Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

Rating:
Summary: The title is a misnomer...
Review: ... since it leads you to believe that its subject matter is interesting.

After ordering this book and wading through its first few chapters, I had one overwhelming thought:

Thank you, Amazon.com, for your marvelous return policy.

Bloom is one of our better critics in terms of readability, but still... Unless you have a great appetite for arid erudition, just stick to reading the poetry itself. This book has more to do with some pet theory of Bloom's than with Stevens' poetry, or our climate--both of which could have been fascinating subjects for a book.

Rating:
Summary: The personality of "interpretive" poetics
Review: Bloom has written this book after an obviously long devotion to reading Stevens and to developing his critical methods, in one of its modes, to a fine precision. The reader of this book benefits most by a slow absorbtion of the varied terminology that Bloom had accumulated previous to this work and the additions then newly made to it. The approach to Stevens' poetry is immediate in its variance from most previous criticism and especially passive reading, or "weak misreading" as B. would call it. To follow him closely is to slough the innocence of idealizing all poetry as committed to presenting its own meaning. Unwitting believers of the like, deterred by Bloom's criticism for appearing so staunchly definitive (though an immediate antidote to a belief in the floppiness of poetry), havn't realized that beyond his belief (on particularly fine display) in the strong potential of formalizing tropes and decoding of intertextualities, is the existance in poetry of its reader's 'becoming' the text that is read, and to do it inventively, eccentrically, and considerately is essentially to further poetry itself.