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Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry

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A couple of things to start off: This is the best of Bloom at the height of his power, and this book is ultimatly the one that will be remembered despite Bloom's sad, downward spiral into "Omens of The Millenium" and other such kitsch.-This book, when first published in 1960, was an affront to the prevailing Neo-Classicism triumphed by T.S. Eliot and the soi-disant New Criticism, both of which defined themselves, to a great extent, by despising the Romantics and in seeking to give the lie to their poetic ability and influence. Neither school is now given much account, while the Romantics are still with us.-The problem with a book defending the Romantics and explaining their poetry is that you are attempting to explain what the poets themselves saw as inexplicable, the vision of the visionary company is that of a divine beauty not of this world making itself known to the poets not at the summoning of their will, but, as Shelley beautifully puts it, like a sudden wind firing a fading coal. It would be a futile endeavor to go over the texts of each of the poets in this necessarily brief review and explain, as Bloom does, how this vision manifested itself in each of them.-That's, after all, what the book's for!-But, as an example, take the final poem of one of Bloom's and my favorite of the Visionary Commpany, Shelley. His unfinished, final poem before he drowned at the age of 30, "The Triumph of Life," is an almost perfect example of why defending the Romantics is such a difficult and complex task, and why this book is such a triumph for Bloom. The "Triumph of Life" describes a public way thronged with people "All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know whither he went, or whence he came, or why...". This is the plight not only of the common man, but of kings, potentates etc. (Napolean makes a brief and horrid appearance). Then follows behind a blazing chariot, which is Life here on Earth as we commonly know it, and that light blinds all to the moon and stars, symbols of Nature and Imagination, respectively. Thus Shelley learns, in common with all the Romantics who had not the luck that Keats had, of dying young, that the "spark with which heaven lit my spirit" is no match eventually for the blinding light of Life. This view of common life, devoid of poetic vision, as, frankly, something evil, is a difficult matter to explain to those who have not shared in the vision. But, intellectually, it's subject matter should not appear strange. It amounts to the Fall of Man, as described Biblically.-The upshot of all this for the poet, who now sees life as evil, is that, quoting Bloom, "Life, our life, can be met only by quietism or by willful self-destruction." This echoes some lines by that later (some would say last) Romantic, Yeats, "What portion can the artist have, who has awakened from the common dream, but dissipation and despair?"-This is hard and unpleasant to many, but it is logical, and makes sense of what the aforementioned literary schools trampled on as sentimental cheeseparings. This then is the book's triumph. No longer can these poets and their poetry be dismissed without contending with Bloom. A formidable obstacle indeed!

As a graduate student writing her thesis on these amazing gentlemen, I fully and wholehartedly recommend this text as a primer. But be sure to have the poetry collections on hand because this is not an anthology, and Bloom assumes a certain level of familiarity with the works of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats.

The most accessible book on British Romanticism I've ever read. Bloom does an outstanding job providing the big picture of the period and a close, specific explication of individual works.

I first read this book 45 years ago in a class taught by Bloom himself. I find it has aged well. As usual Bloom squeezes his five poets into the Procrustean bed of his idiosyncratic typologies. This is justified as a necessary dialectic of the visionary imagination, a sort of Freudian analog. His account, thankfully, illuminates these figures and is rooted in Blake's own daft myth-making (or mythopoeia.) Naturally, it doesn't apply so closely to the other members of the "visionary company" though the basic thrust of his argument seems valid. The readings of key texts are close but not obsessive. As usual Bloom brings his characteristic empathy (identification?) to these poets of disappointment - "We poets in our youth begin in gladness/But thereof come in the end to despondency and madness." (Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence"

Bloom ate Blake, Crane, Shakespeare, Shelley, and the rest of them before adolescence and has been digesting ever since. Even before his lifelong meal, his intellect is simply larger and sharper than anyone else's.

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