On the morning we talked David Lehman was in his Manhattan apartment. I heard sirens and horns honking and the persistent ring of Mr. Lehman's second telephone. Through all this clamor Mr. Lehman spoke with great Augustan calm. I asked if he ever thought he'd get out ten years of his Best American Poetry series.

"No. When we started I remember thinking, 'Well, we'll have three years before they decide that it was a noble failure.' Then I thought, after the 'Bests' had been successful for three years, 'Well, it's going to be five years before I throw in the towel, exhausted.' But the series seemed to gather its own momentum. It was a success and it seems to have perpetuated itself. Somewhere along the line I guess I did think we'd get to ten years. And I guess too that at that very point I thought of this retrospective anthology."

I asked Mr. Lehman what caused him to do The Best of the Best.

"It occurred to me at some point that if we reached a milestone of 10 years, which no one would have thought possible when we embarked on the project, that we should do a retrospective anthology, selecting works from the first ten years.

"I thought that perhaps I would do it alone but my publisher felt strongly that this was in their words, 'counter intuitive' and that we should proceed in the same manner that we did year to year. They grasped the idea of it. We had to do something different for an anthology, a volume that would stand outside the series and comment on it. So it seemed to me that we should have either a critic or a professor or a novelist as the volume's editor. With that decision made, I narrowed the list to several people who seemed both superbly qualified and well enough known."

Which is how, Mr. Lehman said, he happened upon Harold Bloom. Bloom never seems to put pen to paper without pissing someone off. In The Western Canon (1994) Bloom agitated against literary criticism founded in Marxism, feminism, Afrocentrism, neoconservatism and just about every other ism but the aestheticism he champions. In The Book of J (1990) he irritated religious conservatives with his suggestion that the author of certain sections of the Old Testament might have been an authoress. Make of Bloom what you will, love him or hate him, but no one can say that Bloom's not a serious, passionate, even occasionally worshipful reader.

"Certainly," Mr. Lehman said, "Bloom is one of the most famous professors of literature and theorists of literary criticism in the United States. He's also very unusual among literature professors inasmuch as he has always grappled with contemporary works of literature. In the 1970s he became both a household name in academe and a very controversial name by publishing a series of theoretical studies of literature. The first of these, published in 1973, was titled The Anxiety of Influence."

I asked Mr. Lehman if he'd explain what Bloom meant by the "anxiety of influence."

"It used to be thought that the literature of the past affected the contemporary poet by inspiring him or her, by showing the way, setting a precedent, creating examples that could be emulated. But Bloom argued that something like Freud's Oedipal theory had an application in writing. He went on to say that for the new writer, the great writers of the past were like father figures that had to be overthrown. That they induced tremendous anxiety in the younger poet.

"So, according to Bloom, for Wordsworth, John Milton's Paradise Lost was not so much a precedent but a terrible anxiety because Milton had already done the epic so magnificently that it seemed to have choked off the possibility of writing an epic. Wordsworth had to figure out a way to veer from what Milton did in order to establish his own originality. By the same logic, for a contemporary poet Wallace Stevens' great achievement in the early part of the century was a tremendous source of anxiety. Because, how could you do better what Stevens had already done?

"What Bloom did in this theory was so to speak very originally. He was building on Professor Walter Jackson Bate of Harvard who had written a book called The Burden Of The Past and The English Poet. Bloom picked up on Bate's insight and fleshed it out. Bloom published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 and then several years later, in 1975, published another book, The Map of Misreading.

"According to Bloom's theory in this second book, to be original you had to misread the poems of the past in fashioning yourself. Poetry involved misreading. Deliberate misinterpretation. There are many other elements of his theory that were equally provocative and interesting. And perhaps the best sign that he was on to something was that people responded to his theory with great anxiety. Many poets denounced him, many critics denounced him, and denied what he was saying. Denied that it applied to them. The more they protested the more one felt that there was a lot of truth to it. And that perhaps one could analyze John Berryman's success and failure as a poet in relation to how well he handled the influence of Yeats. One could analyze T.S. Eliot's whole career in poetry as a reaction against the Romantic poets. Bloom also argues that the best way to read a poem, any poem, is in relation to some earlier poem. So he promoted a way of reading that we could call intertextual."

I said that I recalled Bloom's use of the word "misprision" in these early books. How, I asked Mr. Lehman, did he define that word.

"That's a very fancy, lit crit term for 'misinterpretation.' Bloom introduced all sorts of big words in putting forward his theory. All of which, I think, added a certain luster to his theory and made it seem somehow more official. But, at the same time, as he was arguing this theory, which was received not only with horror on some fronts, but with great enthusiasm on others, he was also embracing contemporary poets and making pronouncements about their relative value.

"It seemed to me that he was the first professorial figure to champion John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons. Ashbery had many followers, including me, long before he became a name. But for the longest time, Ashbery's poetry was resisted very fiercely by the literary critical establishment. Bloom, I think, in around 1970, 71, 72 wrote a long essay saying that Ashbery was our greatest poet. And he demonstrated in the 1970s very good taste in the poets that he singled out for approbation: Ashbery, Ammons, James Merrill, Robert Penn Warren, and Elizabeth Bishop. Bloom also had a way of asserting these judgments very boldly. Just as Clement Greenberg was unflinching in promoting Jackson Pollock and other abstract painters in the late 40s, so Bloom in the 1970s asserted his judgments in contemporary poetry in the same declarative way.

"I knew that Bloom hadn't written much about poetry in the last 10 or 15 years. That he'd turned his mind to other projects. So it seemed to me that it might be a good opportunity to ask this man of many words and a certain academic charisma to engage himself once again with contemporary poetry and select what, in his opinion, were the best poems over the past ten years."

Bloom, Mr. Lehman said, dutifully read all ten of the past volumes.

"He claims to have what he calls a 'scandalously rapid reading rate,' in that he can read and digest things more rapidly than anyone could imagine. He certainly received all ten volumes because he clamored for them and couldn't wait to have them all assembled."

Bloom excoriated the 1996 issue of Best American Poetry, edited by guest editor Adrienne Rich. Bloom refused to include in Best of the Best even one poem from this volume. Bloom writes in his introduction that the 1996 anthology "seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. Bursting with sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose."

In the small world of poets, Bloom's introduction has already caused quite a brouhaha. Mr. Lehman said this commotion didn't surprise him, nor did he imagine Mr. Bloom was surprised.

"I dare say he anticipated that and welcomed it. Poetry brings out tremendous passion in people. And while there are some critics who are known for a certain subtlety and a certain judiciousness, there are other critics, and commentators and practitioners who radiate ferocious passion. They love the art so much that they also hate it when it doesn't conform to their expectations or hopes. I think that in a way the two antagonists here, Harold Bloom and Adrienne Rich, are both distinguished by that sort of passionate attachment to poetry, both loving with great ardor what they love and despising with fierce contempt that which they regard as pernicious."

I asked if Mr. Lehman was surprised when he received Bloom's essay. He wasn't.

"Bloom had been telling me on the phone that I should expect something very strong. He told me this so often that I was ready, and so I wasn't entirely surprised. I did argue with him. I did try to get him to represent the 1996 volume, which I felt was unfairly scanted by him. I didn't think it was a total disaster by any means and that there were many poems that were fine even by his particular critical criteria. So I made that argument with him. I spoke in favor of some specific examples from that book. I made other arguments having to do with his introductions in the same way that I edit and comment on the introduction each year, as it is written by that year's guest editor. But, of course, the final selections and the final shape of an introductory essay are up to the guest editor and I can't dictate to that person. Anyone who knows Harold Bloom, knows how unlikely it is that he will change his commentary when pressed in an argument."

Copyright © by Judith Moore.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.