Identity and Society in American Poetry: The Romantic Tradition B ...

Psychoanalytic criticism had been pervasive since the 1940s, but Bloom’s approach stood out because it focused on the poet rather than the text. While the earlier, derided “biographical criticism” attempted to unravel the poem’s meaning by uncovering the poet’s intent, Bloom, less respectful of the poet, dared in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, to imagine the poet’s struggle for originality that resulted in the creation of a poetic style. And Bloom’s consistent identification of “gnosticism” (the religious impulse behind the poet’s work) and self-identification as a “Gnostic Jew” put him in a different, somewhat more-equal relationship with the artist. Most critical modes since the New Critics either take pains not to violate the mystery of the text (“reader response” criticism being an extreme example) or, fuelled by skeptical Continental philosophy and social rather than aesthetic concern, seek to unravel any glib assumptions about the text’s depth, importance, or meaning.

The dominance of this latter mode, poststructuralist criticism in its many varieties, led to a lack of academic interest in poetry in the 1980s and 1990s. Little poetry gets into the U.S. college curriculum these days outside of creative writing departments, partly because much poetry appears too ambiguous to speak to the cultural and political themes that dominate literary discourse. If a poem lacks a semantic center, it is not in need of “de-centering.” If it lacks any clear message or statement, it cannot be said to mean the opposite of what it seems to mean. When it lacks a clear authorial presence or a narrative, it cannot be read as a testimony of the struggles of persons from underrepresented groups to forge an identity. Poststructuralist philosophy denies the existence of any transcendental source, and even postwar, avant-garde poets had an undeniable spiritual agenda. Mysticism and politics are usually assumed to be incompatible.

With the exception of the earliest poet/critics, literary commentators have steered clear of the mystical aspects of poetry, choosing a social, formal, or skeptical/philosophical perspective. It is little wonder that Harold Bloom—who writes from a visionary perspective, from the vantage point of one who understands the unexplainable aspects of poetry, and with a dose of the eighteenth-century regard for judgment—seems retrograde now.