Blooming Wonder

Found this bit from Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading, and have to stew on it for a bit:

Strong poets are infrequent; our own century, in my judgement, shows only Hardy and Stevens writing in English. Great poets -- even Yeats and Lawrence, even Frost -- may fail of continuous strength, and major innovators -- even Pound and Williams -- may never touch strength at all. Browning, Whitman, Dickinson are strong, as are the High Romantics, and Milton may be taken as the apotheosis of strength. POETIC STRENGTH COMES ONLY FROM A TRIUMPHANT WRESTLING WITH THE DEAD, AND FROM EVEN A MORE TRIUMPHANT SOLIPSISM. Enormous gifts, the endowment of a Coleridge or of a lesser but still considerable talent like Eliot, do not avail where strength is evaded, or never attained. […] This chapter will move from THE PRIMAL CATASTROPHE OF POETIC INCARNATION on to a description of the relation of POETIC STRENGTH TO POETIC INFLUENCE, and then to THE FINAL PHASES OF HARDY AND STEVENS.

I'm not at all sure about these assessments, and I wonder why, for example, Eliot is dismissed as a lesser figure. Eliot wrestles with the dead and with his own solipsistic tendencies (to my mind) as well as Stevens or Hardy do. I'm trying to figure out how much stock to put into this-- whether it's ultimately Bloomian bluster (very typical) or something profoundly significant. I'm pretty sure the latter isn't true, though. I really never do know quite what to do with Harold....