life and poetry

 In The American Canon (2019) Harold Bloom writes: 

Of all poets writing in English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I judge Emily Dickinson to present us with the most authentic cognitive difficulties.

This is a recurring theme. Generally when Bloom writes about Dickinson he comments on how difficult she is. This, from a scholar who, at the height of his powers, could read 1000 pages an hour, and who had committed whole novels and hundreds of pages of poetry to memory and accurately quoted from those works in his writing and speaking, had taught himself to read three languages - Yiddish, Hebrew and English - by the age of six, was captivated by the poetry of William Blake and Hart Crane before the age of 8, and went on to become one of the greatest literary criticics of the 20th century. 

So, when Bloom says that someone's poetry is difficult, I don't even know what that means. What does cognitive difficulty mean for someone with preternatural cognitive abilities? It's a metadifficulty....a difficulty that is difficult to understand. 

My difficulty with Dickinson is much less interesting than Bloom's. It's basically incomprehension. That's what I don't get about Bloom, though. Like, how does he find difficulty in it? But then, if poetry was easy, Bloom wouldn't be so passionate about it. He even calls good literature a 'difficult pleasure'. I don't think Bloom invented that term, but it's a good expression of the value he sees in the best literature. 

I've never really taken to poetry but I appreciate it. I have books of poetry - Dickinson's complete poems, the Norton Anthology of poetry, all 6 of the major English Romantic poets - Shelley, Keats, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge - Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, Paradise Lost and other poems by John Milton, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Wislawa Szymborska, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, John Clare, Emily Brontё, the other Brontёs, The Best Poems of the English Language (with commentary) edited by Harold Bloom, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Judith Wright, Emerson, The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry (Volume 2), Chaucer's The Canturbury tales, book 1 and 2 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sad Toys by Takuboku Ishikawa....

I feel a kind of reverence for poetry. I remember when I first read Wuthering Heights and loved it, and I ended up focusing on Emily Brontё in a lot of my studies (and ultimately writing my honours thesis about her). Out of all the Brontёs, she's the one who is most respected as a poet. Anne and Charlotte were great novelists, but not that great as poets, but Emily....she's a poet. And that fits so well with her novel. I read a few biographies of Emily, including the one by Winifred Gérin, which was probably my favourite, and I found that they all fit together so well - the novel, the life, and the poems. 

In reading the biographies and some of the literary criticism and the poems, there's a nice sense of getting to spend a bit longer in the world evoked by Wuthering Heights.