I kept reading about Gautier, but his books were never available, until suddenly they were. I’d already read a collection of his poetry, which contained a book of poetry that he’d published late in his career and that were one hundred percent awesome (!) and then some poetry that, frankly, I just had to quit reading.

I’d read one of his short stories in a collection of French Decadent fiction and these short stories (and one melancholy essay) were definitely in that vein. Like the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, but with a lot more sex and whose dread was more openly erotic. They equate sex with death not to make sex scary, but to make it all super sexy. A priest who spends his nights in a dream-like Venice with a vampire as his mistress. A visitor to Pompeii who accidentally awakens a dead and sexy pagan aristocrat whose breasts are, apparently, fantastic (really incredible; Gautier emphasizes this point repeatedly; in fact, I think it’s fair to say that Gautier is a breast man – derrieres get short shrift, but marble white, front facing curves really get his blood pumping).

The stories are reasonably fast reads and a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

The collection ends with a paean to his friend, the poet Gerard de Nerval, who committed suicide. He clearly loved Nerval (and almost certainly saw him as the superior writer and poet) and the essay elevates his life into an exotic, sexy adventure of art as life, but also one for whom life was too difficult for such a sensitive soul. He defends Nerval against claims of madness, without denying he was mad, but madness as a way of living his art.

I bought this book, thinking it was Bloom’s seminal tome, Anxiety of Influence. You can see how I might have made the mistake.

But it’s never a mistake to read Bloom. He is old-fashioned and wedded to a very traditional Western canon, but that doesn’t make it him unenlightened nor unpersipacious – it is just something you have to be aware of and know that you’ll have to learn about writers outside the classical European tradition elsewhere.

I actually started reading this a while ago, but it’s a series of essays, some more connected than others, so I tended to pick it up and put it down again frequently. But about a week ago, I set myself to finish it and did.

When I was very young, freedom beckoned through the poets I first loved: Hart Crane, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, John Milton, and above William Shakespeare in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

What do you think about that? Shakespeare, of course, looms over everything. Hart Crane is someone I’ve never really read much of and Wallace Stevens has always left me a little cold. But it makes you ask: who are my poets?

Shakespeare and Hamlet, but Julius Caesar would replace those others for me.

Ezra Pound. Adrienne Rich. Charles Simic. T.S. Eliot. Edgar Allan Poe. Allen Ginsberg. Asian and Japanese poets, like Tu Fu, but specifically mediated through translation and specifically through the translations of Kenneth Rexroth.

These poets don’t all still ‘do it’ for me. I can see the flaws in Poe now, more than when I was younger. Ginsberg wrote a handful of great poems and heaping pile of very bad ones. And if you were talking about my favorites now, what about Anne Carson or Fanny Howe? But I discovered them later. Those ones above were the ones I loved early and whose influence is strongest, as a result.

Who are yours?