01-01-2023, 01:48 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-01-2023, 02:05 AM by RiverNotch.)
I love Bloom. Currently reading/rereading Shakey's plays (Dicky III died right at the stroke of midnight for me. Happy New Year!) with Dr. Johnson and Mr.'s Hazlitt and Bloom for my tutors. I find Bloom's whole "school of resentment" angle a bit disingenuous, about as much as when some proponents of that same school seek to (for example) stop reading Shakey wholesale, but I get the impression Mr. Bloom would admit to being a curmudgeon or a provocateur in this regard, and both those kinds of people have their place (though preferably not in Malacañang). It's his "anxiety of influence" that I value, in relation to this article, and I constantly confess to feeling some of that angst with regards to Eliot.
Eliot was definitely one of my biggest influences, starting out. In seeking to find a voice that lives outside of outmoded meter or sub-English pop, it was Whitman, Eliot, and Louise Gluck that first greeted me as tutors, with Gluck and Whitman existing in relation to Eliot -- Whitman the teacher, Gluck the student. And as I've found out that the Anglicanism-turned-Anglo-Catholicism I once admired was actually predicated on prejudices I actually loathe, prejudices against which I have been induced to turn to Orthodoxy (though, in an ironic twist of fate, the local priest that confirmed me is properly pro-Marcos, while the missionary priest he's most working with peddles Putinite propaganda), my love for him has turned to ardent hate. A spurned lover's hate, not least because of how sexually liberated Whitman is, or how Gluck is both a woman and a Jew: their voices are just so much more welcoming, with Whitman by Bloom's estimation being the most canonical of this trinity. Between me and toxic Eliot was a toxic relationship that never materialized because of the welcome arms of others, one of whom is both his better and more open to the prospect, although of course I continue to acknowledge the anxiety born from losing him, just as I keep remembering my Southern Baptist school upbringing or my high school crush (who I learned too late had gone to the church the school was an arm of xD).
All this is to say, Eliot's overrated. Mightily, mightily overrated. Not least because I don't think poetry's dead, it's just found (or is presently searching for) a new medium or media. The dramatic poets of Ancient Greece had to incorporate choruses and depict the action only of a single day, their medium being necessarily a community ritual. Ancient Rome's metropolitan sophistication made "ritual" more "theatre" in the modern sense of the word, and it was the likes of Ben Jonson and, everyone's favourite, Christopher Marlowe that made contemporary dramatic poetry more of a written medium, at least by my understanding. Now it's moving on again to film -- see Andrei Tarkovsky's work, with his father being an acclaimed Russian poet. For lyric poetry, it's the phonograph that "killed" that, or rather tranformed bards and troubadours into rockstars, rappers, and folkies; for epic poetry, well, you have mass literacy making that an increasingly rare medium, and no honest lover of the written word would fault that. Just as no honest reader of poetry would wish away the likes of libgen or project gutenberg or wikimedia commons, giving access to poor sods like me books that aren't even shipped to my country.
Not to deny anyone's God-given right to cultural pessimism. Only those poets Bloom considered more canonical than Eliot -- Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoi, of course Shakespeare -- were perhaps so canonical because they weren't so pessimistic. Heck, even in the apocalyptic visions of Dante and Becket, I don't intimate apocalyptism with regards to Western culture. To persons and communities, perhaps, but the whole history of Western culture, and by extension poetry in general, is one of continuous self-revision. If Rome hadn't fallen, wherefore he who'd "small Latin and less Greek"? And yet we mourn the fall of Rome, not because of that mere scutcheon we'd lost, "culture", but because of the people who needlessly suffered in its fall's wake....at least, we who mourn that strive to be more just.
Eliot was definitely one of my biggest influences, starting out. In seeking to find a voice that lives outside of outmoded meter or sub-English pop, it was Whitman, Eliot, and Louise Gluck that first greeted me as tutors, with Gluck and Whitman existing in relation to Eliot -- Whitman the teacher, Gluck the student. And as I've found out that the Anglicanism-turned-Anglo-Catholicism I once admired was actually predicated on prejudices I actually loathe, prejudices against which I have been induced to turn to Orthodoxy (though, in an ironic twist of fate, the local priest that confirmed me is properly pro-Marcos, while the missionary priest he's most working with peddles Putinite propaganda), my love for him has turned to ardent hate. A spurned lover's hate, not least because of how sexually liberated Whitman is, or how Gluck is both a woman and a Jew: their voices are just so much more welcoming, with Whitman by Bloom's estimation being the most canonical of this trinity. Between me and toxic Eliot was a toxic relationship that never materialized because of the welcome arms of others, one of whom is both his better and more open to the prospect, although of course I continue to acknowledge the anxiety born from losing him, just as I keep remembering my Southern Baptist school upbringing or my high school crush (who I learned too late had gone to the church the school was an arm of xD).
All this is to say, Eliot's overrated. Mightily, mightily overrated. Not least because I don't think poetry's dead, it's just found (or is presently searching for) a new medium or media. The dramatic poets of Ancient Greece had to incorporate choruses and depict the action only of a single day, their medium being necessarily a community ritual. Ancient Rome's metropolitan sophistication made "ritual" more "theatre" in the modern sense of the word, and it was the likes of Ben Jonson and, everyone's favourite, Christopher Marlowe that made contemporary dramatic poetry more of a written medium, at least by my understanding. Now it's moving on again to film -- see Andrei Tarkovsky's work, with his father being an acclaimed Russian poet. For lyric poetry, it's the phonograph that "killed" that, or rather tranformed bards and troubadours into rockstars, rappers, and folkies; for epic poetry, well, you have mass literacy making that an increasingly rare medium, and no honest lover of the written word would fault that. Just as no honest reader of poetry would wish away the likes of libgen or project gutenberg or wikimedia commons, giving access to poor sods like me books that aren't even shipped to my country.
Not to deny anyone's God-given right to cultural pessimism. Only those poets Bloom considered more canonical than Eliot -- Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoi, of course Shakespeare -- were perhaps so canonical because they weren't so pessimistic. Heck, even in the apocalyptic visions of Dante and Becket, I don't intimate apocalyptism with regards to Western culture. To persons and communities, perhaps, but the whole history of Western culture, and by extension poetry in general, is one of continuous self-revision. If Rome hadn't fallen, wherefore he who'd "small Latin and less Greek"? And yet we mourn the fall of Rome, not because of that mere scutcheon we'd lost, "culture", but because of the people who needlessly suffered in its fall's wake....at least, we who mourn that strive to be more just.