Introduction

Up until quite recently, when the question of Jewish American poetic practice was raised, it was largely in the interest of declaring the enterprise difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-five years ago, Harold Bloom broached the subject in a now-infamous essay entitled “The Sorrows of American-Jewish Poetry.” As the funereal title suggests, Bloom takes a gloomy view of his subject, maintaining that, as a category of analysis, Jewish American poetry has all but withered on the vine before it has even blossomed. Indeed, he argues that the poetic process - which according to Bloom entails an agon, a wrestling, between a would-be poet and his precursor – is fundamentally alien to a Jewish sensibility on at least two counts. To begin with, even the most secularized Jew cannot wholly commit himself to the “pragmatic religion-of-poetry” (251) or to holda precursor poet in “god-like” esteem (253). The objection is predicated on an essentializing link between Christianity and the poetic, basedupon a mutual investment in the “universal” which necessarily precludes Jewishness, a category of being which Bloom sees as bound up with historicity and specificity. Furthermore, Bloom provocatively suggests that a poetic alliance between a Jewish poet anda “Gentile precursor” (such as Milton), a Jewish self mixing with a foreign other, is in some way transgressive –- a violation perhaps of a culture deeply committed to keeping its borders intact.