SOURCE: "Death and the Native Strain in American Poetry," in Social Research, Vol. 39, No. 3, Autumn, 1972, pp. 449-62.

In the following essay, Bloom selects a representative poem from both Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats in order to contrast American and British poetic conceptions of death, and observes that the former is generally more solipsistic than the latter.

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next
 spring?
 Of what disaster is this the imminence:
 Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?
 The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
 They throw around their shoulders cloaks that  flash
 Like a great shadow's last embellishment.
 It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,
 Almost as part of innocence, almost,
 Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

This is Wallace Stevens in expectation of an imminent death. The context is the American Sublime; the poem is...