Mirroring the Future Adonais, Elegy, and the Life in Letters - Critical Essay

Harold Bloom's work on the dynamics of poetic influence helps clarify the distinction I make between creative refashioning and reading. Working with a model of oedipal conflict and resolution, Bloom argues that a strong poet must displace his poetic forefathers. This impetus is particularly important for a poet working in a highly structured and intensely traditional genre like the pastoral elegy This operation, however, proceeds indirectly; it depends on a calculated, although occulted, rupture and forgetting. A strong poem must neither imitate nor compete directly with its forefather, for neither strategy affords the younger poet the possibility of winning. Indeed, the precursor is so strong and so well established as to be virtually invincible on its own terms. The only recourse the younger poet has is to deliberately misread the precursor's work. This is a tricky maneuver, however, because the younger poet cannot let himself know what he is doing. He must work with his eyes closed, "as though it were midnight, a suspended midnight," Bloom writes, for only in this midnight of forgetting can the younger poet find the energy to overcome the enervating power of the tradition.(14) Creation, for Bloom, presupposes forgetting--but only for a time--the priority of the precursor text. Forgetting is generative; it opens a space and a present within which the younger poet can breathe, so to speak, relieving him of the fear of being a mere copy, a second son and not an heir.

Bloom's model does a good job of describing how elegists in particular have entered the tradition. Although all of the pastoral elegists know the conventions established by their forefathers and follow them with precision, each must pretend at the beginning that he does not know the end. Elegy, like all highly conventional genres, is imbued with artifice. Elegy is modeled as feeling, but its composition requires a cool and level head, and its object is rarely more than an occasion for the exercise of the younger poet's prowess. Indeed, too much and too fond a feeling for the deceased detracts from the elegy's handling of the delicate structures that organize it. Furthermore although a pastoral elegist must bend his utterance to convention and precedent, he must do so as if they appeared for the first time, and with an intense belief in the efficacy of his own utterance to accomplish its fictive end. As Bloom would put it, the poet must agree to close his eyes to the redundancy of the moment.

The calculated forgetting central to Bloom's analysis foregrounds topoi of breaking and rupturing that recur in many pastoral elegies, while at the same time touching base with critical terms like pretense and paradox that recur in discussions of the genre and of mourning generally. Sacks focuses on how elegies, through the use of figural language and by making recourse to techniques like repetition, defer death. W. David Shaw, in his recent book on elegy, posits paradox as central to how the genre works.(15) Treatments of the genre that draw on mythic cycles and on rituals of renewal likewise focus attention on how the severed head of Orpheus, for example, can blossom into song or on how the severed body of Dionysus can fertilize the earth and bring forth rebirth. Many myths adopt similar premises, and many elegies make recourse to them. Although Adonais passes from the precincts of death into those of life and forges out of the shards of mortality, out of the glassy "many-colored" fragments of life's dome trampled by death, a vision of the "white radiance of Eternity" (462-63), it does so without closing its eyes. In Adonais, Shelley refuses to forget, refuses to close his eyes to the fact that Bion's Lament and Milton's Lycidas are not songs. Much like Alice, who sees that the Queen of Hearts and her ugly henchmen are nothing but a deck of cards, Adonais shows us that poems are words on a page that exist in the simultaneity of the present to be read, revised, rewritten, and reworked at will by the reader.