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Question about this Bloom quote 2016-10-13 19:30:41 Post No. 8615894
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Question about this Bloom quote 2016-10-13 19:30:41 Post No. 8615894
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“The deepest characteristic of [Percy Bysshe] Shelley's poetic mind is its skepticism. Shelley's intellectual agnosticism was more fundamental than either his troubled materialism or his desperate idealism. Had the poet turned his doubt against all but his poetry, he would have anticipated certain later developments in the history of literature, but his own work would have lost one of its most precious qualities, a unique sensitivity to its own limitations.”
Unpastured Sea - Harold Bloom
What are the "certain later developments" to which Bloom refers?
For context, Bloom argues against a popular scholarly conception of Shelley as a naturalist turned Platonist (idealist), and posits instead he is a skeptic, that his "eclecticism centers on the point where his empiricism terminates and his idealism begins", a conflict between "his self and his poetry" (consider the dissonances of the Enlightenment and Romanticism) until he "gave himself over to the dark side of his vision" and used this irreconcilable head-heart relationship to achieve a mode in which the mind must renovate itself "beyond the cyclic limitations of nature".
It's a chiefly aesthetic mode--"a vision [...] without the sanction of religious or mythological tradition"--but clearly in dialogue with both religion and philosophy, a reparation of both and 'new philosophy' into his poetic mind, which I think leads to Bloom's comment. ("IF he had turned his doubt against all but his poetry...") But I'm struggling to think of later such doubtful literature.
My mind goes to the modernists: ahistorical Beckett, atheist Woolf ("the whole world is a work of art"!), Joyce the textual/sensual atomist, in many ways a movement of faith crisis absorbed into form. But I don't know, seems like he's making a strongly implied reference but if so it's over my head. Or maybe it's just Bloom being Bloom about a degeneration of aesthetics?
(Also, please correct me if I've completely misunderstood the essay.)
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>Or maybe it's just Bloom being Bloom about a degeneration of aesthetics
By this I mean, for example, pomo self-indulgence.
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What do you mean by "textual/sensual atomist", OP?
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>>8615916
Forgive me, I misused "atomist", I meant as in the verb "atomize". His attempt to record sensation and thought down to a base form, represented by text down to a base form, often 'short-circuited' past a point of conventional (or to some, legible) language to simulate the essentials of experience.
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Anyone?
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>>8615894
Good luck op, I think you're in the wrong place with this sort of question. I remember reading about epistemological questions of the romantics in some essays by Earl Wasserman but i'm not really interested in tracking them down to refresh my memory.
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>>8616767
Thank you. Thought I'd give it a shot, I've seen serious discussion here. The volume in which I read this essay concerns those very questions, though Wasserman isn't included (although his books are cited).
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I would imagine Bloom is referring to l'art pour l'art of the French symbolists and British aesthetes in the second half of the 19th century, like Baudelaire, Swinburne and Wilde.
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>>8616998
That makes sense! He mentions Swinburne as a proponent of Shelley and cites Ave Atque Vale. The lineage could have been even closer. I wonder why he's so vague about it.
That probably answers it. Thanks! Do you know if there are any similar apolitical / essentialist movements?
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