passion of T. S. Eliot. Again above all others, we can affirm the Passion of Hart Crane.
Much of White Buildings (1926), a volume of darkly resonant lyrics and meditations, was given over to invocations of a God unknown. In his visionary epic The Bridge (1930), Crane stands in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge at twilight and memorably calls down a God:
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year…
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
Brooklyn Bridge is both a vast aeolian harp and the altar of a new God. As a threshold, it stands between what the late Angus Fletcher termed labyrinth and temple. The labyrinth is inhabited by the lover’s cry and the pariah’s prayer, or the prophet pledging the way to the temple. There is a grand pietà in “And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.”
Hart Crane had never read Saint John of the Cross, yet we are in his kind of version of the state of mysticism. There is an ultimate echo, mediated by the Whitman of the “Lilacs” elegy and of the Biblical Song of Songs. Hart Crane’s spiritual canticle turns at last to the great leap of Brooklyn Bridge and prays that its curveship lend a myth to God, who so badly needs a new Word.
Conrad Aiken, “Tetélestai”
SOMETIME IN 1963, I had dinner with Conrad Aiken and gave him the manuscript of what was to become Preambles and Other Poems by my friend Alvin Feinman, which was published in 1964. I had always been very moved by Aiken’s poetry, and at my request we discussed it. Aiken died in 1973 at the age of eighty-four, having returned to live his final decade in his native Savannah. Thirty years later, in 2003, I wrote a foreword for a new edition of his Selected Poems in the hope of reviving his work. I would not say my effort was in vain, yet he is still very much a neglected master.
The firstborn child of transplanted New Englanders, Aiken suffered an awful childhood, because his father, a distinguished surgeon, during a paranoid seizure murdered his wife and then committed suicide. The eleven-year-old Conrad Aiken discovered the bodies and sustained a trauma. After the burial, Aiken and his siblings were taken north to be adopted by relatives. Separated from the others, the future poet became the ward of his uncle who was a librarian at Harvard University.
Entering Harvard in 1907, Aiken began to find himself as a poet. T. S. Eliot and Aiken formed what was to be a permanent friendship as Harvard undergraduates, but from the start a tension existed between them. Eventually, Eliot’s neo-Christianity became intolerable to Aiken, who was always a Lucretian poet.
Aiken’s best work was in his two sets of “preludes”—Preludes for Memnon (1931) and Time in the Rock (1936). The alternative title to the earlier sequence is Preludes to Attitude, where I take “attitude” to mean stance:
Winter for a moment takes the mind; the snow
Falls past the arclight; icicles guard a wall;
The wind moans through a crack in the window;
A keen sparkle of frost is on the sill.
Only for a moment; as spring too might engage it,
With a single crocus in the loam, or a pair of birds;
Or summer with hot grass; or autumn with a yellow leaf.
Winter is there, outside, is here in me:
Drapes the planets with snow, deepens the ice on the moon,
Darkens the darkness that was already darkness.
The mind too has its snows, its slippery paths,
Wall bayonetted with ice, leave ice-encased.
Here is the in-drawn room, to which you return
When the wind blows from Arcturus: here is the fire
At which you warm your hands and glaze your eyes;
The piano, on w
hich you touch the cold treble;
Five notes like breaking icicles; and then silence.
This internalized winter is also celestial. Arcturus, brightest star in our Northern Hemisphere, blows the wind of space against the poet, and yet his own ears make the blowing wind they heard. As this initial prelude concludes, it heightens to a Lucretian severity:
Here is the tragic, the distorting mirror
In which your gesture becomes grandiose;
Tears form and fall from your magnificent eyes,
The brow is noble, and the mouth is God’s.
Here is the God who seeks his mother, Chaos,—
Confusion seeking solution, and life seeking death.
Here is the rose that woos the icicle; the icicle
That woos the rose. Here is the silence of silences
Which dreams of becoming a sound, and the sound
Which will perfect itself in silence. And all
These things are only the uprush from the void,
The wings angelic and demonic, the sound of the abyss
Dedicated to death. And this is you.
Aiken had a lifelong obsession with silence, as did my late mentor Gershom Scholem, who shared Walter Benjamin’s conviction that silence was the mark of the unfallen. “You” and the Epicurean divinity scarcely can be distinguished in Aiken’s vision. The abyss, in the mode of the late poems of Victor Hugo, returns in prelude XIV:
—I saw myself and God.
I saw the ruin in which godhead lives:
Shapeless and vast: the strewn wreck of the world:
Sadness unplumbed: misery without bound.
Wailing I heard, but also I heard joy.
Wreckage I saw, but also I saw flowers.
Hatred I saw, but also I saw love…
