AGON

Less a contribution to Bloom's esoteric theoretical system (The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, etc.) than an essay in nervous self-classification—fascinating as such, but excruciating, too, in its twists and turns, its fecklessness. Unsurprisingly, Bloom once again stresses "misprision," "troping," the three elements of "strong readings of belated poems": "negation, evasion, extravagance." He jumps across despised Modernism on the back, now, of Emerson—whom Bloom sees as the foremost American Gnostic (his classification for himself, early on). In opting for pneuma (spark) over psyche (adhesive self—to HB), Emerson made everything dependent on a "reader's Sublime." Where do we find this Sublime? In Whitman, in Hart Crane (the one successful critical examination), in Donald Lindsay's Gnostic fantasy A Voyage to Arcturus (on which Bloom's novel The Flight to Lucifer is modeled), in John Ashbery and John Hollander—all of them in quest of "an illusion of identification or possession; something we can call our own or even ourselves." Yet Bloom's attentions are particularly unfocused in this book, perhaps because he is preoccupied with defending himself against antagonists: the deconstructionists, the imaginationists, the Poundians, the lightweights. If anything is distressing here, in fact, it's the scantiness of serious analysis. Gnostics, of course, may not need to analyze: "Loving poetry is a Gnostic passion not because the Abyss itself is loved, but because the lover longs to be yet another Demiurge." Still, the scattershot approach ill suits Bloom's academic formalism—leaving it less defined, rather than more. In the end, one has the nagging suspicion that Bloom is promoting an art so vague, so self-erasing, that only the university critic could have the time and temper to cosset it.