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They contend that aesthetic values like the primacy of “silence” in poetry are a positive thing, generative of new semantic possibilities, rather than a symptom of a poet alienated by modernity to the point of speechlessness. The (psychological) question remains: why are modernists and postmodernists so determinedly difficult? What did they hope to gain by this? It is certainly a strange way to obtain what writers may be assumed to want most: clear communication, the satisfaction of addressing issues that are important to readers, the satisfaction of having readers at all. These are all desires one would ordinarily ascribe to a writer who is close to his or her work and is easily identified with it: a Fitzgerald, Plath, or Hemingway.
“Objectivist” writers of one kind or another (not in Hemingway’s sense) are avowedly absent from their works. Pound and Williams excise explicit ideas from their work, ideas that would signal their presence in the poem, dealing with them only through the more-concrete vehicle of an image. Explicit ideas would be mistaken for the poet’s thoughts—for thoughts in general—and transcendentalists do not deal in thoughts. These poets and their descendants up to the Language Poets belong to a transcendental tradition in spite of their Modernism and their concern with objectivity. It was an earlier book that came closest to the genesis of American avant-garde poetic form, Karl Malkoff’s Escape from the Self. The title appropriately summons up the spiritual intent of so much Modern and Postmodern poetry. Malkoff fumbles, however, when it comes to explaining this flight from identity. He quotes Norman O. Brown at length, viewing the dilemma as a core human psychological problem. Like many psychological approaches, this one is only as valid as one’s faith in its Freudian precepts.
Bloom’s approach in The Anxiety of Influence, while Freudian, does not depend on Freudian metapsychology for its coherence. In other words, the obsession, imitative zeal, and ultimate hostility Bloom sees between writers and their dearest influences may be believed on a common sense psychological level, although it may also be said to resemble an Oedi-pus complex. I propose, in this study, to enter the mindset of poets through the most reasonable, available route: the philosophical traditions and literary forbears these writers evidently took so seriously.