Harold Bloom sees modern poetry as a battlefield where new poets fight against their predecessors. Strong poets, he says, suppress the "anxiety of influence" to create something of their own. In this book, Bloom applies his theory to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. He shows how Stevens grew out of the Romantic tradition, with its forceful imagery of the Sublime and rhetoric of subjectivity, and fought successfully against his American forebears, especially Whitman. Bloom elucidates Stevens' development through the theory of "poetic crossings," which are the three decisive shifts in every strong poet's career from "one kind of figurative thinking to another." Crossings are both psychological and rhetorical. The first involves the poet's search for assurance of his own powers and expresses itself as a turn from irony to synecdoche; the second shows him trying to reach out to others, and he moves from metonymy to hyperbole; third, he confronts his own mortality and identifies with things outside himself, and his images pass from metaphor to metalepsis. With this last crossing, which occurred with Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), "the Stevens who matters most" appeared; and from then onward he exhibited poetic mastery of tradition, rhetoric, and his own anxieties. Bloom's ideas and rhetoric are difficult, and only the determined student of literature and critical theory will struggle to the end, where Bloom defends his theories against the current fashion: Deconstruction. Yet the book glows with insights into both literature and personality and is sure to stand as a megalith in Stevens' criticism.
Pub Date: May 9, 1977
ISBN: 0801491851
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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