Bloom, Harold. "Introduction." In Bloom, Harold, ed.  Ernest Hemingway's
        A Farewell to Arms.  New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 1-8.

        Acknowledging Hemingway's nod to Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Bloom sees more likeness between Hemingway's style and that of Walt Whitman (1-2).  Wallace Stevens and Robert Penn Warren both see poetry in Hemingway's style.  Sifting through the modern canon, Bloom points to Hemingway's short fiction and calls him "an elegiac poet who mourns the self, who celebrates the self (rather less effectively) and who suffers divisions in the self" (2-3).  Bloom places Hemingway in the tradition of negative Emersonian American Gnosticism, and cites a letter to Scribner's in which the author rated himself against the canonical writers of America and Europe.  Bloom insists that Hemingway's "true genius was for very short stories, and hardly at all for extended narrative," so he rates the author's stories as the best since James Joyce (3).  After griping about repetition in A Farewell to Arms, Bloom nevertheless claims that Hemingway's style was as influential in his century as Byron's was in the previous century (5), because "he alone in this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth," albeit with "an absurdly implausible life" leaving us with a "permanent image of . . . the American illusion of heroism" (5).  [Praise doesn't get much more backhanded than that!]

        Pidgeon-holing A Farewell to Arms squarely behind Hemingway's short fiction and The Sun Also Rises, Bloom [perhaps taking his vengeance on Hemingway for knocking down poet Wallace Stevens, 20 years his senior, while  boxing in Key West (2)] decries the ending of the novel as "sentimental" and sympathizes with the feminist critics who have attacked the author as afraid of women for Catherine's taking "the death for both of them" (6).  The rain, Bloom suggests, can be linked to Whitman's symbolic web of "night, death, the mother, and the sea" that influenced poets contemporary to Hemingway.  Quoting the opening of chapter 16 in the novel, Bloom defines what Frederic Henry has lost when Catherine dies as intensity of sensory experience, trailing away into Keats' "Ode to Melancholy" (8).

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