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It would be easy to argue that Bloom had it wrong from the beginning. Strange beliefs about the Muses, the Aeolian Harp, or mythic beings that inhabit the poet’s mind at the moment of writing are the province of the mad artist, not the critic. And yet critics who steer wide of the religious/spiritual bent of most poetry seem curiously at odds with the character of the genre.
A number of years ago I gave a negative review of a book called Gnostic Contagion by Peter O’Leary for a journal called Literature and Medicine. The author, obviously influenced by Bloomian ideas of gnosis in poetry, argued that Robert Duncan had not only been influenced by H.D., but had also caught a literal disease from the older poet, a sort of spiritual bug which he in turn passed on to Nathaniel Mackey. The argument, I argued, was vague at best, and the author seemed to identify too strongly with the poet, glibly taking seriously Duncan’s belief that poetry came to him through a connection with the mythic past. In retrospect, I may have been uncharitable. However extravagant his theories, the author of Gnostic Contagion at least understood the spiritual nature of the poet’s claim and did not sidestep this issue by building his study around fairly superficial characteristics of Duncan’s work or around social and cultural matters that were in no way part of Duncan’s concern. On the other hand, by focusing on “illness,” O’Leary discusses Duncan’s ethereal conversation with mythic beings in purely corporeal terms. For all their faults, Bloom and this author may have been at least partly on the right track, because they attempted to imagine the poet’s perspective.
As poststructuralist and political perspectives have begun to play themselves out, traditional, interpretive criticism has focused on the most intellectually involved schools of postwar poetry: the Poundian, projective, and Objectivist schools. Studies like Susan Vanderborg’s Para-Textual Communities avoid the primary material of the poetry, moving poets’ clearer and more literal statements of poetics to the fore. Other significant studies view poetic styles as the latest expression of longstanding American tendencies.