The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

Author:Harold Bloom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-02-04T08:13:43.687034+00:00

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,

My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety.

Celebration and anguish coexist in many superb poets, but self-celebration and self-anguish are a startling, ever-present juxtaposition in Whitman. Elegies for the self are the characteristic genre of American poetry because of Whitman’s example; the puzzle is not why Whitman invented the mode, but why it was so inevitably transmitted after him. The two great “Sea-Drift” poems that crowned the third Leaves of Grass in 1860, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” have engendered an endless progeny as varied as Eliot’s “Dry Salvages,” Stevens’s “Idea of Order at Key West,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “End of March,” John Ashbery’s “A Wave,” and A. R. Ammons’s “Corsons Inlet.” Since my prime subject is the canonical, the acute critical question for me becomes what makes these two poems so central.

Part of the answer is the sea’s melodious hissing of “death” in “Out of the Cradle,” since any consideration of death in our national literature must always circle back to Walt Whitman. Night, death, the mother, and the sea triumphantly blend in “Out of the Cradle,” but are held off and almost overcome in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” the more powerful of the two poems. Whereas “Out of the Cradle” traces the incarnation of the poetic character in Whitman, “As I Ebb’d” obliquely represents an obscure but traumatizing personal crisis that Whitman appears to have suffered in the winter of 1859–60. Presumably sexual, the sense of failure fills “As I Ebb’d” with a new pathos, richer than any before in Whitman. Nothing in him until the “Lilacs” elegy is so perfectly expressive of the American family romance as the extraordinary moment when he falls in anguish on the beach and creates out of that gesture our strongest image of reconciliation with the father:

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