Bloom makes a virtue of misrecognition, and prioritizes, in his Freudian way, what the reader needs from the poem, and so what the reader needs the poem for. In Bloom’s account the question ‘Am I getting this poem right?’ is as misleading as the question ‘Am I right to have this need?’ The questions that Rorty asks of a text and that Bloom ‘confesses’ to like – ‘what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean?’ – turn the text into a new-found tool; but unlike a hammer or a saw, its form does not dictate its function; what determines its function is
...more
