One of the essential qualities of every Romantic aesthetic is revisionism. We say that Romanticism breaks certain rules, or alters them; or we say that it attacks or changes various traditional forms of thought and order. To do so, of course, implies a deep consciousness of the past, which in fact all Romantics have. Antiquarianism is a very Romantic activity. But a Romantic consciousness recovers only to transform.

Though Harold Bloom has his own unmistakable way of speaking of these matters, they represent the subject he has always been most concerned with, as The Ringers in the Tower illustrates very well. Romantics are obsessed with history, both past and future. Bloom concentrates upon their relation to the past in order to show how frequently the Romantic writer sees himself as a sick rose. All past greatness inclines to take the form of an invisible worm which so hunts the life of the aspiring Romantic that Bloom imagines him indulging terrible secret wishes, dark loves.

Somewhere in the heart of each new poet there is hidden the dark wish that the libraries be burned in some new Alexandrian conflagration, that the imagination might be liberated from the greatness and oppressive power of its own dead champions….

Bloom's observation introduces his suggestive discussion of "Keats and the Embarrassments of Poetic Tradition," one of twenty-one essays on Romantic traditions which he has collected in his book. The quotation is central to Bloom's work over the past fifteen years, the period during which he emerged as our most influential (and, in my view, most profound) critic of English Romanticism and its traditions. [The Ringers in the Tower], in this respect, is probably his most indispensable book, for it contains—along with three new essays—the continuity of his critical thought between 1957 and 1971. The basis of that continuity, as Bloom says in his brief preface, is the study of "poetic influence (perhaps rather poetic misprision) conceived as an anxiety principle" within Romantic and post-Romantic traditions.

Bloom's highly figurative prose wheels continually about two basic metaphor systems: Freudian and Judeo-Christian. The implications of this fact are significant when we seek to understand his criticism. For example, the Freudian resonance of his surmise, quoted above, on Romantic poets is the sign of Bloom's interest in treating literature as a vehicle for observations upon more intimately psychological or more broadly social concerns. In his earlier works like The Visionary Company, these interests are generally sublimated within the immediate act of exegesis. But in the more recent essays, as well as in Bloom's other new book, Yeats, the impulse to adopt the position of a cultural oracle has grown increasingly apparent. Jeremiads upon various forms of modern decadence (as Bloom has observed them) erupt in his prose, and while one judges that such tactical lapses are in some way a function of his genius, they are nonetheless an unfortunate appearance in his work. We do not enjoy discovering the afterimage of Thomas Carlyle, however faint it may appear, in Harold Bloom.

But the critical tradition which reaches us through Bloom is an embarrassment in other ways as well, though these too are intimately related to his principal scholarly preoccupation (the working of poetic tradition) and his recurrent social polemics. For Bloom, poetic traditions in Romantic and post-Romantic art represent a continuous state of personal crisis and psychospiritual agony. Keats and Blake and Wordsworth and Shelley are (variously) "appalled" or "crippled" or "threatened" or "betrayed" by the traditions on which they draw, and if Milton stands to them as a terrifying father figure whom the earliest Romantics have a "dark wish" to destroy, those first Romantics stand in very much the same relation to their successors. Tennyson, Yeats, Lawrence, and many others suffer under similar oedipal agonies. Yet for their suffering Bloom will praise them, even though the achievements of all their ancestors seem invariably to overreach their own efforts, smothered as they must be by still further generations of great forebears. The single exception to this generally regressive view of poetic history seems to be Stevens.

Bloom's model for this history produces, necessarily, that peculiarly Bloomian method of commentary…. [His] rhetoric is continually de profundis or in extremis because Bloom sets out to imitate in his own prose the very issues which he takes to be at the heart of all Romanticism. The problems which the first Romantics had to face are still current, and they involve a continual crisis—how, in brief, to live a human life under the weight of history…. The crisis [which the traditionbound artist faces in simply trying to write a poem] comes into existence because all creation is constantly threatened by the Reasoning Spectre—by a discursive or intellectual reductiveness which wants to turn the ephemeral triumphs of man into permanent victories, or what Blake calls Moral Law. But if one is threatened on this side by a rationalist escape from the struggle to be human, on the other side one meets the equally diabolical temptation from the "exhausted reason that seeks … only to know its own deathly limits."… This is the temptation toward "mere irrationalism and a dangerous antihumanism." (pp. 243-44)

The crisis is overcome, temporarily, whenever these two temptations are resisted. But the very nature of Romanticism demands that the state of crisis persist as long as life continues. Some rapprochement (not compromise) must take place between tradition and the individual talent; yet even as this special equipoise is achieved, one knows that it is no longer available as a spiritual program. The effort must begin again and again because the effort is always fated to triumph in unsuccess. (pp. 244-45)

[Given his view] of the Romantic poet's life, and of our lives as they are represented in the artist's, Bloom's critical style must be seen as the perfect function of his thought. His engagement with the poetry offers a series of impassioned exegeses in which he seems always to be encountering the poetic act anew. We discover in Bloom's beautifully contorted prose a continuing involvement with some new fierce dispute, or some freshly achieved moment of insight…. One comes away from [his discussion of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"] as one comes away from nearly all of Bloom's critical commentaries—with a sense that the work has not been exhausted by analysis but renewed in its mysterious power. For Bloom, the consequence is that he will never be able to say enough about the poem, but that if he has written upon it many times in the past, he will have to find the resources to be equal to it many times again. As for poets within their personal and cultural traditions, Bloom's constant threat and stumbling block are his own past critical performances. He is forced repeatedly to "prove" his critical inspiration, not necessarily because he labors in doubt of that inspiration, but rather because the perpetual renewal of impassioned criticism (the "desperately sincere" critic …) is the final proof of the continuous vitality of art.

This quality of Bloom's criticism marks out its permanence, indeed, its genius. His is the egotistical sublime of modern critical prose. But alas, like all things in this sublunary world, such virtues involve their inevitable defects. Yet many of the charges that have already been heaped upon him—that his criticism is arbitrary, or idiosyncratic, or authoritarian—seem to me quite beside the point. One might as well condemn Keats for luxuriousness, or Byron's spleen. Other complaints, for example those against Bloom's "system," represent mere ignorance, for if there is one modern critic of Romanticism almost entirely free of systematic reasoning, it is Harold Bloom.

Bloom's defect as a critic is, rather, in his special history of Romantic traditions, a history which is fractured not merely because it allows little sympathy with French Romantic traditions, but even more because of Bloom's peculiar sense that poetic tradition necessarily involves "an anxiety principle or variety of melancholy." This view, as we have seen, stems from Bloom's inclination toward a Freudian frame of reference…. Bloom's view leads him to take the crisis poem as the most characteristic form of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry; yet I do not see how one could possibly make Don Juan which, pace Wordsworth and Bloom, must surely be the greatest poem in English since Milton just as it is most surely a Romantic poem—into a poem of crisis. Rather, it is a poem of celebration, though elements of crisis are naturally involved in it. (pp. 245-46)

The fact is that certain poets, though deeply in debt to the past, are not threatened by their psychological or cultural predecessors; or, if they have been threatened, have overcome the threat and have written some of their greatest work on the other side of it without at the same time succumbing to their Reasoning Spectres. Byron, Browning, Swinburne, and Hardy may be called to witness.

Nonetheless, Bloom's crisis rhetoric perfects his commentaries upon Romantic crisis literature. Indeed, Bloom's prose style is the clearest explanation of why his greatest criticism is, first, on Wordsworth, second, on certain works of Blake, and thereafter on the scattered crisis poems of all sorts of different Romantics down into our own day. But that style, because it represents only a special view of Romantic traditions, is prophetic bad manners when admitted to the company of visionaries who, however much they may recognize the tragic realities of the world, have neither submitted to that world nor embraced their own anxieties of hope.

Remarkably, Bloom can turn off his heated prose when he confronts works which manifestly do not involve intense crisis. His remarks on Marius the Epicurean show this, and so does most of his essay on Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Bloom has always maintained the greatness of Stevens's great poem as well as its crucial place in Romantic traditions. Further, he himself seems to recognize how meaningless it would be to call Notes a poem of crisis: Bloom in fact never does so, and though he qualifies his description of the poem's assured poise, he honestly represents the work in the face of his own pronouncement about the preeminence of the crisis poem in the modern world…. [Yet despite] the admirable tact of most of his essay on Notes, Bloom perversely insists that Stevens's poem "partly refutes" itself, and in this conviction Bloom permits himself to release his characteristic rhetoric into the final pages of his essay. Even while Notes mounts toward its greatest assurance and dignity and calm, Bloom adopts his crisis style…. In such moments we recognize a gap emerging between the critic and the poem. In such moments, for good and ill alike, Bloom is more than equal to his subject. Academics who complain of Bloom's stridency find themselves justified in [these instances].

But my remarks on Bloom's style are no mere cavils with his prose. Bloom is a master of his medium, certain modern ignorance notwithstanding, and the effects he achieves are most carefully sought. By the same token, Poe is not neglected in Bloom's work by an oversight but by policy, nor is Byron—the most influential Romantic poet in any language—placed among the subordinate Romantic powers inadvertently. Bloom overreads Notes for the same reason that he neglects Poe, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Byron and for the same reason that his readings of Tennyson and Browning are so deliberately restrictive.

Harold Bloom is a Romantic writer very much in the tradition which absorbs his life, and I cannot see that his own acts of critical misprision can be finally made subject to the ordinary measures of academic conduct. We do not apply such measures to Ruskin or Pater, and I do not believe they can be applied to Bloom either. His work in literature has left him in a world somewhat apart, and if he is elevated by that separation—as he surely is—he is also, from a purely academic viewpoint, to be handled all the more cautiously. He is an invaluable yet dangerous Guide through the Romantic Movement, and should probably be approached only after we have taken to heart the wisdom of a proverb from Whitman: "He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher." (pp. 246-47)