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20 oct 2011

Sea Surface Full of Clouds (ii)

When i was very young I looked at book that Harold Bloom had just published on Wallace Stevens. Of course, I looked up what he said about "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," and of course he dismissed the poem in a kind of high-handed way, as "the famous and overrated set piece of 1924." The most experimental side of this great modernist poet interested Bloom not at all. So I developed a dislike for Harold Bloom at that point. If he couldn't tell me something interesting about this poem, then I no longer trusted him. Of course, I was probably 20, so what did I know? It was a kind of arrogant position for me to take. On the other hand, I wasn't about to bow down to some critical authority either. At what point was I going to have opinions of my own, if not right then?

4 comentarios:

  1. I'll bet Bloom had the same sort of experience at about the same age.

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  2. I'm sure he did. But he must have forgotten or he wouldn't have turned into HAROLD BLOOM>

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  3. This is the best time on one's intellectual journey, I believe. One feels completely entitled to dismiss any accepted authority and very self-assured.

    I always thought that people who end up making a name for themselves in academia are the ones who manage to preserve this enthusiasm and self-assurance for as long as possible.

    Sadly, I don't think I have been able to do that. :-(

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  4. One of the reasons I got bored with physics and math when I was 18/19 years old was the feeling I had that I was not really doing physics and math yet; I was still learning the basics that would allow me to do them. But when I talked about Dostoevsky I was already doing literary criticism, and when I talked about Nietzsche I was already doing philosophy.

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