Bloom praises the sustaining power of poetry that helps in staying alive

Harold Bloom the scared monster of the American Academy, literary critic and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, who died in October 2019 aged ninety left behind a abundant literary criticism and cultural commentary which is  indeed Erudite and charismatic.

Harold Bloom often cited Paul Valery’s bon mot that  poem was never finished, only abandoned and you sense that this book, could have gone on as long as the man did. “I cannot finish this book because I hope to go on reading and seeking the blessing of more life”, he wrote at the end of an earlier work, The Anatomy of Influence (2011)  which he described prematurely as “my virtual swan song”.

This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death completed weeks before Harold Bloom died shows how a literature renews life amid what Milton called “ a universe of death”. Bloom takes readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature”, he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality premature death.” In passages of intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright and many others, as he feels himself “edged by nothingness”.

“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can”.

Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death by Harold Bloom, Yale University Press £25, 672 pages.