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ISSN 0974-0368 Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry Saintsburry observes, are in fact a fresh formation of the classical restraint, definiteness, proportion, and form, against the romantic vogue, the Romantic Fantasy. (1911: 477) Arnold was dangerously close to Siddhartha Singh the Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century to see it impartially. Arnold's emphasis on the classical restraint of form does not allow him Harold Bloom begins his career of antithetical criticism, directly to evaluate the imaginative and visionary power of romantic poetry. opposing the critical inheritance of T. S. Eliot, in the late fifties with his Harold Bloom does not entirely reject Arnoldian criticism. In Shelley's published dissertation Shelley's Mythmaking (1959). Bloom begins Mythmaking, Bloom Is quite conscious of the Arnoldian formulation. developing his own vision of the nature and value of literature, which is He begins with the mythopoeic form and craftsmanship in Shelley's both intellectually unique and socially daring. It is his intense predilection poetry, which according to Bloom, reaches a higher level of expression for the Romantic tradition which formulates his entire critical writings. . because of the fusion of the poet's vision with it. (Bloom, 1959:1-10) Unlike his predecessors, who challenged the romantic Inheritance in Thus the importance of form is not altogether neglected by Bloom. the name of classical ideals. Bloom installs at the centre It is T. S. Eliot who mounts a scathing attack on the romantic of post-renaissance English literature. advanced critical poets. T.S. Eliot, echoing Aristotle, proposes an "impersonal" conception opposition to the Romantic Inheritance In the 1850s. Some later critics of art, which is almost belligerently anti-Romantic. In the famous essay under his Influence, Including the American scholar In/Ing Babbitt, whose 'Tradition and the Individual Talent", (2001 )which first appeared in the book Rousaeau and Romanticism (1919), condemned the Romantic Egoist, Oct-Dec, 1919 (in two parts) and was reprinted in The Sacred Movement as an Irresponsible "pilgrimage In the void that had licensed M/ood (1920) and Selected Essays (1932), he lays down the concept: self-indulgent escapism and rationalist aggression." (Drabble, 2005: ... the poet has not a "personality" to express but a particular medium, 873)Hls student T.S. Eliot continued the anti-romantic campaign, which which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impression and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. was further intensified by Eliot's followers. (2001:7) The basic concern of this paper is to shed light on Bloom's Eliot, In the same essay challenges Wordsworthian formula that defence of the romantic poetry and consequently to highlight the "emotion recollected In tranquility" Is an Inexact fonmula. For it is neither tendency to humanize and secularize art in Romantic poetry - an emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility, endeavour that seems to guide Bloom's critical thought. The concept (ibid., 8) Eliot does not leave any possibility for the Romantic poet as of humanism, which Bloom explores, is apocalyptic. "Apocalypse", he finally concludes: from the Greek word "apokalypsis" meaning "revelation", or "disclosure". ... poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion, Is associated with the New Testament. The Book of Revelation contains it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.... a series of visions and concerning the "end of the world". (A The emotion of art is impersonal, (ibid., 8-9) Dictionary, 1989: 492)Bloom intents to highlight the concept of Eliot fixes the guideline for critics also: apocalyptic humanism as the strength of the romantic poet. It makes Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the the romantic poet liable to the status and role of the poet seer or poet poet but upon the poetry, (ibid., 5) Eliot sees progress of an artist in his complete surrender of the self to prophet. "the tradition". He wants to propose that if the poet does not surrender In his famous 'Preface' of 1853, Arnold declares that the eternal to the tradition he is immature. Thus Eliot declares that romanticism is object of poetry is "action", or more precisely human action (Wimsatt an immature form of art as it puts the poetic self at its at its center. and Brooks,1957: 440) In his Augustan tone, which favours form of (See "What is a Classic"). Eliot proposes that romanticism, being poetry, Arnold, as a "strenuous champ of cultural classicism", (ibid., opposite to classicism, lacks in classicist qualities such as maturity 440) proposes, "All depends upon the subject; choose a fitting action, of mind, manners and language. Eliot finds classicism leading to "the penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situation; this done, everything perfection of the common style" (Ibid.,102). Eliot's apposition between else will follow". (Ibid., 438). Arnold's chief critical doctrines as the poet and his poem can be seen as a leading idea that governs the Ut0ny Ptnp0otlv$ Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 30 Literary Perspectives Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 31 siddhartha Singh Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry . Eliot can be considered a precursor of the New Criticism. the three important books: Principles of (1924) and Eliot says in "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama": Practical Criticism (1929) by the English critic, I.A. Richards, and ... Wordsworth and Browning hammered out forms for thcmMlvet - Understanding Poetry (1938) by the Americans Cieanth Brooks and personal forms,..; but no man can Invent a form, areata a tastt tor It, . These are foundational texts in their shared and perfect It too. Tennyson, who might unquestionably havs been insistence on the special nature of the literary artifact. The New Critics a consummate master of minor forms, tooK to tuming out large patterns emphasize that readers need to adjust their reading strategy to on a machine. As for Keats and Shelley, they were too young to be accommodate the difference between literary and non-literary language. Judged, and they were trying one after another. (Ibid., 51) Thus the poet's role Is pushed back and what remains is the autonomy Eliot raises very significant Issues; the Invention of a personal of the literary text and Its language. Stephen Matterson puts it thus% form, the creation of a taste for It and the perfection of the personal When approaching the text, readers need to focus on the "system of relationships" that are operating within the text, rather than on those form. It means that, for Eliot form Is a prerequisite for the content, that may operate between the text and the world beyond Its whereas In the romantic poetry content Is the prerequisite to the form. boundaries... this system ensures that the literary artifact Is This Issue Is the starting point of Bloom, whose endeaveour Is to show autonomous. (2006: 170-171) that fomi In the romantics Is a trope; It Is a rhetorical or figurative Thus for the New Critics the poem cannot be translated from device. Thus Eliot becomes a new prophet of the "canonization". "Canon Is a body of writing established as authentic. The \em usually refers to one medium to another. It implies that the act of "paraphrasing is a biblical writings accepted as authorized. The temi Is applied to authors' heresy". Matterson further explains, "A poem's meaning is specific to work, which art accepted as genuine." (Cuddon,, 1996:108). In 'The the system of relationship within that poem". (Ibid., 171 )This idea is an Metaphysical Poets", Eliot proves the supsriorlty of ths metaphysical anathema to Harold Bloom who later develops a full-fledged theory of poets, who possessed a unification of sensibility over the English poets "intertextuallty" of other major textual approaches, associated with the of the eighteenth and nineteenth century: "In the seventeenth century a New Criticism, the "intentional fallacy" and the "affective fallacy" developed dissociation of sensibility set In, from which we have never in the essays published in 1946 and 1949 by Wimsatt in collaboration recovered".(2001:76) The phrase "dissociation of sensibility" Is seen with Monroe Beardsley, attack the romantic theory of poetic selfhood. In the poets who 'Ihink" but "do not feel their thought Immediately as Matterson nicely summarizes their arguments: the odour of rose". (Ibld.76) Thus, by this criterion Donne is being The tttiolc on both of that* paroalvad fallacies' was very much In canonized: "A thought to Donne was an experience; It modified his Una with the Naw Critical ballaf In the autonomy of the text. In The Intantlonal Fallacy (1948) Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that what sensibility". (Ibid. 76). But after Donne, If language of the poets Is an author intended was Irrelevant to Judgment of a literary text. "refined", feeling becomes crude or sometimes some poets think and Intention, they said, was neither available nor desirable In the formation feel by fits; therefore unbalanced. Thus the feeling, "the sensibility of literary judgement. That Is, there were two grounds for the attack expressed In the 'Country Churchyard'," Eliot says," Is cruder than on Intentlonallty. The first is that authorial intention Is never clear and that In 'The Coy Mistress'," and In "one or two passages of Shelley's may always be a matter of dispute. The second ground, and a more important one for the New Critics, was that to Invoke Intention was THumph of Ufa, In the Second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle to threaten the Integrity of the text by Introducing the figure of the toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and author. Once the text's boundaries were threatened, then the text Tennyson and Browning ruminated". (Ibid., 77)Contrary to Eliot, Bloom could not to be seen as a system of language operating with its own from the very beginning attempts to demonstrate that the feeling of the rules. (Ibid., 171) romantic poets was visionary and the language and form were "Invented" Thus for the New Critics, removing authorial intentlonallty is a according to that vision. Thus Bloom follows a different parameter to part of the strategy of sealing off the boundaries of the text and ensuring grade the romantic poetry and emerges as a critic antithetical to the that only the words on the page are the true focus of the critical earlier critical taste. After Eliot the New Critical theory contributes judgment. Structuralists and post-structuralists develop this idea of significantly to damage the romantic Inheritance. the removal of authorial intention to the extreme of the "death of the author". (A phrase made famous by Roland Barthes). But Structuralism New Criticism Is a practice that Is expressed most cogently In and Post-Structuralism differ from New Criticism in the sense that in Uttnry P»r$p»otlvt$ Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 32 Literary Perspectives VoL I, No. II, July 2006 33 I I

Bioom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry Siddhartha Singh the former two the text can be scrutinized in the context supplied by psycho-spiritual vision of romantic poetry, which is achieved at the the historical and social discourses, and the languages outside the highest level of experience. Throughout his critical project Bloom text. maintains this aspect of romantic poetry where the poet is a prophet or Bloom is contrary to T.S. Eliot and the New Critics. He begins a seer. Indeed the romantic poet sustains belief in the basic human his career as a critic of British Romantic literature in the afterglow of values. Leaving aside or more precisely, reacting against the eighteenth the New criticism. His first three published books, Shelley's Mythmaking, century emphasis on reason, the romantic pofet turns to the primitivism The Visionary Company (1961) and Blake's Apocalypse (1963) are and the mythopoeic mode of poetry. There is a kind of conscious effort devoteH to tlie study of English Romantic tradition. The use of the to save primitivism, which has been decreasing in the world in which Jewish theology of Martin Buber and the dialogic readings of Shelley's the romantic poet lives. When Bloom talks about Shelley's mythopoeic poem in Shelley's Mythmaking stand in defiant contrast to the New vision or the Imaginative power of the romantic poets he brings out this Criticism's praise of verbal iconism, metaphysical wit, and the humanistic approach of the romantic poets. Mythopoeic, in the context consequent devaluation of Shelley and the Romantics. If we employ of romantic poetry, can be defined as the process of the poetic invention the Saussurian distinction between diachronic and synchronic : of a myth. During this process the poet reveals his own apocalyptic "diachronic denoting the historical, study of the growth and development vision of the "revolutionary disillusionment and despair". However, the of a language", and "synchronic denoting the study of a language as a mythic creation of the poet is different from the already established • tern at any given moment of Its life", (Cuddan, 1998:869) it will be creations because he does not project his myth within the limited .odr that contrary to the New Critics and Structuralists who insist on penumbrae of any orthodox religion. It is through the power of his the synchronic rhetoric, Bloom shows a marked tendency to swen/e imagination that he perceives the vision, which is secular, humanist towards an extended use of diachronic rhetorical terms; the historical and therefore of universal significance. The romantic poet localizes his study and growth of the tropes. vision into a universe of his own mythopoeic creation. However, Bloom is not all alone in this defence of Romanticism. However the mythopoeic element in the romantic poetry has Bloom's contemporaries are also involved in reinterpreting romanticism. been most brilliantly discussed by in his book Fearful 'The great Romantic poems," Abrams says in his great essay "English Symmetry: A Study of (1947), in which he discusses Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age" (1963), "were not written in the the mythological concerns of William Blake. However, the estimation mood of revolutionary exaltation but in the later mood of revolutionary of the romantic poets as mythopoeic, and therefore revolutionary, is disillusionment or despair". (53) Abrams goes on to say that these deeply projected In his famous essay "The Drunken Boat: The Romantic poems 'lurn on the theme of hope and joy and the temptation Revdiutlonary Element In Romanticism" (1963:1-20). Frye proposes to abandon all hope and fall into dejection and despair." (Ibid., 55)Abrams that the romantic poet is a part of the total process, engaged with and proposes, especially in the context of Wordsworth, that the militancy united to a creative power greater than his own because it includes his of the overt political action has been transformed into the paradox of a own self. The entire romantic poetry is mythopoeic and the tone of spiritual quietism or in a wise passiveness and "the hope has been primitivism Is dominant in it. This is a "by-product of the internalizing of shifted from the history of mankind of the single individual, from militant the creative impulse". Frye maintains that though the romantic poet external action to an imaginative act; and the marriage between the imitates nature but nature is inside him, just as it is outside and this Lamb and the New Jerusalem has been converted into a marriage mythopoeic mode of poetry unites his experience with a greater power. between subject and object, mind and nature, which creates a new Thus myth, a story of the , is also a story of a sun god or tree god world out of the old world of senses." (Ibid., 59)Abram thus puts the or ocean god or more precisely of the human in the form of god. Frye focus on the individual, the imaginative act, and the fusion of the subject suggests that this is a revolutionary element in the Romantic poetry. and object (as well as mind and nature). Here lies the origin of what Thus in the romantic poet a myth is a matter of the creation of his own Harold Bloom would later call the "Internalization of Quest Romance" system; a creation of a cosmology- 'lor myth is the language of concern: in his book The Ringer in the Tower(^ 971:1). Abrams provides a deep It Is cosmology in movement, a living form and not a mathematical Literary Perspectives VoL I, No. II, July 2006 35 Literary Perspectives VoL /, No. II, July 2006 34 Bioom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry Siddhartha Singh one." (1969'.ii). Bloom elaborates it in Shelley's Mythmaking thaXe^ery poet's mind depends upon its separation from his life and thus he is to romantic poet iias tlie power to create a universe of his own myth. comfort his own self-alienation. Hartman gives an analogy of the (1959:1 -8) it implies that Bloom sees a profound change in the romantic wandering Jew; a solitary figure in exile, who is to suffer the despair poets' response to reality. This change is not primarily in belief but in since he cannot achieve the unity of Being and yet he is compelled to the spatial projection of reality. The romantic poet does not localize the repeat the experience. The romantic poet, a solitary or self-alienated figure is to live a purgatorial existence. (Ibid., 559) various levels of reality in the spheres, which are already explained either in theology or in science. He relocalizes his experience into an This apocalyptic vision does not necessarily belong just to imaginative universe of his own myths. This act is bound to cause one religion but Is a matter of an experience at a higher psycho-spiritual chanyG in belief and attitude. (1959:1 -5) level. The heroism of the romantic poet to face this apocalyptic situation Thus the romantic poetry, as Geoffrey H. Hartman obsen/es in compels Bloom to reconsider the strength of the romantic poetry in "Romanticism and Antiself- Consciousness", should be valued in order to recanonize it. Fite, in Haro/cf Bloom: The Rhetoric of contradiction to the analytic or purely conceptual mode of thought. Romantic Vision, comments - Bloom is drawn to Romantic poetry by the "moral heroism" of its (1962:553-65) In order to understand Bloom's position there Is need to "agnostic faith" In the "mythopoeic mode," by the heroism, that Is, of summarize this discussion of Hartman. Hartman argues that In romantic Its refusal "to be anything but poetry, anything but mythmaking". poetry Intelligence is seen as a perverse though necessary (1965: 9) specialization of the whole soul of man. Art Is seen as a means to 'The Agnostic is one", says Leslie Stephen," who asserts, what ^ist the Intelligence Intelligently. Therefore, romantic poetry deviates no one denies that there are limits to the sphere of human intelligence." rrom the eighteenth century emphasis on sense. It emphasizes the (2003:1) It implies that an agnostic believes that nothing can be known constructive power of the mind where reality Is brought Into being by about the existence of God or anything except material things. Thus experience. The reality Is apocalyptic revelation of a void and the the romantic poet is agnostic In the sense that for him the only faith knowledge and guilt of the fallen state of mankind. Hartman charts out lies In the creation of his own mythopoeic cosmos. Bloom, as a fierce the romantic poet's development of this vision. The Romantic poet Is canonlzer of the romantic poets, projects the aspects of humanizing not enslaved by his self but his vision is extended from consciousness and secularization of art through mythmaking and visionary imagination. (knowledge) and self-consciousness (guilt), or knowledge and guilt as Though Bloom is Indebted to Frye, Fredrick Pottle and IVI.H. Abrams expressed in the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to the last two are Bloom's teachers to whom he dedicates respectively anti-self-conscious-ness. Hartman believes that the romantic poet is Sh0ll9y'a Mythmaking and The Visionary Company. Yet his voice of doomed to live in the "guilt-conscious" fallen state as the process of canonization is so passionate and logically applied that from his first maturation brings the knowledge of the loss of innocence. (Ibid.,554- book he emerges as a champion of Shelley who has been underrated 556) It means that knowledge brings painful experience of maturation. during the time when T.S. Eliot was influential. Bloom advances the The sensitive mind of the romantic poet explores this painful experience. same subtle critical conception of Romantic vision in The Visionary He neither escapes from this situation nor does yield to it. He seeks to Company an6 Blake's Apocalypse. Bloom again insists on the freedom draw the antidote to self-consciousness from consciousness. This is a of the Romantic poet who creates new myth from "old" or "revises Milton return to a state of innocence; but only after eating again the fruit of and the Bible" in a transcendent way. knowledge. Since he has lost his "innocent state" he desires a kind of In the "Preface" to The Visionary CompanyBoom frankly declares organized innocence. Hartman explains this process through the that the "central contention of the book is that Romantic poets are not dialectical method of Hegel that the guilt-conscious mind, which was poets of nature", he does not translate the six romantic poets into Innocent before the nrocess of maturation, must be separated from the Blakean categories, rather he seeks out "the crucial analogues and selfhood to become spiritually perfect. The same is the destiny of rivalries that connect these poets".(1961: vii)And what connects these Imagination In the English romantics. The imagination must be separated poets so different in their reactions to the common theme of imagination from nature and Its own lesser form. It means that the strength of the Is a quality of passion and largeness in speech and response to life: Utarary Panpactlves Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 37 LItanry Pampaotlvaa Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 36 Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry siddhartha Singh which "the attractions of Beulah" begin "to be eclipsed by its dangers". "All of them knew Increasingly well what Stevens seems to have known (Ibid., 298). It is important to refer to the French Revolution. The outward best among the poets of our time, that the theory of poetry Is the form of the inward grace of the Romantic imagination was the French theory of life". (Ibid., 3)They are allied by their Protestant temper and Revolution which was a failure and so the vision of its followers also what distinguishes Romantic poetry from most of English poetry is the failed. But the ultimate effect of the revolution was that it left a vast expression of a Radical , which is: visionary hope In humanism and every nation later on followed its one of the great traditions of English poetry, the prophetic and principals. The Romantics also expressed their faith in humanism. Protestant line of Spenser and Milton, which reaches its radical limits Though their vision faiied but the hope is still alive. Wordsworth's in the generation after Wordsworth. (Ibid., 7-8) movement to tilt interior gradually ends in defeat. Coleridge fails as a For a romantic poet Protestantism provides a vision of secularism. poet as hit vision fades very early. Blake understands his own quest The Protestant liberty mingles with a Gnostic theme of the poet's as being a displacement of antinomlan desire for an outer actuality suspicion of both imagination, and nature. It also incorporates the poet's that has ceased to be very extraordinary. Shelley makes an attempt to anxiety of literary influence. Bloom argues that- When the Romantics, from Blake onto Shelley and Keats, talk about live with the world but fails and moves instead with his own conception the relation of poetry to other areas of culture, they make the direct of it. Byron the most social is the least Romantic. Keats is free of claim that poetry is prior, to theology or moral philosophy and by apocalyptic desire because he has an urgency to create. Of Course 'prior' they mean both more original and more intellectually powerful. the romantic vision failed, but not destroyed. It is still solace to a troubled (Ibid., xxlli) heart. It tears out the fake faith in orthodoxy. All these poets can be As an assertion, Romantic self-exaltation has been viewed by put into one category of being "Secular and Humanists". Bloom confirms critics like In/Ing Babbitt and TE. Hulme and through TS. Eliot down to that what separates us from the Romantics is our loss of their faithless the American New Critics, as mere megalomania. But this assertion is faith, which few among them could sustain even in their lives and not Just an assertion, It a metaphysics, a theory of history, "a vision, a poems". (1961:1) The term "faithless faith" can be best understood by way of seeing, and of living a more human life". (Ibid., xxiii-xxiv)That Keats' notion of the "Negative Capability" appropriated with the visionary vision which is imaginary is the human is "Existence" itself. Bloom hope of humanism. The search for the truth begins with the search for rightly says in Blake's Apocalypse (1970); that "visionary forms are not the self. This search does not rely on the rational energy but on the merely projection onto the already given of the phenomenal world"; at power of Imaginaiton; their best, as Blake's attempt to build a myth of the man regenerated Tha Imagination la radamptlve because it can operate like a later through the "Human from Divine" of the active imagination, shows the rtaaon, bacausa It can take a momentary apprehension of release life-in-life of vision. Here again Bloom subverts the New Critics' claim and build that apprahanalon into a faith, because again it can follow that those Romantic poets long for a oneness with nature that could tha Romantic path of moving from the privileged moment to a save them; Blake rejects any such tendency. Blake's rejection of the declaration of mind's autonomy, to a casting-out of remorse and a natural world, Bloom says, is "dialectical or promised", insofar as the freedom from outworn conceptions of the self. (1971: 334) Thus the object of the search of the romantic poet is the self, which is "unorganized innocence" of the state of Beulah depicts to a "limited but a micro-god, and the poetry is the sacred shrine. Their poetry never genuine extent" a nature that is "paradisal". (1970:336)"Unorganized sen/ed any orthodox belief: innocence" is the state of l-Thou, or as Hartman would say the state of Spenser and l\^ilton were Christian poets. The Romantics were not. self-consciousness in which there is a oneness with nature. But when Wordsworth and Coleridge died as Christians, but only after they the vision is attained by the romantic poet and there is disillusionment have died as poets. Byron rejected no belief, and accepted none, with the "paradise", he is to pass through the l-lt relationship or anti- Shelley lived and died agnostic, and Keats never wavered in believing religion an imposture. Blake thought himself a Christian, but was not self-consciousness and thus he has to achieve an "organized a theist in any orthodox sense. If the divine is the human released Innocence." Therefore, early the vision of Blake is later transcended in from every limitation that impedes desire, then Blake is a believer in the much greater and more authentic long prophetic poems whose the divine reality. (1961: 5) emphasis Is on "the extent to which nature is fallen", the extent to Utarary Perspectives Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 39 Utarary Panpactlves Vol. I, No. II, July 2006 ^ siddhartha Singh Bloom's Critical approach to the Romantic Poetry So It is neltlier nature nor Orthodox , which holds Romantic York: Doubleday:: Ithaca: Comell Press, 1970). belief. Rousseau's Naturalism fails here. Bloom remarl