Ruth

http://www.infrared-sauna-spot.info

What has always bugged me about Bloom’s theory is that it makes poetry about, or produced by, or capable of producing, nothing but itself. Indeed you take up this point at several moments in your explication; even the critique of that model is necessarily implicated, as you show. But in this sense the model is not truly dialectical in any robust sense of the meaning; it is, or rather aspires to be, self-sufficient. There is a longing in Bloom for a poetics that engages nothing but its own history and the attendant guilt and anxiety produced by that history. It is noteworthy that Bloom begins the Anxiety of Influence with Milton (and only in the second edition does he back it up and go further with Shakespeare): b/c Shakespeare is about the last poet (going backwards) at least in the English tradition which one could reasonably (as I think Bloom does), hang this self-sufficient poetic model upon. I am uncomfortable with what Bloom’s model has just made me do: which is start going “backward” in time, as if there is only one story of one struggle to tell, played out endlessly and with varying degress of skill either well or ill by the best and worst, respectively, of our poets. This is a utopian poetics which denudes any reason of reading poetry: if it is only really “about” itself, why should I read a poem as opposed to talking to a highly intelligent, highly mysterious, highly self-obsessed individual? Presumably of course, so I can learn the secret hand-shake. While there is of course keen delight to be had in that pleasure, it somehow makes poetry like Magic the Gathering Club (remember that?).

Your last point makes me want to read the Levinas article mentioned at end and report back from the field. I do not know Levinas much, but knowing a little about Buber, we are already on different ground, as you suspect. For Buber, identity is dialogical insofar as it is formed out of “meeting.” The notion of “meeting,” however, already presupposes an ontological difference between “I” and “Thou,” a difference that will never be effaced. Human law and the world of human is so crucial for Buber because the world of man is already cut off from God (think of the Fall not so much as creating original sin but something like original estrangement from the divine); therefore, it is through respect and cultivation for human law and human interaction that we respect the Godly. In this way, Buber’s theology is an ethics and vice versa; “I” and “Thou” describes both the existential condition between man and man, and the fundamental relationship between man and God.