Bloom Poetry Revision Repression

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Poetry, Revisionism, RepressionAuthor(s): Harold BloomSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1975), pp. 233-251Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342901

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Poetry, Revisionism, Repression

HaroldBloom

Jacques Derrida asks a central question in his essay on Freud and theScene of Writing: "What is a text, and what must the psyche be if it canbe represented by a text?" My narrower concern with poetry promptsthe contrary question: "What is a psyche, and what must a text be if it canbe represented by a psyche?" Both Derrida's question and my own re-quire exploration of three terms: "psyche," "text," "represented."

"Psyche" is ultimately from the Indo-European root bhes, meaning"to breathe," and possibly was imitative in its origins. "Text" goes back tothe root teks, meaning "to weave," and also "to fabricate." "Represent"has as its root es: "to be." My question thus can be rephrased: "What is abreath, and what must a weaving or a fabrication be so as to come intobeing again as a breath?"In the context of post-Enlightenment poetry, a breath is at once aword, and a stance for uttering that word, a word, and a stance of one'sown. In this context, a weaving or a fabrication is what we call a poem,and its function is to represent, to bring back into being again, an indi-vidual stance and word. The poem, as text, is represented or secondedby what psychoanalysis calls the psyche. But the text is rhetoric, and as apersuasive system of tropes can be carried into being again only byanother system of tropes. Rhetoric can be seconded only by rhetoric, forall that rhetoric can intend is more rhetoric. If a text and a psyche can berepresented by one another, this can be done only because each is adeparture from proper meaning. Figuration turns out to be our onlylink between breathing and making.The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will thatdares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all prior texts asopenings for its own totalizing and unique interpretations. Strong poets

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234 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,Repressionpresent themselves as looking for truth in the world, searching in realityand in tradition, but such a stance, as Nietzsche said, remains under themastery of desire, of instinctual drives. So, in effect, the strong poetwants pleasure and not truth; he wants what Nietzsche named as "thebelief in truth and the pleasurable effects of this belief." No strong poetcan admit that Nietzsche was accurate in this insight, and no critic needfear that any strong poet will accept and so be hurt by demystification.The concern of this book, as of my earlier studies in poetic misprision, isonly with strong poets, which in this series of chapters is exemplified bythe major sequence of High Romantic British and American poets:Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emer-son, Whitman, and Stevens, but also throughout by two of the strongestpoets in the European Romantic tradition: Nietzsche and Freud. By"poet" I therefore do not mean only verse-writer, as the instance ofEmerson also should make clear.A poetic "text," as I interpret it, is not a gathering of signs on a page,but is a psychic battlefield upon which authentic forces struggle for theonly victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over oblivion, or asMilton sang it:

Attir'd with Stars, we shall for ever sit,Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee O Time.Few notions are more difficult to dispel than the "commonsensical"one that a poetic text is self-contained, that it has an ascertainable mean-ing or meanings without reference to other poetic texts. Something innearly every reader wants to say: "Hereis a poem and there is a meaning,and I am reasonably certain that the two can be brought together."Unfortunately, poems are not things but only words that refer to other

words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on, into thedensely overpopulated world of literary language. Any poem is aninter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading. A poem isnot writing, but rewriting,and though a strong poem is a fresh start, sucha start is a starting-again.In some sense, literary criticism has known always this reliance oftexts upon texts, but the knowing changed (or should have changed)after Vico, who uncovered the genuine scandal of poetic origins, in thecomplex defensive trope or troping defense he called "divination."

Harold Bloom is DeVane Professor of the Humanities at Yale Uni-versity. This article is the first chapter of his new book, Poetryand Repres-sion, to be published by the Yale University Press. The book completes atetralogy, of which the earlier volumes are TheAnxietyof Influence,A Mapof Misreading, and Kabbalahand Criticism.


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Winter 1975 235Poetry began, according to Vico, out of the ignorance and mortal fear ofthe gentile giants, who sought to ward off danger and death throughinterpreting the auguries, through divination: "Their poetic wisdombegan with this poetic metaphysics ... and they were called theologicalpoets . . . and were properly called divine in the sense of diviners, fromdivinari, to divine or predict." These were the giants or poets before theFlood, for Vico a crucial image of two modes of encroachment alwaysthreatening the human mind, a divine deluge and a natural engulfment.Edward Said eloquently interprets Vico's own influence-anxieties:

These threatening encroachments are described by Vico as theresult of a divinely willed flood, which I take to be an image for theinner crisis of self-knowledge that each man must face at the verybeginning of any conscious undertaking. The analogy, in Vico'sAutobiography, f the universal flood is the prolonged personal crisisof self-alienation from full philosophic knowledge and self-knowledge that Vico faces until the publication of his major work,the New Science. His minor successes with his orations, his poems,his treatises, reveal bits of the truth to him, but he is always strivingwith great effort to come literally into his own.

Said's commentary illuminates the remarkable passage in Vico'searly On the StudyMethodsof Our Time, where Vico suddenly appears tobe the precursor of Artaud, arguing that the great masterpieces of an-terior art must be destroyed, if any great works are still to be performed.Or, if great art is to be retained, let it be for "the benefit of lesser minds,"while men of "surpassing genius, should put the masterpieces of theirart out of their sight, and strive with the greatest minds to appropriatethe secret of nature's grandest creation." Vico's primary precursor wasDescartes, whom he repudiated in favor of Bacon as a more distant andantithetical precursor, but it could be argued that Vico's New Scienceas a"severe poem" is a strong misprision of Descartes.Language for Vico, particularly poetic language, is always andnecessarily a revision of previous language. Vico, so far as I know, inau-gurated a crucial insight that most critics still refuse to assimilate, whichis that every poet is belated, that every poem is an instance of what Freudcalled Nachtriiglichkeitor "retroactive meaningfulness." Any poet (mean-ing even Homer, if we could know enough about his precursors) is in theposition of being "after the Event," in terms of literary language. His artis necessarily an aftering, and so at best he strives for a selection, throughrepression, out of the traces of the language of poetry; that is, herepresses some of the traces, and remembers others. This rememberingis a misprision, or creative misreading, but no matter how strong amisprision, it cannot achieve an autonomy of meaning, or a meaningfully present, that is, free from all literary context. Even the strongestpoet must take up his stance within literary language. If he stands outside

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236 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,Repressionit, then he cannot begin to write poetry. For poetry lives always underthe shadow of poetry. The caveman who traced the outline of an animalupon the rock always retraced a precursor's outline.The curse of an increased belatedness, a dangerously self-consciousbelatedness, is that creative envy becomes the ecstasy, the Sublime, of thesign-system of poetic language. But this is, from an altered perspective, aloss that can become a shadowed gain, the blessing achieved by thelatecomer poet as a wrestling Jacob, who cannot let the great departfinally, without receiving a new name all his own. Nothing is won for thereader we all need to become if this wrestling with the dead is idealizedby criticism. The enormous distinction of Vico, among all criticaltheorists, is that he idealized least. Vico understood, as almost no one hassince, that the link between poetry and pagan theology was as close as thewar between poetry and Hebrew-Christian theology was perpetual. InVico's absolute distinction between gentile and Jew, the gentile is linkedboth to poetry and history, through the revisionary medium of lan-guage, while the Jew (and subsequently the Christian) is linked to asacred origin transcending language, and so has no relation to humanhistory or to the arts. We only know what we ourselves have made,according to Vico, and so his science excludes all knowledge of the trueGod, who can be left to the Church and its theologians. The happyconsequence, for Vico, is that the world of the indefinite, the world ofambivalent and uncertain images, which is the universe of poetry, be-comes identical with our fallen state of being in the body. To be in thebody, according to Vico, is to suffer a condition in which we are ignorantof causation and of origins, yet still we are very much in quest of origins.Vico's insight is that poetry is born of our ignorance of causes, and wecan extend Vico by observing that if any poet knows too well what causeshis poem, then he cannot write it, or at least will write it badly. He mustrepress the causes, including the precursor-poems, but such forgetting,as this book will show, itself is a condition of a particular exaggeration ofstyle or hyperbolical figuration that tradition has called the Sublime.

2How does one read a strong poem? How does one write a strong

poem? What makes a poem strong? There is a precarious identity be-tween the Over-reader and the Over-poet, both of them perhaps formsof the Over-man, as prophesied by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Strongpoetry is a paradox, resembling nothing so much as Durkheim on Marx-ism, or Karl Kraus on Freudianism. Durkheim said that socialism wasnot a sociology or miniature science, but rather a cry of grief; not somuch a scientific formulation of social facts, as itself a social fact. Follow-ing the aphorism of Kraus, that psychoanalysis itself was the disease for


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Winter 1975 237which it purported to be the cure, we can say that psychoanalysis is morea psychic fact than a formulation of psychic facts. Similarly, the readingof strong poetry is just as much a poetic fact as is the writing of suchpoetry. Strong poetry is strong only by virtue of a kind of textual usurpa-tion that is analogous to what Marxism encompasses as its social usurpa-tion or Freudianism as its psychic usurpation. A strong poem does notformulate poetic facts any more than strong reading or criticism formu-lates them, for a strong reading is the only poetic fact, the only revengeagainst time that endures, that is successful in canonizing one text asopposed to a rival text.There is no textual authority without an act of imposition, a declara-tion of property that is made figuratively rather than properly or liter-ally. For the ultimate question a strong reading asks of a poem is: Why?Why should it have been written? Why must we read it, out of all the toomany other poems available? Who does the poet think he is, anyway?Why is his poem?By defining poetic strength as usurpation or imposition, I am of-fending against civility, against the social conventions of literary scholar-ship and criticism. But poetry, when it aspires to strength, is necessarily acompetitive mode, indeed an obsessive mode, because poetic strengthinvolves a self-representation that is reached only through trespass,through crossing a daemonic threshold. Again, resorting to Vico givesthe best insight available for the nature and necessity of the strong poet'sself-proclamation.Vico says that "the true God" founded the Jewish religion "on theprohibition of the divination on which all the gentile nations arose." Astrong poet, for Vico or for us, is precisely like a gentile nation; he mustdivine or invent himself, and so attempt the impossibility of originatinghimself.Poetry has an origin in the body's ideas of itself, a Vichian notionthat is authentically difficult, at least for me. Since poetry, unlike theJewish religion, does not go back to a truly divine origin, poetry is alwaysat work imagining its own origin, or telling a persuasive lie about itself, toitself. Poetic strength ensues when such lying persuades the reader thathis own origin has been reimagined by the poem. Persuasion, in a poem,is the work of rhetoric, and again Vico is the best of guides, for heconvincingly relates the origins of rhetoric to the origins of what he callspoetic logic, or what I would call poetic misprision.

Angus Fletcher, writing on TheMagicFlute, observes that: "To beginis always uncertain, nextdoor to chaos. To begin requires that, uncer-tainly, we bid farewell to some thing, some one, some where, some time.Beginning is still ending." Fletcher, by emphasizing the uncertainty of abeginning, follows Vico's idea of the indefiniteness of all secular origins.But this indefiniteness, because it is made by man, can be interpreted byman. Vico says that "ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everythingwonderful to men who were ignorant of everything." From this followed

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238 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,Repressiona poetic logic or language "not... in accord with the nature of the thingsit dealt with ... but ... a fantastic speech making use of physical sub-stances endowed with life and most of them imagined to be divine."For Vico, then, the trope comes from ignorance. Vico's profundityas a philosopher of rhetoric, beyond all other ancient and modern ex-cept for his true son, Kenneth Burke, is that he views tropes as defenses.Against what? Initially, against their own origins in ignorance, and soagainst the powerlessness of man in relation to the world:

... man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe, forin the examples cited he has made of himself an entire world. Sothat, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things byunderstanding them, this imaginative metaphysics shows that manbecomes all things by not understanding them; and perhaps thelatter proposition is truer than the former, for when man under-stands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when hedoes not understand he makes the things out of himself and be-comes them by transforming himself into them.Vico is asking a crucial question, which could be interpreted reduc-tively as, What is a poetic image, or what is a rhetorical trope, or what is a

psychic defense? Vico's answer can be read as a formula: poetic image,trope, defense are all forms of a ratio between human ignorance makingthings out of itself, and human self-identification moving to transformus into the things we have made. When the human ignorance is thetrespass of a poetic repression of anteriority, and the transformingmovement is a new poem, then the ratio measures a rewriting or an actof revision. As poetic image, the ratio is a phenomenal masking of themind taking in the world of things, which is Vico's misprision of theCartesian relationship between mind and the res extensa. An image isnecessarily an imitation, and its coverings or maskings in poetic languagenecessarily center in certain fixed areas: presence and absence, partnessand wholeness, fullness and emptiness, height and depth, insideness andoutsideness, earliness and lateness. Why these? Because they are theinevitable categories of our makings and our becomings, or as inevitableas such categories can be, within the fixities and limits of space and time.As trope, the ratio between ignorance and identification takes usback to the realization, by Vico, that the first language of the gentiles wasnot a "giving of names to things according to the nature of each," unlikethe sacred Hebrew of Adam, but rather was fantastic and figurative. Inthe beginning was the trope, is in effect Vico's formula for pagan poetry.Kenneth Burke, the Vico of our century, gives us a formula for whyrhetoric rises:

In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, therewould be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can


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Winter 1975 239join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes theircommunication possible, thus providing the first condition neces-sary for their interchange of blows. But put identification and divi-sion ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain justwhere one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteris-tic invitation to rhetoric. Here is a major reason why rhetoric, ac-cording to Aristotle, "proves opposites."

Vico saw rhetoric as being defensive; Burke tends to emphasize what hecalls the realistic function of rhetoric: "the use of language as a symbolicmeans of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond tosymbols." But Vico, compared to Burke, is more of a magical formalist,like his own primitives, his "theological poets." Vico's giants divinate soas to defend against death, and they divinate through the turns offigurative language. As a ratio between ignorance and identification, apsychic defense in Vichian terms is not significantly different from theFreudian notion of defense. Freud's "mechanisms" of defense are di-rected toward Vico's "ignorance," which in Freud is "instinct" or "drive."For Freud and Vico alike the "source" of all our drives is the body, anddefense is finally against drive itself. For though defense takes instinct asits object, defense becomes contaminated by instinct, and so becomescompulsive and at least partly repressed, which rhetorically meanshyperbolical or Sublime.A specific defense is for Freud an operation, but for Vico a trope. Itis worth noting that the root-meaning of our word "defense" is "to strikeor hurt," and that "gun" and "defense" are from the same root, just as itis interesting to remember that tropos meaning originally "turn, way,manner" appears also in the name Atroposand in the word "entropy."The trope-as-defense or ratio between ignorance and identificationmight be called at once a warding-off by turning and yet also a way ofstriking or manner of hurting. Combining Vico and Freud teaches usthat the origin of any defense is its stance towards death, just asthe origin of any trope is its stance towards proper meaning. Wherethe psychic defense and the rhetorical trope take the same particularphenomenal maskings in poetic images, there we might speak of theultimate ratio between ignorance and identification as expressing itselfin a somber formula: death is the most proper or literal of mean-ings, and literal meaning partakes of death.

Talbot Donaldson, commenting upon Chaucer's Nun's Priest'sTale,speaks of rhetoric as "a powerful weapon of survival in a vast and alienuniverse," a mode of satisfying our need for security. For a strong poetin particular, rhetoric is also what Nietzsche saw it as being, a mode ofinterpretation that is the will's revulsion against time, the will's revenge,its vindication against the necessity of passing away. Pragmatically, a

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240 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,Repressiontrope's revenge is against an earlier trope, just as defenses tend to be-come operations against one another. We can define a strong poet as onewho will not tolerate words that intervene between him and the Word, orprecursors standing between him and the Muse. But that means thestrong poet in effect takes up the stance of the Gnostic, ancestor of allmajor Western revisionists.

3What does the Gnostic know?These are the injunctions of the Gnos-tic adept Monoimus, who sounds rather like Emerson:

Abandon the search for God and the creation ... Look forhim by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is whowithinyou makes everything his own and says, "Mygod, mymind, mythought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love,hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, restswithout willing, becomes angry without willing, loves without will-ing. If you search these matters you will find him in yourself.What the Gnostic knows is his own subjectivity, and in that self-consciousness he seeks his own freedom, which he calls "salvation" butwhich pragmatically seems to be freedom from the anxiety of beinginfluenced by the Jewish God, or Biblical Law, or nature. The Gnostics,

by temperament, were akin both to Vico's magic primitives and to post-Enlightenment poets; their quarrel with the words dividing them fromtheir own Word was essentially the quarrel of any belated creator withhis precursor. Their rebellion against religious tradition as a process ofsupposedly benign transmission became the prophecy of all subsequentquarrels with poetic tradition. R. M. Grant, in his Gnosticismand EarlyChristianity,remarks of the proto-Gnostic yet still Jewish Prayer of Josephthat it "represents an attempt to supplant an archangel of the olderapocalyptic by a new archangel who makes himself known by a newrevelation." But Gnostics, as Grant indicates, go beyond apocalypticthought, and abandon Judaism (and Christianity) by denying the good-ness and true divinity of the Creator god, as well as the law of Moses andthe vision of the Resurrection.Part of the deep relevance of Gnosticism to any theory of poeticmisprision is due to the attempt of Simon Magus to revise Homer as wellas the Bible, as in this Simonian misreading of the Iliad, where Virgil'sstationing of Helen is ascribed to Homer, an error wholly typical of allstrong misinterpretation:

She who at that time was with the Greeks and Trojans was thesame who dwelt above before creation.... She is the one who now


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Winter 1975 241is with me; for her sake I descended. She waited for my coming;for she is the Thought called Helen in Homer. So Homer has to de-scribe her as having stood on the tower and signaling with a torchto the Greeks the plot against the Phrygians. Through its shininghe signified the light's display from above.... As the Phrygians bydragging in the wooden horse ignorantly brought on their owndestruction, so the gentiles, the men apart from my gnosis, pro-duce perdition for themselves.

Simon is writing his own poem, and calling it Homer, and his pecu-liar mixture in this passage of Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and his ownGnosis amounts to a revisionary freedom of interpretation, one so freethat it transgresses all limits and becomes its own creation. Christianityhas given Simon a bad name, but in a later time he might have achieveddistinction as a truly audacious strong poet, akin to Yeats.Valentinus, who came after Simon, has been compared to Heideg-ger by Hans Jonas, and I myself have found the Valentinian speculationto be rather more useful for poetic theory than the Heideggerian. Some-thing of that usefulness I attempt to demonstrate in the chapter on Yeatsin this book; here I want to cite only a single Valentinian passage, for itsview of the Demiurge is precisely the view taken of a strong precursorpoet by a strong ephebe or latecomer poet:

When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate also the bound-less, eternal, infinite and timeless nature of [the original eightAeons in the Pleroma], but could not express their immutableeternity, being as he was a fruit of defect, he embodied their eter-nity in times, epochs, and great numbers of years, under the delu-sion that by the quantity of times he could represent their infinity.Thus truth escaped him and he followed the lie. Therefore he shallpass away when the times are fulfilled.This is a misprision-by-parody of Plato, as Plotinus eloquently

charged in his SecondEnnead IX, "Against the Gnostics; or Against Thosethat Affirm the Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmos Itself to be Evil."Hans Jonas observes the specific parody of the Timaeus 37C ff:

When the father and creator saw the creature which he hadmade moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, herejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more likethe original, and as this was an eternal living being, he sought tomake the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature ofthe ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in itsfullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore he resolved tohave a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order theheaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to

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Poetry,Revisionism,Repressionnumber, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we calltime.

The Demiurge of Valentinus lies against eternity, and so, againstthe Demiurge, Valentinus lies against time. Where the Platonic modelsuggests a benign transmission (though with loss) through imitation, theGnostic model insists upon a doubly malign misinterpretation, and atransmission through catastrophe. Either way, the belated creatorachieves the uniqueness of his own consciousness through a kind of fall,but these kinds are very different, the Platonic model positing time as anecessity, the Valentinian misprision condemning time as a lie. While themajor traditions of poetic interpretation have followed Platonic and/orAristotelian models, I think that the major traditions of post-Enlightenment poetry have tended more to the Gnostic stance of mispri-sion. The Valentinian doctrine of creation could serve my own re-visionist purpose, which is to adopt an interpretative model closer to thestance apd language of "modern" or post-Enlightenment poetry thanthe philosophically oriented models have proved to be. But, again likethe poets, so many of whom have been implicitly Gnostic while explicitlyeven more occult, I turn to the medieval system of Old Testament in-terpretation known as Kabbalah, particularly the doctrines of IsaacLuria. Kabbalah, demystified, is a unique blend of Gnostic and Neo-platonic elements, of a self-conscious subjectivity founded upon a re-visionist view of creation, combined with a rational but rhetorically ex-treme dialectic of creativity. My turn to a Kabbalistic model, particularlyto a Lurianic and "regressive" scheme of creation, may seem rathereccentric, but the readings offered in this book should demonstrate theusefulness of the Lurianic dialectics for poetic interpretation.The quest for interpretative models is a necessary obsession for thereader who would be strong, since to refuse models explicitly is only toaccept other models, however unknowingly. All reading is translation,and all attempts to communicate a reading seem to court reduction,perhaps inevitably. The proper use of any critical paradigm ought tolessen the dangers of reduction, yet clearly most paradigms are, in them-selves, dangerously reductive. Negative theology, even where it vergesupon Theosophy, rather than the reasoning through negation of Conti-nental philosophy, or structuralist linguistics, seems to me the likeliest"discipline" for revisionary literary critics to raid in their incessant questafter further metaphors for the act of reading. But so extreme is thesituation of strong poetry in the post-Enlightenment, so nearly identicalis it with the anxiety of influence, that it requires as interpretative modelthe most dialectical and negative of theologies that can be found. Kab-balah provides not only a dialectic of creation astonishingly close torevisionist poetics, but also a conceptual rhetoric ingeniously orientedtowards defense.

242 Harold Bloom


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Winter 1975 243Kabbalah, though the very word means "tradition" (in the particularsense of "reception") goes well beyond orthodox tradition in its attempt

to restoreprimal meanings to the Bible. Kabbalah is necessarily a massivemisprision of both Bible and Talmud, and the initial sense in which itaccurately was "tradition" is the unintentionally ironic one that meansNeoplatonic and Gnostic traditions, rather than Jewish ones. The cos-mology of Kabbalah, as Gershom Scholem definitively observes, is Neo-platonic. Scholem locates the originality in a "new religious impulse," yetunderstandably has difficulty in defining such an impulse. He distin-guishes Kabbalistic theories of the emanation of the sefirot, from Neo-platonic systems, by noting that, in the latter, the stages of emanation"are not conceived as processes within the Godhead." Yet he grants thatcertain Gnosticisms also concentrated on the life within the Godhead,and we can notice the same emphasis in the analysis of the ValentinianSpeculation by Hans Jonas: "The distinguishing principle ... is the at-tempt to place the origin of darkness, and thereby of the dualistic rift ofbeing, within the godhead itself." Jonas adds that the Valentinian visionrelies on "terms of divine error" and this is the distinction betweenGnosticism and Kabbalah, for Kabbalah declines to impute error to theGodhead.

Earlier Kabbalah from its origins until Luria's older contemporaryCordovero, saw creation as an outgoing or egressive process. Luria'sstartling originality was to revise the Zohar's dialectics of creation into aningoing or regressive process, a creation by contraction, destruction, andsubsequent restitution. This Lurianic story of creation-by-catastrophe isa genuine dialectic or dialectical process by the ordeal of the toughest-minded account of dialectic I know, the one set forth by the philosopherKarl Popper in his powerful collection, Conjecturesand Refutations: TheGrowthof ScientificKnowledge,which has a decisive essay, "What Is Dialec-tic?" in which neither Hegel nor Marx passes the Popperian test.The Lurianic story of creation begins with an act of self-limitationon God's part that finds its aesthetic equivalent in any new poet's initialrhetoric of limitation, that is, in his acts of re-seeing what his precursorshad seen before him. These re-seeings are translations of desires intoverbal acts, instances of substantive thinking, and tend to be expressedby a nominal style, and by an imagery that stresses states of absence, ofemptiness, and of estrangement or "outsideness." In the language ofpsychoanalysis, these modes of aesthetic limitation can be called differ-ent degrees of sublimation, as I will explain in this chapter's last section.Lurianic zimzum or divine contraction, the first step in the dialectic ofcreation, can be called God's sublimation of Himself, or at least of Hisown Presence. God begins creation by taking a step inside Himself, byvoiding His own Presence. This zimzum, considered rhetorically, is acomposite trope, commencing as an irony for the creative act, since itsays "withdrawal" yet means the opposite, which is absolute "concentra-

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244 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,Repressiontion." Making begins with a regression, a holding-in of the Divinebreath, which is also, curiously, a kind of digression.Even so, the strong poems of the post-Enlightenment, from Blakethrough Stevens, begin with the parabasis of rhetorical irony. But thepsychic defense concealed in the irony is the initial defense that Freudcalled reaction-formation, the overt attitude that opposes itself directlyto a repressed wish, by a rigidity that expresses the opposite of theinstinct it battles. The Kabbalistic contraction/withdrawal is both tropeand defense, and in seeking an initial term for it I have settled upon theEpicurean-Lucretian clinamen, naturalized as a critical term long beforeme, by Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection.The clinamenor "swerve" is thetrope-as-misreading, irony as a dialectical alternation of images of pres-ence and absence, or the beginnings of the defensive process. Writing onTheMagic Flute, Angus Fletcher ventures some very useful observationsupon irony as an aesthetic limitation:

Irony is merely a darkened awareness of that possibility of change,of transformation, which in its fixed philosophic definition is the"crossing over" of dialectic process. But we can never say too oftenthat irony implies the potential defeat of action, defeat at the handsof introspection, self-consciousness, etc., modes of thought whichsap the body and even the mind itself of its apparent motivation.Kenneth Burke notes that dialectic irony provides us with a kind oftechnical equivalent for the doctrine of original sin, which for a strongnew poem is simply a sin of transgression against origins. The Lurianicdialectic follows its initial irony of Divine contraction, or image of limita-tion, with a process it calls the breaking-of-the-vessels, which in poeticterms is the principle of rhetorical substitution, or in psychic terms is the

metamorphic element in all defenses, their tendency to turn into oneanother, even as tropes tend to mix into one another. What follows inthe later or regressive Kabbalah is called tikkun or "restitution" and issymbolic representation. Here again, Coleridge can be our guide, as heidentified Symbol with the trope of synecdoche, just as Freud located thedefense of turning-against-the-self, or masochistic reversal, within athinking-by-synecdoche. Here, seeking for a broader term to hold to-gether synecdoche and reversal within the part/whole image, I havefollowed Mallarme and Lacan by using the word tessera,not in its mod-ern meaning as a mosaic-building unit, but in its ancient, mystery-cultmeaning of an antithetical completion, the device of recognition that fitstogether the broken parts of a vessel, to make a whole again.There is an opening movement of clinamen to tessera, in mostsignificant poems of our era, that is, of the last three centuries. I amaware that such a statement, between its homemade terminology and itsapparent arbitrariness, is rather outrageous, but I offer it as merely


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Winter 1975 245descriptive and as a useful mapping of how the reading of poems begins.By "reading" I intend to mean the work both of poet and of critic, whothemselves move from dialectic irony to synecdochal representation asthey confront the text before them. The movement is from a troubledawareness of dearth, of signification having wandered away and gottenlost, to an even more troubled awareness that the self represents onlypart of a mutilated or broken whole, whether in relation to what itbelieves itself once to have been, or still somehow hopes to become.Clinamen is a swerve or step inside, and so is a movement of inter-nalization, just as tessera is necessarily an antithetical completion thatnecessarily fails to complete, and so is less than a full externalization.That is reason enough for strong modern poems passing into a middlemovement, where as terms-for-mapping I have employed kenosis, St.Paul's word for Christ's "humbling" or emptying-out of his own divinity,and daemonization,founded upon the ancient notion of the daemonic asthe intervening stage between the human and the divine. Kenosis sub-sumes the trope of metonymy, the imagistic reduction from a priorfullness to a later emptiness, and the three parallel Freudian defenses ofregression, undoing, and isolating, all of them repetitive and compulsivemovements of the psyche.

Daemonization, which usually marks the climax or Sublime crisispoint of the strong poem, subsumes the principal Freudian defense,repression, the very active defense that produces or accumulates muchof what Freud calls the Unconscious. As trope, poetic repression tends toappear as an exaggerated representation, the overthrow called hyper-bole, with characteristic imagery of great heights and abysmal depths.Metonymy, as a reification by contiguity, can be called an extension ofirony, just as hyperbole extends synecdoche. But both extremes lackfinality, as their psychic equivalents hint, since the reductiveness ofmetonymy is only the linguistic version of the hopelessly entropic back-ward movements of the regressing, undoing, and isolating psyche. Themetonymizer is a compulsive cataloger, and the contents of the poeticself never can be wholly emptied out. Similarly, there is no end to re-pression in strong poetry, as again I will indicate in the last section of thischapter. The dialectics of revisionism compel the strong poem into afinal movement of ratios, one that sets space against time, space as ametaphor of limitation and time as a restituting metalepsis or transump-tion, a trope that murders all previous tropes.

I take the name, askesis, for the revisionary ratio that subsumesmetaphor, the defense of sublimation, and the dualistic imagery of in-side consciousness against outside nature, from Walter Pater, who him-self took it from pre-Socratic usage. Pater said ofaskesis (which he spelledascesis) that in a stylistic context it equalled "self-restraint, a skillfuleconomy of means," and in his usually subtle play on etymological mean-ing, he hinted at the athlete's self-discipline. Even more subtly, Pater was

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246 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,Repressionattempting to refine the Romantic legacy of Coleridge, with its prefer-ence for mind/nature metaphors over all other figurations. To Paterbelongs the distinction of noting that the secularized epiphany, the"privileged" or good moment of Romantic tradition, was the ultimateand precarious form of this inside/outside metaphor. The third and finaldialectical movement of modern strong poems tends to begin with such asublimating metaphor, but again this is another limitation of meaning,another achieved dearth or realization of wandering signification. In thefinal breaking-of-the-vessels of Romantic figuration, an extraordinarysubstitution takes place, for which I have proposed the name apophrades,the unlucky days, dismal, when the Athenian dead return to reinhabittheir former houses, and ritualistically and momentarily drive the livingout of doors.

Defensively, this poetic final movement is frequently a balance be-tween introjection (or identification) and projection (or casting-out theforbidden). Imagistically, the balance is between earliness and belated-ness, and there are very few strong poems that do not attempt, some-how, to conclude by introjecting an earliness and projecting the afflictionof belatedness. The trope involved is the unsettling one anciently calledmetalepsis or transumption, the only trope-reversing trope, since it sub-stitutes one word for another in earlier figurations. Angus Fletcher fol-lows Quintilian in describing transumption as a process "in which com-monly the poet goes from one word to another that sounds like it, to yetanother, thus developing a chain of auditory associations getting thepoem from one image to another more remote image." Kenneth Burke,commenting upon my A Map of Misreading, sees daemonic hyperboleand transumption as heightened versions of synecdoche, representa-tions related to Plato's transcendentalized eros:

The Phaedrus takes us from seed in the sense of sheer sperm tothe heights of the Socratic erotic, as transcendentally embodied inthe idea of doctrinal insemination. And similarly, via hyperboleand metalepsis, we'd advance from an ephebe's sheer physicalrelease to a poetically ejaculatory analogue.Metalepsis or transumption thus becomes a total, final act of takingup a poetic stance in relation to anteriority, particularly to the anteriorityof poetic language, which means primarily the loved-and-feared poems

of the precursors. Properly accomplished, this stance figuratively pro-duces the illusion of having fathered one's own fathers, which is thegreatest illusion, the one that Vico called "divination," or that we couldcall poetic immortality.What is the critic's defense for so systematic a mapping of the poet'sdefenses? Burke, in the preface to his first book, Counter-Statement, aidthat his set-piece, his "Lexicon Rhetoricae," was "frankly intended as a


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1975 247machine-machine for criticism, however, not for poetry," since poetry"is always beyond the last formula." I too offer a "machine for criticism,"though I sometimes fear that poetry itself increasingly has become thelast formula. Modern poetry, as Richard Rorty sums it up, lives under atriple curse: (1) Hegel's prophecy that any future will be transcendedautomatically by a future future, (2) Marx's prophecy of the end of allindividual enterprise, (3) Freud's prophetic analysis of the entropic drivebeyond the Pleasure Principle, an analysis uneasily akin to Nietzsche'svision of the death of Man, a vision elaborated by Foucault, Deleuze, andother recent speculators. As Rorty says: "Who can see himself as caughtin a dialectical moment, enmeshed in a family romance, parasitic.uponthe last stages of capitalism, yet still in competition with the mightydead?" The only answer I know is that the strongest artists, but only thestrongest, can prevail even in this entrapment of dialectics. They prevailby reattaining the Sublime, though a greatly altered Sublime, and so Iwill conclude this chapter by a brief speculation upon that fresh Sublime,and its dependence upon poetic equivalents of repression.

4The grandfathers of the Sublime are Homer and the Bible, but in

English, Milton is the severe father of the Sublime mode. Erich Auer-bach said that "the Divine Comedy s the first and in certain respects theonly European poem comparable in rank and quality to the sublimepoetry of antiquity," ajudgment that seems to exclude Paradise Lost fromEurope. I suppose that Dante's superiority over Milton, insofar as itexists, best might be justified by Auerbach's beautiful observations uponDante's personal involvement in his own Sublime:

Dante ... is not only the narrator; he is at the same time thesuffering hero. As the protagonist of his poem which, far greater inscope than the Homeric epics, encompasses all the sufferings andpassions, all the joys and blessings of human existence, he himself isinvolved in all the movements of his immense action. ... it is hehimself who, held fast in the depths of hell, awaits the savior in amoment of extreme peril. What he relates, accordingly, is not amere happening, but something that happens to him. He is notoutside, contemplating, admiring, and describing the sublime. Heis in it, at a definite point in the scene of action, threatened andhard pressed; he can only feel and describe what is present to himat this particular place, and what presents itself is the divine aid hehas been awaiting.Elsewhere in the same book (LiteraryLanguage and Its Public in LateLatin Antiquityand in the MiddleAges), Auerbach sets Petrarch above even


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248 Harold Bloom Poetry,Revisionism,RepressionDante in one respect, which I believe is also the one in which the Englishline that goes from Spenser through Milton on to Wordsworth sur-passed even Petrarch:

The Italians learned to control the devices of rhetoric and gradu-ally to rid them of their coldness and obtrusive pedantry. In thisrespect Petrarch's Italian is markedly superior even to Dante's, fora feeling for the limits of expressibility had become second natureto Petrarch and accounts in good part for his formal clarity, whileDante had to struggle for these acquisitions and had far greaterdifficulty in maintaining them in the face of his far greater andmore profound undertaking. With Petrarch lyrical subjectivismachieved perfection for the first time since antiquity, not impairedbut, quite on the contrary, enriched by the motif of Christian an-guish that always accompanies it. For it was this motif that gavelyrical subjectivism its dialectical character and the poignancy of itsemotional appeal.

The dialectical character of lyrical subjectivism is indeed my subject,and is what I attempt to map through my interplay of revisionary ratios.Auerbach, in the same book, says of Vico that "In the rhetorical figuresof the schools he saw vestiges of the original, concrete, and sensuousthinking of men who believed that in employing words and conceptsthey were seizing hold of things themselves." Auerbach is thus in Vico'stradition when he praises Dante for being in his own Sublime, as thoughthe Sublime were not so much a word or concept but somehow was thething itself, or Dante was one with his own severe poem. The lyricalsubjectivism of Petrarch knows more clearly its distance from the thingitself, its reliance upon words apart from things. Perhaps this is whyJohn Freccero so persuasively can nominate Petrarch as the first stronginstance in Western poetry of the anxiety of influence, an anxiety in-duced by the greatness of Dante. Petrarch, like Spenser and Milton afterhim, suffers several dialectical anguishes, besides the anguish of attempt-ing to reconcile poetry and religion.Milton does stand outside his own Sublime; his astonishing inven-tion was to place Satan inside the Sublime, as even a momentary com-parison of the Satans of Dante and Milton will show. I am an unrecon-structed Romantic when I read Paradise Lost; I continue to be less sur-prised by sin than I am surprised by Satan. If I can recognize the Sub-lime in poetry, then I find it in Satan, in what he is, says, does; and morepowerfully even in what he is not, does not say, and cannot do. Milton'sSatan is his own worst enemy, but that is his strength, not his weakness,in a dualizing era when the self can become strong only by battling itselfin others, and others in itself. Satan is a great rhetorician, and nearly asstrong a poet as Milton himself, but more important he is Milton's cen-tral way through to the Sublime. As such, Satan prophesies the post-Enlightenment crisis-poem, which has become our modern sublime.


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Winter 1975 249I find that my map of misprision with its dialectic of

limitation/substitution/representation, and its three pairs of ratios, alter-nating with one another, works well enough for the pattern of Satan'smajor soliloquies, possibly because these are among the ancestors of thecrisis-of-poetic-vision poem, by way of the eighteenth-century Sublimeode. Satan's hyperbolical rhetoric is wonderfully described by a theoreti-cian of the Sublime, Martin Price, in a passage which tries only to expli-cate Longinus, but which nevertheless conveys the force of Satan'scharacteristic imagery:

One finds, then, a conception of passion that transcends mate-rial objects, that moves through the sensible universe in search ofits grandest forms and yet can never find outward grandeur ade-quate to its inherent vision and its capacities of devotion. The in-tensity of the soul's passions is measured by the immensity of itsobjects. The immensity is, at its extreme, quite literally a bound-lessness, a surpassing of measurable extension.The hyperbole or intensified exaggeration that such boundlessnessdemands exacts a psychic price. To "exaggerate" etymologically means"to pile up, to heap," and the function of the Sublime is to heap us, asMoby Dick makes Ahab cry out "He heaps me!" Precisely here I locatethe difference between the strong poets and Freud, since what Freudcalls "repression" is, in the greater poets, the imagination of a Counter-Sublime. By attempting to show the poetic ascendancy of "repression"over "sublimation" I intend no revision of the Freudian trope of "theUnconscious," but rather I deny the usefulness of the Unconscious, asopposed to repression, as a literary term. Freud, in the context of poetic

interpretation, is only another strong poet, though the strongest ofmodern poets, stronger even than Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche,Marx, and Browning; far stronger than Valery, Rilke, Yeats, Stevens. Acritic, "using" Freud, does nothing different in kind from "using" Miltonor Valery. If the critic chooses to employ Freud reductively, as a sup-posed scientist, whatever that is, then the critic forgets that tropes ordefenses are primarily figures of willed falsification rather than figures ofunwilled knowledge. There is willed knowing, but that process does notproduce poems.Whatever the criticism of poetry that I urge is, and whether itproves to be, as I hope, a necessary error, orjust another useless mistake,it has nothing in common with anything now miscalled "Freudian liter-ary criticism." To say that a poem's true subject is its repression of theprecursor poem is not to say that the later poem reduces to the processof that repression. On a strict Freudian view, a good poem is a sublima-tion, and not a repression. Like any work of substitution that replacesthe gratification of prohibited instincts, the poem, as viewed by theFreudians, may contain antithetical effects but not unintended or coun-

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Poetry,Revisionism,Repressionterintended effects. In the Freudian valorization of sublimation, thesurvival of those effects would be flaws in the poem. But poems areactually stronger when their counterintended effects battle most inces-santly against their overt intentions.

Imagination, as Vico understood and Freud did not, is the faculty ofself-preservation, and so the proper use of Freud, for the literary critic,is not so to apply Freud (or even revise Freud) as to arrive at an Oedipalinterpretation of poetic history. I find such to be the usual misunder-standing that my own work provokes. In studying poetry we are notstudying the mind, nor the Unconscious, even if there is an unconscious.We are studying a kind of labor that has its own latent principles, princi-ples that can be uncovered and then taught systematically. Freud'slifework is a severe poem, and its own latent principles are more usefulto us, as critics, than its manifest principles, which frequently call forinterpretation as the misprisions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche thatthey are, despite their own intentions.Poems are not psyches, nor things, nor are they renewable ar-chetypes in a verbal universe, nor are they architectonic units of bal-anced stresses. They are defensive processes in constant change, which isto say that poems themselves are acts of reading. A poem is, as ThomasFrosch says, a fierce, proleptic debate with itself, as well as with precur-sor poems. Or, a poem is a dance of substitutions, a constant breaking-of-the-vessels, as one limitation undoes a representation, only to be resti-tuted in its turn by a fresh representation. Every strong poem, at leastsince Petrarch, has known implicitly what Nietzsche taught us to knowexplicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every interpretationanswers an earlier interpretation, and then must yield to a later one.I conclude by returning to the poetic equivalent of repression, to theSublime or the Counter-Sublime of a belated daemonization,because theenigma of poetic authority can be resolved only in the context of repres-sion. Geoffrey Hartman, in The Fate of Reading, calls the poetic will"sublimated compulsion." I myself would call it "repressed freedom."Freud, expounding repression, was compelled to posit a "primal repres-sion," a purely hypothetical first phase of repression, in which the veryidea representing a repressed instinct itself was denied any entrance intoconsciousness. Though the French Freudians courageously have tried toexpound this splendidly outrageous notion, their efforts have left it inutter darkness. To explain repression at all, Freud overtly had to createa myth of an archaic fixation, as though he were saying: "In the begin-ning was repression, even before there was any drive to be repressed orany consciousness to be defended by repression." If this is science, thenso is the Valentinian Speculation, and so is Lurianic Kabbalah, and so isFerenczi's Thalassa, and perhaps all of them are. But clearly they are alsosomething else, poems that commence by defensive processes, and thatkeep going through an elaboration of those processes.

250 Harold Bloom


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Winter 1975 251A primal fixation or repression, as I have tried to show in A Map ofMisreading, takes us back not to the Freudian Primal Scene of the

Oedipus Complex, nor to the Freudian Primal History Scene of Totemand Taboo, nor to Derrida's Scene of Writing, but to the most poeticallyprimal of scenes, the Scene of Instruction, a six-phased scene that strongpoems must will to overcome, by repressing their own freedom into thepatterns of a revisionary misinterpretation. Thomas Frosch's lucidsummary is more admirably concise than I have been able to be, and so Iborrow it here:... a Primal Scene of Instruction [is] a model for the unavoidableimposition of influence. The Scene-really a complete play, orprocess-has six stages, through which the ephebe emerges: elec-tion (seizure by the precursor's power); covenant (a basic agree-ment of poetic vision between precursor and ephebe); the choice ofa rival inspiration (e.g., Wordsworth's Nature vs. Milton's Muse);the self-presentation of the ephebe as a new incarnation of the"Poetical Character"; the ephebe's interpretation of the precursor;and the ephebe's revision of the precursor. Each of these stagesthen becomes a level of interpretation in the reading of theephebe's poem.

To this, I would add now only the formula that a poem both takes itsorigin in a Scene of Instruction and finds its necessary aim or purposethere as well. It is only by repressing creative "freedom," through theinitial fixation of influence, that a person can be reborn as a poet. Andonly by revising that repression can a poet become and remain strong.Poetry, revisionism, and repression verge upon a melancholy identity,an identity that is broken afresh by every new strong poem, and mendedafresh by the same poem.

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