Possessed by Memory Read online

  ALSO BY HAROLD BLOOM

  Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind

  Iago: The Strategies of Evil

  Lear: The Great Image of Authority

  Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air

  Falstaff: Give Me Life

  The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

  The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible

  The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

  Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems

  Fallen Angels

  American Religious Poems: An Anthology

  Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine

  Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

  The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost

  Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

  Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

  Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages

  How to Read and Why

  Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

  Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection

  The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

  The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation

  The Book of J

  Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

  The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism

  The Breaking of the Vessels

  The Strong Light of the Canonical

  Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism

  The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy

  Deconstruction and Criticism

  Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

  Figures of Capable Imagination

  Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens

  Kabbalah and Criticism

  A Map of Misreading

  The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

  The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition

  Yeats

  Romanticism and Consciousness

  Commentary on David V. Endman’s Edition of The Poetry of William Blake

  Selected Writings of Walter Pater

  The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin

  Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument

  The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry

  Shelley’s Mythmaking

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Harold Bloom

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bloom, Harold, author.

  Title: Possessed by memory : the inward light of criticism / Harold Bloom.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018037649 (print) | LCCN 2019001822 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520894 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520887 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Literature—History and criticism. | Canon (Literature) | Bloom, Harold—Books and reading.

  Classification: LCC PN511 (ebook) | LCC PN511 .B525 2019 (print) | DDC 809—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018037649

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520894

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  v5.4

  ep

  For Celina Spiegel

  That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind….

  OSCAR WILDE, “The Critic as Artist,” Intentions (1891)

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Harold Bloom

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  Part One

  A VOICE SHE HEARD BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE

  Thresholds to Voice: Augmenting a God in Ruins

  The Poetry of Kabbalah

  More Life: The Blessing Given by Literature

  Moses: The Sublime of Silence

  Judges 13–16: Samson

  Daughter of a Voice: The Song of Deborah

  David: “Thou Art the Man”

  The Hebrew Prophets

  Isaiah of Jerusalem: “Arise, Shine; For Thy Light Is Come”

  Psalms or Praises

  Job: Holding His Ground

  The Song of Songs: “Set Me as a Seal upon Thine Heart”

  Ruth: “Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go”

  Ecclesiastes: “And Desire Shall Fail”

  Part Two

  SELF-OTHERSEEING AND THE SHAKESPEAREAN SUBLIME

  The Concept of Self-Otherseeing and the Arch-Jew Shylock

  The Bastard Faulconbridge

  The Falstaffiad: Glory and Darkening of Sir John Falstaff

  Hamlet’s Questioning of Shakespeare

  Iago and Othello: Point-Counterpoint

  Edgar and Edmund: Agonistic Dramatists

  The Fool and Cordelia: Love’s Martyrdom

  King Lear: Authority and Cosmological Disorder

  Macbeth: Triumph at Limning a Night-Piece

  Part Three

  IN THE ELEGY SEASON: JOHN MILTON, THE VISIONARY COMPANY, AND VICTORIAN POETRY

  Ben Jonson on Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell on Milton

  Paradise Lost: The Realm of Newness

  Comus: The Shadow of Shakespeare

  Dr. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton

  William Collins, “Ode on the Poetical Character”

  Thomas Gray: The Poet as Outsider

  Wisdom and Unwisdom of the Body

  William Blake’s Milton

  William Wordsworth:

  “The Solitary Reaper”

  “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  Percy Bysshe Shelley:

  “Ode to the West Wind”

  “To a Skylark”

  Prometheus Unbound

  Lord Byron, Don Juan

  John Keats:

  “Ode to a Nightingale”

  “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

  “To Autumn”

  Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest Book

  Alfred Tennyson:

>   “Ulysses”

  “Tithonus”

  Idylls of the King

  “Morte d’Arthur”

  Robert Browning:

  “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”

  Pauline

  The Condition of Fire at the Dark Tower

  “Thamuris Marching”

  George Meredith, “A Ballad of Past Meridian”

  Algernon Charles Swinburne:

  “August”

  “Hertha”

  Part Four

  THE IMPERFECT IS OUR PARADISE: WALT WHITMAN AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY

  The Psalms and Walt Whitman

  Fletcher, Whitman, and The American Sublime

  The Freshness of Last Things: Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

  Wallace Stevens:

  “The Snow Man”

  “Montrachet-le-Jardin”

  Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Luke Havergal”

  William Carlos Williams, “A Unison”

  Archie Randolph Ammons, Sphere

  Hart Crane:

  “Possessions”

  “To Brooklyn Bridge”

  Conrad Aiken, “Tetélestai”

  Richard Eberhart, “If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That Is Near Madness”

  Weldon Kees, “Aspects of Robinson”

  May Swenson, “Big-Hipped Nature”

  Delmore Schwartz, “The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain”

  Alvin Feinman, “Pilgrim Heights”

  John Ashbery, “At North Farm”

  John Wheelwright, “Fish Food”

  James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim

  Jay Macpherson, “Ark Parting”

  Amy Clampitt, “A Hermit Thrush”

  Coda

  IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

  A Note About the Author

  I am grateful for the labors of my editor and publisher, Erroll McDonald, and his assistant, Nicholas Thomson, and production editor, Victoria Pearson. As always, I am indebted to my literary agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu.

  This book would not exist without the devoted efforts of my research assistants: Lauren Smith, Alice Kenney, Jessica Branch, Bethany Carlson, Alexis Larsson, Abigail Storch, and Natalie Rose Schwartz.

  Author’s Note

  All Bible excerpts are from the King James Bible, unless otherwise noted in the text. Excerpts from Shakespeare tend to follow the latest Arden edition. I have in a few places repunctuated according to my understanding of the text and restored Shakespeare’s language, where I judge traditional emendations to be mistaken.

  Preface

  MANY YEARS AGO, in Cambridge, England, I attended one meeting of a rather esoteric faculty group that believed you could communicate with the dead. It was a disquieting experience with a gyrating table and spirit voices drifting in. I left, rather abruptly, because I felt out of place. Long before that, my charming mentor George Wilson Knight attempted to persuade me of his conviction that séances were authentic. I recall protesting that this seemed to me an over-literalization of a human yearning. George chuckled and said I was still too young to comprehend a vital truth.

  The poet James Merrill, a good acquaintance, sometimes teased me about my skepticism. Like William Butler Yeats, he called up spooks to give him metaphors for poetry. With both poets, the results were wonderful, whether or not sprites aided the imaginings.

  My own concern is rather different. When I read my departed friends, I have an uncanny sensation that they are in the room. Common readers, so many of whom are in touch with me, are very moving when they say that reading or rereading a book highly valued by their beloved dead comforts them.

  All of us wish that, when we experience sorrow, we could be shown the end of sorrow. If we are secular, that cannot be expected. Possessed by Memory is not intended to be a lamentation for my own generation of critics and poets. Instead it hopes, in part, to be a living tribute to their afterlife in their writings. The other evening, I glanced at my writing table and saw books by many of my lost friends. There were volumes of poetry by John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Mark Strand, Alvin Feinman, and of criticism by Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Angus Fletcher, and John Hollander. I had been close to all of them for at least half a century, and to most of them for two-thirds of my lifetime.

  I will be going on eighty-nine when this book is published; in its composition over the past several years I began to apprehend my ongoing writing as a dialogue with my dead friends. These include mentors like M. H. Abrams, Frederick Pottle, Gershom Scholem, Hans Jonas, and Kenneth Burke. Sometimes they were good acquaintances: Frank Kermode, Anthony Burgess, A. D. Nuttall, Northrop Frye.

  This book is reverie and not argument. My title is the book in a single phrase. What is it to be “possessed by memory”? How does possession differ in these: to possess dead or lost friends and lovers, or to possess poetry and heightened prose by memory? The range of meanings of the verb “possess” are varied: to own as property, to have power over, to master knowledge, to be controlled by a daemon, to be filled with felt experience or with cognitive apprehension, to enjoy sexual intercourse, to usurp and pillage.

  The Indo-European root poti- implies lordship or else potency. Possession ensues from potential, a sense of something evermore about to be. There is a kindling of effort, expectation, desire, and then an ebbing, as in the Shakespearean “Desire is death.” Memory contains the composite triad in which the Kantian summa—Freedom, God, Immortality—transmutes into poetry’s countersumma: individuating voice, drawing down or augmenting a waning God, and bestowing upon us the Blessing that is more life.

  In a poem the image of voice is always a trope listening for a tone you may have heard before your world was made. The Blessing frequently coincides with a change in your name. When you have a poem by heart, you possess it more truly and more strangely than you do your dwelling place, because the poem possesses you. Drawing down a god can be an esoteric procedure, yet poems at their strongest strike the lyre, and then the god becomes an issue of the strings.

  [ Part One ]

  A VOICE SHE HEARD

  BEFORE THE

  WORLD WAS MADE

  Thresholds to Voice:

  Augmenting a God in Ruins

  AS I NEAR THE END of my eighties, I am aware of being in the elegy season. The majority of my close friends from my own generation have departed. I am haunted by many passages in Wallace Stevens, and one that I keep hearing centers his extraordinary poem, “The Course of a Particular”:

  And though one says that one is part of everything,

  There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;

  And being part is an exertion that declines:

  One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

  Throughout his final poems, Stevens listens for the voice he heard before the world was made. Though he is not preoccupied with occult and Hermetic modes of speculation, in the manner either of William Butler Yeats or of D. H. Lawrence, he hears voices. Falling leaves cry out, houses laugh, syllables are spoken without speech, the wind breathes a motion, thoughts howl in the mind, the colossal sun sounds a scrawny cry, and the phoenix, mounted on a visionary palm tree, sings a foreign song. Sleepless like many other old men and women, I too dream what Stevens calls a heavy difference:

  A little while of Terra Paradise

  I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,

  Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,

  But in that dream a heavy difference

  Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,

  In vain, life’s season
or death’s element.

  Montrachet-le-Jardin

  When that saddens me too much, something in my spirit turns to a more intimate Stevens:

  The cry is part. My solitaria

  Are the meditations of a central mind.

  I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound

  Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice

  That is my own voice speaking in my ear.

  Chocorua to Its Neighbor

  Frequently at dawn, when I am very chilly and sit on the side of my bed, knowing it is not safe for me to go downstairs by myself in order to have some morning tea, I find deep peace in Stevens at his strongest:

  To say more than human things with human voice,

  That cannot be; to say human things with more

  Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

  To speak humanly from the height or from the depth

  Of human things, that is acutest speech.

  Can human things be said with more than human voice? Stevens was a kind of Lucretian skeptic, as Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Walter Pater had been before him. Yet, of those three, only Pater would have agreed with Stevens as to whether we could hear a primordial utterance. Even Stevens had his openings to a transcendental freedom: