Sphinx

You know, I think the following tells us something vaguely interesting about the impact of the Internet. In 1998, the critic Harold Bloom edited a collection called The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, which he had selected from a regular publication called The Best American Poetry, with an introductory essay, also published as part of a forum in The Boston Review (April/May 1998), entitled ‘They have the numbers; we, the heights’. It opens like this:

My title is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp- followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of “cultural studies.” For just a little while longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic. There are still authentic poems being written in the United States.

Oh. Dear.

Not being any sort of aficionado of late 20th-century American poetry, I can’t say whether the image of a few naked, muscular aesthetes standing firm against the decadent foreign hordes dedicated to the destruction of Western Civilization is absurdly over the top or just very silly – but further research is definitely needed into the networks of influence between this essay and the other notorious bit of Laconophilia from 1998, Frank Miller’s 300. But at least Miller knew he was drawing on Herodotus; Bloom’s confident declaration that his source was Thucydides is either an in-joke, or an error of substantial proportions. It should be noted that I haven’t found the line in Herodotus yet either, or any other source, and of course the Spartan strategy scarcely depended on holding the higher ground, but if you’re going to make up bullshit quotes for your ex cathedra peroration, that attribution would at least be plausible.

Three things struck me about this… no, four. Among the things that struck me… Firstly, one assumes that in this day and age Bloom (or his editors) would have made at least a cursory effort to check such things (unless it was indeed deliberately made up) – but in 1998, there were no dodgy internet quote sites, just volumes like Bartlett’s, which could always be assumed not to be complete records. Secondly, in the absence of Twitter, there was no visible flurry of corrections or criticism; none of the contributors to the Boston Review forum remarked on the Thucydides reference, and the occasional later discussions all take Bloom’s Thucydides attribution at face value – they’re more interested in his evocation of martial metaphors in the cultural context.

Thirdly, this is one of those aggravating misattributions where I don’t have an original source that doesn’t mention Thucydides, which means it will be much harder to quash; it actually comes down to my asserting my authority in Thucydidean matters over Harold Bloom’s great reputation for learning, which actually I have no problem with, but others may think differently. If he dd get it from a written source, it isn’t one that’s been digitised, so the chances of my finding it are limited.

But, finally, it is striking that I’ve never encountered this line before. The usual quoters of Thucydides, I suspect, don’t generally read articles about the state of contemporary American poetry or the critical practices of Harold Bloom; those who do read and comment on such things don’t generally then quote Thucydides, except to explain why Bloom is wrong (or worse) in citing him. So until today the line has been absent from Twitter and from the usual rubbish quote websites – and maybe, just maybe, we can keep it that way…

Update: I did mean to add a comment to the effect that, were Harold Bloom still active, he would definitely be fulminating about Grievance Studies, and probably even Cultural Marxism. It isn’t a compliment to say that large sections of his essay feel rather familiar:

That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this essay, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet.

Though other parts are a little more quaint: “Enthusiastic young men and women (and some of their middle-aged gurus) rushed forth in a Great Awakening of Rock Religion in the closing years of the 1960s…”