His introduction to the Library of America’s “American Religious Poems” anthology (the source of that quote) is a typical Bloom performance. The book, coedited by Jesse Zuba—not only a Yale Ph.D. candidate but a multi-instrumentalist with the jazz-funk jam band Alcibiades Jones—covers more than 200 poets; but Bloom’s introduction is mostly a celebration of Walt Whitman: “a new kind of religious bard,” “our prime shaman,” a writer more “vital and vitalizing” than Proust or Joyce, and author of the single greatest American poem (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”). He touches on Emily Dickinson—for Bloom, Whitman’s only peer—whose “conceptional originality … is dwarfed only by Shakespeare’s,” and on Hart Crane, “her greatest disciple.” Bloom knows how over the top all this is: “I do not fear being called hyperbolical, since the Critical Sublime is precisely that.” And I can’t imagine he cares that other readers may find Crane’s prophetic-archaic mode unbearable: “O harp and altar, of the fury fused,/(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)/Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,/Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry …”
But just what is their work (and Wallace Stevens’s and John Ashbery’s and Jorie Graham’s) doing in an anthology of religious poems? They’re certainly not devotional poets, like Edward Taylor—the closest to John Donne and George Herbert early America ever got—or monitory poets, like fellow Puritan Michael Wigglesworth, whose earnest “Day of Doom” has such lines as “Thy best enjoyments are but Trash and Toyes/Delight thyself in that which worthless is.” Bloom can only justify the anthology’s title by redefining “religious” in the way his own 1992 book “The American Religion” did: as he tries to explain it now, the American religion “makes obsolete most distinctions between theism, agnosticism and atheism.” Something like Unitarianism, maybe, a tiny bit like Pentecostalism (Bloom became so interested in “spirit-filled churches” that he attended several services), something like Whitman’s ecstatic spiritualism. In other words, what Christian fundamentalists or ultra-Orthodox Jews would consider irreligious and blasphemous. But Bloom says it, so it must be so. His poets include Christians, Jews and Muslims, as well as all the whatevers; he also has American Indian songs and chants and African-American spirituals. “The Criteria of Political Correctness,” he writes, “I dismiss with weary contempt.” Go ahead and laugh, but I’ll bet the Great Enjoyer really does enjoy it all.
Some of the selections are no-brainers, like T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” that weary recollection in old age by one of the three Wise Men. It begins with DJ T.S. sampling from a sermon by the divine Launcelot Andrews—"‘A cold coming we had of it/ … The ways deep and the weather sharp/The very dead of winter’"—and ends with the speaker wondering if he’d seen a birth or a death; “No longer at ease” in his kingdom, he “should be glad of another death.” And if you were hoping he could or would share the cataclysmic revelation of the infant Jesus with you, sorry: “It was (you may say) satisfactory.”
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Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” doesn’t allude to the Bible at all—in fact, it seems to predate everything but Genesis I. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” But guess where Hughes got those litanylike repetitions: “I bathed,” “I built,” “I looked,” “I heard.” And Hughes must also have loved Whitman—this reads like a “Leaves of Grass” outtake.
Probably no one but Bloom would identify James Wright’s exquisite “The Blessing” as a religious poem, but damned if he’s not right. This encounter with two ponies, “just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,” is as ecstatic as anything Whitman ever wrote, but there’s nothing unearthly or disembodied here: this blessing is physical and emotional. It begins as the speaker sees the ponies’ eyes “darken in kindness.” The poem’s sexuality is obvious, but so is its purity: “I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms/ … The light breeze moves me to caress her long ear/That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” Only in the last three lines does a Whitmanesque spiritual unity with all nature burst forth: “Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I would break/Into blossom.”
Many of the more obscure poems Bloom and Zuba have found are obscure for no reason I can see. You’ll thank Bloom for introducing you to a poem by Edith Wharton—who knew?—about lying awake after sex. It not only tells you what sex is ultimately about, but throws in a reference to the end of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” for good measure: “… Seeking each other’s souls … in the depth of unfathomed caresses,/And through the long windings of passion emerging again to the stars…”
That was the second biggest revelation for me. The biggest: Jay Wright, whom Bloom calls “the only peer of Ralph Ellison in African-American literature.” It took just one poem, “The Origin of Mary in a Cathedral Choir,” to sell me. Check this out:
You have come from that different cave life,
out of the springs of distemper and possession.
Lying in a crypt, you gather your strangeness,
waiting to bejewel another city with your ecstasy.
Such rose leaves enfold your words that the king,
as he refuses, must bend to define the light
and hear the modulation in his voice that has gone.
True to the night and the cave’s rejoicing,
you cover his eyes with flame.
I’ve only been through this poem a few times, and it’s as daunting as it is superficially beautiful. I’ve spotted some connections—the rose leaves, for instance, hook up to something earlier and something later, the “modulation” has to do with a section about music that I haven’t quoted here, and the connection between “cave” and “crypt” is clear, though I can’t yet say for sure if they’re the same. (Best guess: no.) Also, I don’t yet know who’s being addressed: maybe Jesus (in which case Herod is the “king”?) but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on any of it right now. Why don’t you get the book and wrestle with it awhile yourself? Even if it ultimately defeats you, you win.
