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Was this the horizon, at once ancient and unrealized, toward which to dream? Was an alternative psychic life of literary labor possible, one that was enabling, unanxious, less regarding of self? Was it wrong to want one? As with rich parables or figurative systems, the story Bloom tells about poetic imagination can be read in more than one direction. There’s an ambiguity that might be reclaimed if the theory isn’t allowed to calcify into a grand individualism (a calcification Bloom greatly aided). Because when you went to grasp for those great names, did you expect to contact something solid?

The modes of personhood respected by the rest of life are undermined in poetic making. A logic inhering in the material begins to suggest itself: the rudiments of soul and mind are already common property, the truth of one’s life is a tangle of known tropes. The terrain of imagination is hatched with backroads between private drives and collective form. In practice the poet toggles constantly between resisting and admitting the voices of others. Perhaps it becomes hard to know the difference. Extreme and contradictory instincts live in proximity: compared with what I love I am almost nothing; there is nothing that has ever been thought or said which does not in some respect belong to me, or I to it. To learn the voice’s capacity is to learn to inherit. What is true for a child is true, at a different depth, for the poet, who perhaps must remain a child of a kind.

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