News at Eleven: The first Collected Poems of

that pleasant man, John Ashbery, are already one thousand pages, and even [Harold] Bloom's enthusiasm begins to falter: "You wonder as you wander in later Ashbery how you can hope to apprehend an underground stream of poetry that goes on inside him all the time . . . I remain in love with this poetry, yet there is a problem of absorption with such florabundance".

Bloom's early love for Crane, however, remains undiminished. And he sees him as "like Whitman, a poet of the unformulated American Religion, the faithless faith of Emersonian Self-Reliance". Indeed, I feel he has made me a convert to the view that Crane's The Bridge is the opposite of and answer to The Waste Land, and with its ardour and positive spirit, may mean more to us now than Eliot's gloom.

from The Irish Times: A gnostic swansong

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