For them to read when they're in trouble \ And I am not - the authority of Harold Bloom

If I were to continue the theme of What I Want To Read That I Am Not Reading, what would I write about today?  Poems of the Spanish Golden Age?  Or anything from Renaissance Italy – Dante, Cellini, Machiavelli?  Machiavelli’s zippy comedy The Mandrake Root is a logical successor to all of that Aristophanes and Plautus.  Or maybe I should start a Whole New Thing – The Tale of Genji or something like that.

I’m acting like I’m dissatisfied with my actual reading, with the often thrilling Les Misérables, or the sly Barchester Towers, or the amusingly skeptical Maupassant.  No, no.  The mind wanders, that’s all.  If only I had the concentration, and the time.

Harold Bloom has a new book out – when is that not true – on exactly this theme.  Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, an anthology of English-language poems on the theme of loss, death, aging, and sorrow.  I assume that the original editorial idea was to create something for the Consolation Market.  Whether this book is exactly that, I don’t know.  What consoles Harold Bloom may not be universal.

Having said that, the quality of the poems in the book is so extraordinary that I sometimes felt a sense of injustice.  Take the greatest poets in the language, select a single poem – I could do this.  Who could not do this?  I could even publish it – The Amateur Reader’s Favorite Poems, ed. Amateur Reader, Wuthering Expectations Press, 2011.  Please see this extraordinary post by the Caustic Cover Critic – one can actually do such things now.

The fact is, though, that even if my book would have poems as good, which it would, since picking a good poem by Keats or Housman is not so hard, it would not have the weight of Bloom’s book.  Harold Bloom has authority.  Not authority of taste, heaven help us, but real expertise based on decades of reading poetry, writing about it, teaching it.  He knows more about English poetry than almost anyone.

Bloom’s rhetoric can be pompous, pure gasbaggery, or it can be subtly wise.  Each poem in the book has a little introduction, a page or two, with bits of biography, close reading, and judgments handed down from the throne.  The book is nicely organized so that readers driven starkers by Bloom’s tone can easily ignore every word he writes and simply read the poems.  I thought Bloom was pretty humble in this book, actually.  He’s writing, implicitly, about his own death.

What was I doing for the last two days – what am I doing on Wuthering Expectations – besides asserting my own authority, however small?  How can the amateur propound on the merits of Greek literature, or the complete works of Nabokov?  Well, I read them, that’s step one.  Most people have not.  If I read them well, carefully, attentively, with reflection, I move ahead again.  We could argue about whether I have actually done that.  The evidence will be in the next step, when I write about them in some sort of evaluative or critical way.  Now I have done something that almost no one has done.  A small number of true experts, Professionals, scholars have an expertise that dwarfs mine.  So do a few amateurs who have made a more serious study of Aeschylus, Nabokov, etc.  I respect their authority, and benefit from their expertise.  Then there's me and my peers, many of us merrily blogging away.

I have wandered into more of a Why We Blog post than I had intended.  This is actually a Successful Resolution post.  I have not read all of Bloom’s book, neither all of the poems nor all of the Bloom.  It’s going back to the library.  It's hardly the kind of book that one should read through, although I kinda want to.

The title is from “They Say My Verse Is Sad” by A. E. Housman, a great favorite of mine, perhaps even a consoling poet.  Bloom writes almost nothing about it.  You'll see why.  It perhaps defeats expertise:

They say my verse is sad: no wonder;
   Its narrow measure spans
Tears of eternity, and sorrow,
   Not mine, but man’s.

This is for all ill-treated fellows
   Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they’re in trouble
   And I am not.