Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

by Harold Bloom

Each Volume, Covering Three To Six Poems, Includes: - User's guide- Editor's note and introduction by Harold Bloom- A comprehensive biography of the poet- Detailed thematic analysis of each poem- Extracts from major critical essays that discuss important aspects of each poem- A complete bibliography of the writer's poetic works- A list of critical works about the poet and his works- An index of themes and ideas in the author's work

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, 20th Century, Criticism

413 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1980

About the author

Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Harold Bloom is an odd duck. I don't know how else to describe him. It's hard to know what to make about this book which is ostensibly about the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Here's an experiment you could try if you have this book in front of you. Open it up to virtually any page, and I guarantee you will find the name of another author, in particular Emerson, Whitman, Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Thoreau, Nietzsche, or someone I have forgotten about. Did you try it? Was I right? On 99% of the pages that's the way it seems to work. What does it mean to constantly refer to Stevens as "Emersonian"? Beats me.

WS in "Mrs. Alfred Uruguay" defines reductiveness as having "said no / To everything, in order to get at myself. / I have wiped away moonlight like mud."

WS, L 426-27: "If you take the varnish and dirt off a picture, you see it in its first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and dirt, you are a thinker of the first idea."

WS seemed to be familiar with Charles Peirce's Idea of Firstness. It's so similar to his.

HB: "Not a year out of the last twenty of Stevens's life is undistinguished by the writing of a great poem." What a remarkable achievement.

For some reason, the poem "Blanche McCarthy" was not included in Stevens's first book Harmonium.

Wallace Stevens had an "obsession" with his own genealogy. Can be applied to some of his poems.

Stevens in a letter to Allen Tate page 677: "After all, Eliot and I are dead opposites and I have been doing about everything that he would not be likely to do."

HB: "Stevens's three finest poems, to me, are "Notes to a Supreme Fiction", "Auroras of Autumn", and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven."

"The Owl in the Sarcophagus" is an elegy for Stevens's best friend Henry Church.

HB consider Stevens's last phase as "his best." It has "some twenty-five shorter poems with an uncanny intensity and originality that surpass nearly all his previous work at middle length or shorter."

Main value of this book was finding the poems that Bloom liked. Otherwise, you have to deal with incomprehensibility, obfuscation, and nonsense.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I read On Mere Being and The Snow Man and I wanted to expose myself to more Stevens and try to figure out what he was getting at. At the time I wasn't aware of how much Bloom's idiosyncratic critical presence would take up space in the book, but that turned out to be a treat as well.

Bloom draws out the reoccurring images and evolving stances that render Stevens' corpus into an interpretable continuity. This was basically exactly what I was looking for. Stevens' rock, palm, ocean, sun, First Idea, poverty, twang, (the list continues) all resonate intertextually. Across the decades, Stevens clarifies the aesthetic problem he is trying to solve and develops his own terminology for thinking about it.

Here's a ham-handed attempt at thinking it through. Early on, Stevens becomes fascinated by a spiritual experience characterized by empty-mindedness, solitude, and embedding in nature (Stevens' "mind of winter", Emerson's "transparent eyeball"). Spurred on by the aesthetic impulse, he becomes frustrated by the ultimate inability to express what he wants to in words. Language by its very nature ("fossil poetry") comes loaded with unwanted significance and breaks the spell. The moment you "reduce to a First Idea", you create another fossil that distracts from the thing itself- worse, the idea of the thing itself is only another artifact.

Stevens vacillates between frustration, despair, and hesitant declarations of victory in his quest to figure out what to do and how to express the problem. This is where Bloom's critical lens excels. Stevens seems an exemplar of his characterization of artistic anxiety. Is Stevens really a poet? How can he reconcile his grand aims with his belief that his predecessors haven't been able to express what he wants to express either? What is the point of doing poetry as one feels oneself becoming yet another fossil?

Bloom paints a picture where by the end, Stevens reconciles himself with the idea that "all is trope" and accept poetry's artistic limitations as its strengths. In one of his early formulations, he finds himself "more truly and more strange". I can tell that a lot of these formulations are going to stick with me.

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great companion for unpacking Stevens difficult poems, and immensely aided me in tackling the most lengthy and challenging works. As all good criticism does, it heightened my experience of the works themselves. I found Bloom's inclinations towards Freudian-influenced frameworks and use of his own Anxiety of Influence theory excessive at times, but it generally was illuminating and well supported. The whole idea of mapping poems (and crossings) also felt a little overplayed, but nonetheless interesting. Aesthetically I'm not sure I agree with his judgment in preferring the later Stevens, but I generally found myself agreeing with him about which poems were strongest and which moments in the poems were best. The last chapter which focuses more on the theoretical basis for Bloom's readings was fascinating, and made me retroactively realize I was not appreciating many of the subtleties of Bloom's readings throughout the book. Look forward to reading Vendler (and other Stevens critics) to see how their interpretations differ.

[Shinji007 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a beast to get through. I did find it very illuminating and helpful. While some take issue with his interpretations, I would recommend this book if you want to take a somewhat deep-dive into the poetry.

[Bobsie67 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Incomprehensible.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love this book, the best study of Stevens that I know of. Wise and funny, Bloom is at his best with this very American poet.