{"id":27957,"date":"2011-11-10T00:30:58","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T05:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=27957"},"modified":"2011-11-10T00:30:58","modified_gmt":"2011-11-10T05:30:58","slug":"christopher-batty-bloom-frye-and-value-judgments-contd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/11\/10\/christopher-batty-bloom-frye-and-value-judgments-contd\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Batty: Bloom, Frye and Value Judgments Cont&#8217;d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Philip Larkin - The Trees (from High Windows, 1974)\" width=\"625\" height=\"469\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DXf-gq65GO0?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Philip Larkin reads his poem, &#8220;The Trees&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Contra Bloom, Frye never claimed that \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/2011\/11\/09\/quote-of-the-day-bloom-frye-and-value-judgements\/\" target=\"_blank\">evaluation has nothing to do with literary criticism<\/a>.\u201d He claimed that criticism can\u2019t comfortably rest on a foundation of mere evaluation. Bloom himself is a good judge of literary merit but far from an infallible one. I\u2019d give Bloom an A- or B+ score if I were evaluating <em>his<\/em>\u00a0ability to evaluate and rank.<\/p>\n<p>When Bloom edited a collection he entitled <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.harpercollins.ca\/books\/Art-Reading-Poetry-Harold-Bloom\/?isbn=9780060540425\" target=\"_blank\">The Best Poems of the English Language<\/a><\/em>, he excluded dozens of conventionally recognized masterpieces and included several idiosyncratic choices of his own I found to be not so great, and sometimes downright mediocre. Bloom can\u2019t see his own blind spots; none of us can. That\u2019s why they\u2019re called \u201cblind spots.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Frye\u2019s real point is that there never has been, in the entire history of literary appreciation, a single individual with anything resembling infallible taste. Everyone has blind spots, everyone who claims to have identified a perfect canon invariably gets shown up as misguided in a few generations time. I don\u2019t see how it\u2019s possible to argue against Frye\u2019s view of this matter. The history of taste, with all its fluctuations and reversals, clearly shows him to be correct about this.<\/p>\n<p>As for how this applies to Bloom: it\u2019s easy for me to assent to his admiration of Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon among living American novelists, but when Bloom (in his younger years) dismissed T.S. Eliot as inferior to John Ashbery and not a \u201cstrong\u201d poet, when Bloom tried to write Poe out of the canon altogether, and when Bloom writes a rave blurb for poet Philip Levine but declares poet Philip Larkin trivial and minor, all I can say is, \u201cHarold, you&#8217;ve got some <em>major<\/em> blind spots. Your aesthetic compass is anything but perfect &#8212; which is precisely Frye\u2019s point.\u201d Does Bloom honestly foresee a future in which Larkin, Eliot, and Poe are forgotten, but \u201ccommon readers\u201d are avidly devouring the \u201cstrong\u201d verse of Levine and Ashbery?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Philip Larkin reads his poem, &#8220;The Trees&#8221; Contra Bloom, Frye never claimed that \u201cevaluation has nothing to do with literary criticism.\u201d He claimed that criticism can\u2019t comfortably rest on a foundation of mere evaluation. Bloom himself is a good judge of literary merit but far from an infallible one. I\u2019d give Bloom an A- or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Christopher Batty: Bloom, Frye and Value Judgments Cont&#039;d - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/11\/10\/christopher-batty-bloom-frye-and-value-judgments-contd\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christopher Batty: Bloom, Frye and Value Judgments Cont&#039;d - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Philip Larkin reads his poem, &#8220;The Trees&#8221; Contra Bloom, Frye never claimed that \u201cevaluation has nothing to do with literary criticism.\u201d He claimed that criticism can\u2019t comfortably rest on a foundation of mere evaluation. 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