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The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost
Bloom’s stand-alone introduction to The Best Poems of the English Language A notable feature of Harold Bloom’s poetry anthology The Best Poems English Language is his lengthy introductory essay, here reprinted as a separate book. For the first time Bloom gives his readers an elegant guide to reading poetry--a master critic’s distillation of a lifetime of teaching and criticism. He tackles such subjects as poetic voice, the nature of metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself. Blooms writes “the work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves.” This essay is an invaluable guide to poetry. This edition will also include a recommended reading list of poems.
1008 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
244 people are currently reading
2997 people want to read
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,715 books2,016 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
November 28, 2019
Quite a good selection. Although in the last section of modernists, it strikes me that this is what happens when you have a collection of brilliant people with large vocabularies, goodly amounts of discretionary income, who are at the same time totally fogged.
March 18, 2013
The Best Poems of the English Language? Who could resist opening an anthology so named to see what's in it? Especially when it has the name of Harold Bloom on the front cover. It's typical of this giant of a critic's eternal self-confidence, of course, that he should name his selection the Best Poems. He begins with Chaucer, born around 1343, and ends with Hart Crane, born in 1899, and admits that by setting the latter limit, he is evading the difficult task of choosing the Best Poems by poets born in the twentieth century. Into his chronological net fall 108 poets (aside from Anonymous), with 24 given "in something like their full abundance." The 24 include poets that Bloom has always championed: Shakespeare, Milton, the major Romantic poets, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Hart Crane.
No anthology is without its critics over who is in and who is out. Such quarrels are par for the course. Bloom himself throws down the gauntlet in the first words of his Introduction when he declares that since the book is intended for personal use, irrelevant to its purpose are both literary history and considerations of political correctness. What he means by "political correctness" becomes clear when he continues, "The best poems published by women before 1923 are here, chosen entirely on the basis of their aesthetic value." The first woman to appear in the anthology is Julia Ward Howe, represented by a single poem "Battle-Hymn of the Republic." But what about the writing of eighteenth-century women, recovered by such ground-breaking anthologies as Roger Lonsdale's? Are we to believe that not one of their poems has "aesthetic value"? That not one of them is better than the jog-trot of "The War-Song of Dinas Vwar," included as one of two poems by Thomas Love Peacock? Whose fourth stanza begins:
We there, in strife bewildr'ing,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
This strange bias in selection makes Bloom's aesthetic judgment seem more idiosyncratic than authoritative. In the introductions to individual poets, Bloom shares biographical facts such as his early love for Hart Crane, and his growing appreciation for the Pre-Raphaelite poets such as the two Rossettis, William Morris and Swinburne (all represented by at least two poems). He does not seem to see, however, that these personal notes, charming though they are, suggest that aesthetic standards are not absolute and universal, but inflected by personal experience and cultural context. Yes, I too believe that the selection of poems for such an anthology must be based on aesthetic value, but I am not at all certain that my judgment should be taken as the yardstick by everyone.
Bloom's taste is broad and his judgment deep. The poems that he has selected are to be savored. He includes lesser known names but personal favorites like George Darley, Jones Very, John Brooks Wheelwright, Lionel Johnson and Leonie Adams. A number of his introductions to the poets or particular poems are really essays. In them, he still challenges preconceived notions. He considers, for instance, T. S. Eliot's "Preludes" to be his best work. Marianne Moore, he argues less controversially, is at her best in her long collage-poem "Marriage," which he judges, unexpectedly, as better than "The Waste Land." Some readers may find his constant comparisons of poets, and of a poet's poems, irritating. I think these comparisons provoke critical thought and discussion.
No anthology is without its critics over who is in and who is out. Such quarrels are par for the course. Bloom himself throws down the gauntlet in the first words of his Introduction when he declares that since the book is intended for personal use, irrelevant to its purpose are both literary history and considerations of political correctness. What he means by "political correctness" becomes clear when he continues, "The best poems published by women before 1923 are here, chosen entirely on the basis of their aesthetic value." The first woman to appear in the anthology is Julia Ward Howe, represented by a single poem "Battle-Hymn of the Republic." But what about the writing of eighteenth-century women, recovered by such ground-breaking anthologies as Roger Lonsdale's? Are we to believe that not one of their poems has "aesthetic value"? That not one of them is better than the jog-trot of "The War-Song of Dinas Vwar," included as one of two poems by Thomas Love Peacock? Whose fourth stanza begins:
We there, in strife bewildr'ing,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
This strange bias in selection makes Bloom's aesthetic judgment seem more idiosyncratic than authoritative. In the introductions to individual poets, Bloom shares biographical facts such as his early love for Hart Crane, and his growing appreciation for the Pre-Raphaelite poets such as the two Rossettis, William Morris and Swinburne (all represented by at least two poems). He does not seem to see, however, that these personal notes, charming though they are, suggest that aesthetic standards are not absolute and universal, but inflected by personal experience and cultural context. Yes, I too believe that the selection of poems for such an anthology must be based on aesthetic value, but I am not at all certain that my judgment should be taken as the yardstick by everyone.
Bloom's taste is broad and his judgment deep. The poems that he has selected are to be savored. He includes lesser known names but personal favorites like George Darley, Jones Very, John Brooks Wheelwright, Lionel Johnson and Leonie Adams. A number of his introductions to the poets or particular poems are really essays. In them, he still challenges preconceived notions. He considers, for instance, T. S. Eliot's "Preludes" to be his best work. Marianne Moore, he argues less controversially, is at her best in her long collage-poem "Marriage," which he judges, unexpectedly, as better than "The Waste Land." Some readers may find his constant comparisons of poets, and of a poet's poems, irritating. I think these comparisons provoke critical thought and discussion.
July 4, 2016
Poetry Man
"Talk to me some more
You don't have to go
You're the poetry man
You make things all right."
Phoebe Snow, Poetry Man, 1974
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Plato
This anthology of poetry in the English language covers a chronology (by each poet's date of birth) from Chaucer, born in 1343, to Hart Crane, born in 1899. For each of the 108 poets in his anthology, Harold Bloom, longtime critic and professor at Harvard & Yale, gives a fine introduction and discussions of some of the poems (widely varying in length) followed by a few or several of each poet's best poems.
Bloom also provides a 29-page introductory chapter on the Art of Reading Poetry, no easy feat. In this introduction, he makes an excellent case that "poetry at its greatest... is the true mode for expanding our consciousness" which it accomplishes by strangeness of meaning. Bloom concludes that:
Below are a few passages I've included from the book:
From "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," Chaucer:
From "The Dunciad," Alexander Pope:
From "Bacchus," Ralph Waldo Emerson:
From "Song," Christina Rossetti:
From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot:
From "Blue Girls," John Crowe Ransom:
Highly recommended.
"Talk to me some more
You don't have to go
You're the poetry man
You make things all right."
Phoebe Snow, Poetry Man, 1974
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Plato
This anthology of poetry in the English language covers a chronology (by each poet's date of birth) from Chaucer, born in 1343, to Hart Crane, born in 1899. For each of the 108 poets in his anthology, Harold Bloom, longtime critic and professor at Harvard & Yale, gives a fine introduction and discussions of some of the poems (widely varying in length) followed by a few or several of each poet's best poems.
Bloom also provides a 29-page introductory chapter on the Art of Reading Poetry, no easy feat. In this introduction, he makes an excellent case that "poetry at its greatest... is the true mode for expanding our consciousness" which it accomplishes by strangeness of meaning. Bloom concludes that:
"The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. Even Shakespeare cannot make me into Falstaff or Hamlet, but all great poetry asks us to be possessed by it. To possess it by memory is a start, and to augment our consciousness is the goal. The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness...."
Below are a few passages I've included from the book:
From "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," Chaucer:
"My fourthe housebonde was a revelour--
This is to seyn, he hadde a paramour--"
From "The Dunciad," Alexander Pope:
In vain, in vain--the all-composing hour
Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the power.
She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
From "Bacchus," Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote
And the grape requite the lote!
From "Song," Christina Rossetti:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With shower and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
From "Blue Girls," John Crowe Ransom:
Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our power shall never establish,
It is so frail.
For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a lady with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished--and yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.
Highly recommended.
April 26, 2024
Today is a very important day as it marks the day that I actually acknowledged that I will not be finishing this book. I mean I read 100 pages 2 years ago and it's been sitting in my 'Currently Reading' ever since.
Obviously it's a dnf but I still believe that I can rate it bad. I say this because Mr. Bloom decided to start with poems from the 1300s, which lost my interest immediately. I mean for all we know I could've been a real poetry guy but because Harold insisted on reviewing these poets in chronological order and I can't understand a word of their old english, I now believe that I hate poetry!
I don't want to point fingers but Harold Bloom is 100% responsible for making me 'not a poetry guy' and possibly robbing the world of the next Shakespeare
ok jk about that last part
... unless?
Obviously it's a dnf but I still believe that I can rate it bad. I say this because Mr. Bloom decided to start with poems from the 1300s, which lost my interest immediately. I mean for all we know I could've been a real poetry guy but because Harold insisted on reviewing these poets in chronological order and I can't understand a word of their old english, I now believe that I hate poetry!
I don't want to point fingers but Harold Bloom is 100% responsible for making me 'not a poetry guy' and possibly robbing the world of the next Shakespeare
ok jk about that last part
... unless?
July 29, 2011
I love poetry and expected this to be a good addition to my collection; something that would cover some of the more well known poets. Unfortunately, they are the 'best poems' as judged by Harold Bloom. Bloom is no doubt an expert in the field and to be admired for his abilities and knowledge, but the poems and poets he selected for this book are not the traditional favourites, but rather a rag tag mix of rather obscure writers. As far as the analysis supplied by Bloom, I slogged through some of it, but honestly, I find him not only difficult to read, but also a rather pompous, elitist ass.
August 19, 2012
An exemplary collection of the most sublime poetry in English, beginning with Chaucer and ending, contra the title, with Hart Crane. Bloom, the world's living expert of the Western poetic tradition, makes consistently exceptional choices for inclusion in this massive volume, and provides profound and scintillating commentary. This book is simply a treasure trove of the greatest cognitive music in our great language.
June 12, 2018
Love to read anything from this wonderful selection of poetry! Amazing book!
March 11, 2024
I found this in a box in storage. My mom gave me this book for Christmas in 2004. The note she wrote on the inside cover tells me to not read the dirty poems til I’m older.
August 5, 2013
This will always be in "currently reading". A constant inspiration!
Harold Bloom stuns me with observations like: We begin to apprehend Blake when we realize that for him "human nature" is a wholly unacceptable phrase, an absolute contradiction, or, as he said, "an impossible absurdity." What was human about us, Blake insisted, was the imagination; what was natural about us had to be redeemed by the imagination, or else it would destroy us."
Harold Bloom stuns me with observations like: We begin to apprehend Blake when we realize that for him "human nature" is a wholly unacceptable phrase, an absolute contradiction, or, as he said, "an impossible absurdity." What was human about us, Blake insisted, was the imagination; what was natural about us had to be redeemed by the imagination, or else it would destroy us."
October 7, 2023
A hell of a slog. Bloom’s too opinionated for an anthology, and it represents his taste, but still worth the read. Introduced me to Hart Crane and gave me a proper encounter with Spenser, Tennyson, and several 20th C. poets.
June 22, 2016
I discovered this anthology of poetry for this class, but I absolutely will be using it for my English classes once school starts again. I love books like this, especially when the author calls it "The Best...", which obviously opens the door to controversy and disagreement. To me, this provokes thought and discussion, and you can begin to debate why something made it and something did not.
While I wouldn't say I am a poetry "expert," I have done my share of teaching poetry over the past six years, and I have come to know some of the bigger works from the English language (relatively speaking). In high school, you cover all of the classics and major poems from the various time periods, and many of the ones I have taught are in here. But what makes this stand out is that there are some poems I do not know, and I am now willing to use these poems to complement the poems we are required to read for school. The commentary in this text is also interesting, as some of the things Bloom says I agree with, and some of it just seems forced (his comments on Poe, for instance). Nevertheless, it makes for a great collection and can be used as a supplement for an English anthology class OR it could be used as a primary text for a poetry high school course. It would be great to get students to argue Bloom's comments about each poem and really get kids thinking through this material. Great stuff here and highly recommended for high school teachers.
While I wouldn't say I am a poetry "expert," I have done my share of teaching poetry over the past six years, and I have come to know some of the bigger works from the English language (relatively speaking). In high school, you cover all of the classics and major poems from the various time periods, and many of the ones I have taught are in here. But what makes this stand out is that there are some poems I do not know, and I am now willing to use these poems to complement the poems we are required to read for school. The commentary in this text is also interesting, as some of the things Bloom says I agree with, and some of it just seems forced (his comments on Poe, for instance). Nevertheless, it makes for a great collection and can be used as a supplement for an English anthology class OR it could be used as a primary text for a poetry high school course. It would be great to get students to argue Bloom's comments about each poem and really get kids thinking through this material. Great stuff here and highly recommended for high school teachers.
September 19, 2020
I spent a long time on this book. I’ve been “currently reading” it for eight years. It’s long. There are a lot of poets in here. It’s a shit anthology, though. It aims to enshrine a canon that is overwhelmingly white, male, upper class, and English, with a pittance thrown towards women and Scottish, Irish, and American poets. There’s no diversity or inclusion beyond that to speak of. 40+ pages are devoted to Walt Whitman; Edna St. Vincent Millay gets one sonnet. There are 56 men before the first woman, Julia Ward Howe, is given one poem. It’s a shambolic attempt at offering an insight into “good” poetry. Harold Bloom is a joke.
September 19, 2021
Index of Poets
Geoffrey Chaucer
William Dunbar
Petrarchan Poetry
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
Sir Walter Ralegh
Chidiock Tichborne
Robert Southwell
Christopher Marlowe
Michael Drayton
William Shakespeare
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Campion
John Donne
Ben Jonson
Tom O' Bedlam
John Cleveland
James Shirley
Robert Herrick
Thomas Carew
Richard Lovelace
Sir John Suckling
Edmund Waller
Andrew Marvell
George Herbert
Richard Crashaw
Henry Vaughan
Thomas Traherne
John Milton
John Dryden
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Alexander Pope
Samuel johnson
Willia Collins
Thomas Gray
Christopher Smart
William Cowper
Robert Burns
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Walter Savage Landor
Thomas Love Peacock
John Clare
George Darley
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
William Cullen Bryant
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edgar Allan Poe
Jones Very
Henry David Thoreau
Julia Ward Howe
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Emily Dickinson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Edward Fitzgerald
Robert Browning
Matthew Arnold
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
William Morris
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Emily Bronte
Elizabeth Barrett Browing
Edward Lear
Lewis Carroll
George Meredith
Rudyard Kipling
William Butler Yeats
Lionel Johnson
Ernest Dowson
Thomas Hardy
Robert Bridges
D. H. Lawrence
A. E. Housman
Wilfred Owen
Edward Thomas
Isaac Rosenberg
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Stephen Crane
Trumbull Stickney
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
Elinor Wylie
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Robinson Jeffers
Marianne Moore
T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
John Crowe Ransom
Conrad Aiken
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Louise Bogan
John Brooks Wheelwright
Leonie Adams
Allen Tate
Hart Crane
Geoffrey Chaucer
William Dunbar
Petrarchan Poetry
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
Sir Walter Ralegh
Chidiock Tichborne
Robert Southwell
Christopher Marlowe
Michael Drayton
William Shakespeare
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Campion
John Donne
Ben Jonson
Tom O' Bedlam
John Cleveland
James Shirley
Robert Herrick
Thomas Carew
Richard Lovelace
Sir John Suckling
Edmund Waller
Andrew Marvell
George Herbert
Richard Crashaw
Henry Vaughan
Thomas Traherne
John Milton
John Dryden
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Alexander Pope
Samuel johnson
Willia Collins
Thomas Gray
Christopher Smart
William Cowper
Robert Burns
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
Walter Savage Landor
Thomas Love Peacock
John Clare
George Darley
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
William Cullen Bryant
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edgar Allan Poe
Jones Very
Henry David Thoreau
Julia Ward Howe
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Emily Dickinson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Edward Fitzgerald
Robert Browning
Matthew Arnold
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossetti
William Morris
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Emily Bronte
Elizabeth Barrett Browing
Edward Lear
Lewis Carroll
George Meredith
Rudyard Kipling
William Butler Yeats
Lionel Johnson
Ernest Dowson
Thomas Hardy
Robert Bridges
D. H. Lawrence
A. E. Housman
Wilfred Owen
Edward Thomas
Isaac Rosenberg
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Stephen Crane
Trumbull Stickney
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
Elinor Wylie
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
Robinson Jeffers
Marianne Moore
T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
John Crowe Ransom
Conrad Aiken
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Louise Bogan
John Brooks Wheelwright
Leonie Adams
Allen Tate
Hart Crane
December 11, 2024
Took me a long ass time to read through all of it but the selection was fantastic and has been massively influential in my poetry education. Bloom’s commentary, while esoteric and not really apt for any sort of introduction, is packed with insight and vigor.
June 17, 2009
The author, Harold Bloom, has been an eminent scholar, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, was a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and author of numerous volumes. In his Introduction, he observes that (Page xxvii) "My chronological limits are set by Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1343, and Hart Crane, born in 1899." There is a useful introductory essay, "The Art of Reading Poetry," that would be of interest to those who take poetry seriously.
But it is the poetry that is at the center of this fat volume (the last poem, by Hart Crane, ends on page 959; I don't know about others, but I like big collections of poetry!
In high school, we read Chaucer, and I still remember the first few lines (repeated in this work) of "The Canterbury Tales."
"Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour."
Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":
"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields."
There is a healthy collection of Shakespeare, but since I recently reviewed a volume of his sonnets, no need for overkill here. But the selections do represent Shakespeare's art nicely.
Then there is Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison," with the well known final stanza:
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage. . . ."
And so many more. . . . Thomas Gray's "Elegy written in a country churchyard" or William Blake's "The Tyger" (I still recall and thrill at the following lines:
"Tyger, tyger, burning bright.
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?") to the Romantics' poetry (represented by poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats). Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Lord Tenneyson, the Rossettis, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and so on.
In short, a cornucopia of poetry in the English language tradition. If that is a genre that you enjoy, running from Chaucer to crane, then this volume should suit you nicely.
But it is the poetry that is at the center of this fat volume (the last poem, by Hart Crane, ends on page 959; I don't know about others, but I like big collections of poetry!
In high school, we read Chaucer, and I still remember the first few lines (repeated in this work) of "The Canterbury Tales."
"Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour."
Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":
"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields."
There is a healthy collection of Shakespeare, but since I recently reviewed a volume of his sonnets, no need for overkill here. But the selections do represent Shakespeare's art nicely.
Then there is Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison," with the well known final stanza:
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage. . . ."
And so many more. . . . Thomas Gray's "Elegy written in a country churchyard" or William Blake's "The Tyger" (I still recall and thrill at the following lines:
"Tyger, tyger, burning bright.
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?") to the Romantics' poetry (represented by poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats). Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Lord Tenneyson, the Rossettis, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and so on.
In short, a cornucopia of poetry in the English language tradition. If that is a genre that you enjoy, running from Chaucer to crane, then this volume should suit you nicely.
April 26, 2024
Reading excerpts from this for my MA exam, I wanted to comment on how apparent it is that Harold Bloom hates female poets.
In general, I have read the majority of these pieces before, whether in their entireties or in excerpts. (Thank God he did not put the entire of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” it would have been half the book itself). It is why I don’t feel guilty or bad about labeling this text as read.
I have what I would call an advanced understanding of many of these poets because of my academic background, which is why I find it necessary to let others know that this text tends to do little service to our female poets. For instance, despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning being extremely popular in her time, as well as resurfacing during contemporary studies regarding gender and interdisciplinary studies, he writes less than half a page for her background! Additionally, he degrades her as being wrongfully held in greater esteem than her husband Robert Browning! He specifically states that gender studies is the /only/ reason she is popular and that such interest will eventually ebb away.
I’m sorry, but if you have ever reader EBB’s “Aurora Leigh” and Robert Browning’s “The Ring and the Book,” than you would understand why people want to focus on the wife and not the husband.
The fact that Harold Bloom so blatantly belittles female poets to uphold basic white male poets is infuriating, especially when he takes 3-8 pages to describe a male poet and then give the women (as far as the ones I have read in this text so far) 1/2 to 1 page of background!
If you are reading for academic purposes, I would recommend picking another texts that does better to illustrate female poet backgrounds as well as includes more diverse poets. Really? You are going to write that EBB was controlled by her father, suffered from a long illness, eloped with Robert, and that’s it? None of her work in abolition? Or the complexities of her involvement as a white woman in transnational abolition effort? Gag me with a spoon, sir.
In general, I have read the majority of these pieces before, whether in their entireties or in excerpts. (Thank God he did not put the entire of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” it would have been half the book itself). It is why I don’t feel guilty or bad about labeling this text as read.
I have what I would call an advanced understanding of many of these poets because of my academic background, which is why I find it necessary to let others know that this text tends to do little service to our female poets. For instance, despite Elizabeth Barrett Browning being extremely popular in her time, as well as resurfacing during contemporary studies regarding gender and interdisciplinary studies, he writes less than half a page for her background! Additionally, he degrades her as being wrongfully held in greater esteem than her husband Robert Browning! He specifically states that gender studies is the /only/ reason she is popular and that such interest will eventually ebb away.
I’m sorry, but if you have ever reader EBB’s “Aurora Leigh” and Robert Browning’s “The Ring and the Book,” than you would understand why people want to focus on the wife and not the husband.
The fact that Harold Bloom so blatantly belittles female poets to uphold basic white male poets is infuriating, especially when he takes 3-8 pages to describe a male poet and then give the women (as far as the ones I have read in this text so far) 1/2 to 1 page of background!
If you are reading for academic purposes, I would recommend picking another texts that does better to illustrate female poet backgrounds as well as includes more diverse poets. Really? You are going to write that EBB was controlled by her father, suffered from a long illness, eloped with Robert, and that’s it? None of her work in abolition? Or the complexities of her involvement as a white woman in transnational abolition effort? Gag me with a spoon, sir.
July 12, 2008
Three things caused me to buy this book. The first was the inclusion of two Emily Bronte poems by Professor Bloom: ‘Stanzas’ and ‘Last Lines’. The second was the inclusion of T S Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ and the third was that 108 poets are represented in this book.
Professor Bloom selected as his chronological limits Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1343 and Hart Crane born in 1899. Within these parameters is a wealth of British and American poetry to cover a wide range of moods and tastes.
There is something intrinsically personal about anthologies of poetry. Those who enjoy poetry will select favourites based on all manner of criteria. My personal criteria owe little to critical objectivity and much more to subjective assessments of evocative language and the metrics of rhythm.
So, I’ve come to love the fierce assertion of the ‘Last Lines’. Here is the first verse:
‘No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere;
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.’
And also to love, for different reasons the self-doubt echoing through ‘The Waste Land’, which starts with The Burial of the Dead:
‘April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.’
It would be remiss of me not to mention some of the other poets included:
Edmund Spenser
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Henry David Thoreau
Thomas Hardy
Wilfred Owen
and 100 others.
Professor Bloom has included an essay on ‘The Art of Reading Poetry’ together with a range of headnotes on poets and poems. If you enjoy poetry anthologies, this may well be a book for your collection as well.
Professor Bloom selected as his chronological limits Geoffrey Chaucer, born around 1343 and Hart Crane born in 1899. Within these parameters is a wealth of British and American poetry to cover a wide range of moods and tastes.
There is something intrinsically personal about anthologies of poetry. Those who enjoy poetry will select favourites based on all manner of criteria. My personal criteria owe little to critical objectivity and much more to subjective assessments of evocative language and the metrics of rhythm.
So, I’ve come to love the fierce assertion of the ‘Last Lines’. Here is the first verse:
‘No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere;
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.’
And also to love, for different reasons the self-doubt echoing through ‘The Waste Land’, which starts with The Burial of the Dead:
‘April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.’
It would be remiss of me not to mention some of the other poets included:
Edmund Spenser
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Henry David Thoreau
Thomas Hardy
Wilfred Owen
and 100 others.
Professor Bloom has included an essay on ‘The Art of Reading Poetry’ together with a range of headnotes on poets and poems. If you enjoy poetry anthologies, this may well be a book for your collection as well.
January 27, 2021
Harold Bloom names the best poetry of the English Language. Poetry is subjective by nature, but you can get better at reading it. As Bloom says, the only way to become proficient at reading poetry is to read a lot of poetry.
Bloom introduces each poet with a short biography and moves on to the poems that each one made. It is not exhaustive. As an example, the entry on Chaucer takes excerpts from The Canterbury Tales. On the other hand, The Canterbury Tales excerpts are in Middle English. Bloom includes an essay called The Art of Reading Poetry, and it works well as an essay.
Bloom limits his coverage between Chaucer and Hart Crane. If you are looking for poems by black people or something from the Harlem Renaissance, this is not the book for you. The introduction mentions that Bloom didn't want to deal with the metaphorical can of worms. So all of the poems are from Americans or citizens of Great Britain.
Harold Bloom includes a lot of gems in this volume. On the other hand, he covers poets forgotten by all but scholars. The early poetry he covers is where most of this occurs, and I understand how this can happen when you compete against such luminaries as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Donne. On a positive note, the book includes many of my favorites.
Bloom introduces each poet with a short biography and moves on to the poems that each one made. It is not exhaustive. As an example, the entry on Chaucer takes excerpts from The Canterbury Tales. On the other hand, The Canterbury Tales excerpts are in Middle English. Bloom includes an essay called The Art of Reading Poetry, and it works well as an essay.
Bloom limits his coverage between Chaucer and Hart Crane. If you are looking for poems by black people or something from the Harlem Renaissance, this is not the book for you. The introduction mentions that Bloom didn't want to deal with the metaphorical can of worms. So all of the poems are from Americans or citizens of Great Britain.
Harold Bloom includes a lot of gems in this volume. On the other hand, he covers poets forgotten by all but scholars. The early poetry he covers is where most of this occurs, and I understand how this can happen when you compete against such luminaries as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Donne. On a positive note, the book includes many of my favorites.
January 18, 2021
A must-read. Buy this book. Stop reading reviews. Buy this book. Like poetry? Buy this book. Don't like poetry? Buy this book. Your favourite colour is red? Buy this book. You worry you're allergic to cheese? Buy this book. You think that all chiffoniers should be made of walnut? Buy this book. You don't want to buy this book? Buy this book. The that you grow is attached to your body? Buy this book. You have a fear of the past and sleep on the bin bags of Hamond Street, opposite New Kingway, close to the old bus station? Buy this book. You already have a copy? Buy this book. You don't read? But you've read this! Hahaha - I've got you now!
(A good comprehensive guide to poetry within England and America (and Scotland and Ireland to a very minor degree (Wales is non-existent (sorry, Dylan Thomas))). Beginning with Chaucer and ending with Hart Crane, skipping through the English Renaissance, Pre-Romantic, Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, Modernist, Madmen, Moderate poets of the language's history, this text is a good start for allowing you a foot in the door, at widening your breadth of poetic knowledge. Get this text if you like reading.)
(A good comprehensive guide to poetry within England and America (and Scotland and Ireland to a very minor degree (Wales is non-existent (sorry, Dylan Thomas))). Beginning with Chaucer and ending with Hart Crane, skipping through the English Renaissance, Pre-Romantic, Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, Modernist, Madmen, Moderate poets of the language's history, this text is a good start for allowing you a foot in the door, at widening your breadth of poetic knowledge. Get this text if you like reading.)
January 29, 2009
A good selection admirably edited. With the caveat that he will ignore anyone born after 1900, he gets away with the title quite nicely. However, I laughed a bit to notice, within five minutes of skimming, that Bloom's two most annoyingly persistent traits were fully on display:
1. A need to flaunt his cantankerous disregard for the academically/politically "correct."
2. His need to sell Hart Crane.
For under $20, this is a worthwhile book, and it's teaching me stuff I didn't know.
1. A need to flaunt his cantankerous disregard for the academically/politically "correct."
2. His need to sell Hart Crane.
For under $20, this is a worthwhile book, and it's teaching me stuff I didn't know.
July 3, 2013
Bloom offers interesting commentary on authors and poems that sets this volume apart from all the other compilations that I own. While I disagree with some of his selections and omissions I applaud his style and ambition. The introductions and commentaries demonstrate Bloom's quality as a writer by presenting higher thinking that is very easy to understand which makes this particular anthology--in my mind at least--my favorite volume to recommend to readers interested in getting into poetry on a deeper level.
January 23, 2020
Harold Brown is a genius. A poetry genius. He dissects poems from some of the best writers to ever live. Highly recommend if you are a poetry junky, or even if you are just dipping your goes into poetry (this is a great place to start!)
December 29, 2009
A very comprehensive anthology of English poetry. A must for all who love poetry!
April 7, 2012
Have to confess I skimmed large parts this one. Read all the commentaries carefully; skimmed a lot of the love and god poems. But the damn thing had 959 pages of text!
I’d never really appreciated Tennyson’s Ulysses before. Maybe that’s a function of age. But these words hit me like never before:
Come my friends
‘Tis not to late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sale beyond the sunset, and the baths
Off all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I have tears in my eyes. Everything from Robert Heinlein’s creepy swan song to Frodo boarding the ship to the western kingdom, to a death well earned, to Angel taking on the dragon.
He also reminded me how much of poetry is about politics. At least from Elizabeth I, poets were in the great battles of the age. Milton, of course, I knew. Propping up or tearing down . . .
Weird bit from Pope’s Dunciad, book 4: (261)
Yet, yet a moment, one dim ray of light
Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!
Of darkness visible so much be lent,
As half to show, have veil, the deep intent.
Ye Powers! Whose mysteries restored I sing,
To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing,
Suspend a while your force inertly strong,
Then take at once the poet and the song.
Now flamed the Dog-star’s unpropitious ray,
Smote every brain and withered every bay;
Sick was the sun, the owl forsook its bower,
The moon-struck prophet felt the madding hour:
Then rose the seed of Chaos and of Night
To blot out order and extinguish light,
Of dull and venal a world to mould,
And bring Saturnian days of lead and gold.
She mounts the throne: her head a cloud concealed,
In broad effulgence all below revealed;
(‘Tis thus aspiring Dulness every shines)
Soft on her lap her laureate son reclines.
Okay, I read the poem as Pope bemoaning the fall and debasement of the Enlightenment in the hands of slackers and posers, but it could also be read to prophesize Dru’s siring of Spike. I’ve always believed Spike was really an enlightenment figure, after all.
Moving on through the scifiverse to William Blake, seems he did work called the “Orc-Urizen” cycle about the fallen existence. In one poem, the Mental Traveller, “The human cycle moves between an infant Orc an aged, beggared Urizen, and then back again. The natural sequence is Tirzah (Nature-as-Necessity), Vala (Nature-as-Temptress), and Rahab (Nature-as-Destroyer) and then back again.” 311.
So we get this poem, a classic of the English Canon, which Harold Bloom, Harvard and Yale professor and a man I adore, calls one of the best in the English language. It says in part (spelled as in the original):
I traveld thro’ a Land of Men
A Land of Men & Women too
And hard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew
For there the Babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe
Just as we Reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow
And if the Babe is born a Boy
He’s given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold
She binds iron thrones around his head
She pierces both his hands & feet
She cuts his heart out at his side
To make it feel both cold & heat
Her fingers number every Nerve
Just as a Miser counts his gold
She lives upon his shrieks & cries
As she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a Virgin bright
Then he rends up his Manacles
And binds her down for his delight
He plants himself in all her Nerves
Just as a Husbandman his mould
And she becomes his dwelling place
And Garden fruitful seventy fold.
Well, huh. That’s . . . making me look at the possible relation between Vala and Danny boy in a whole new light. And there seems to be something of the Go’uld lurking in there too. And certain fan sites I always feel guilty about peaking at.
Other good bits – Whitman’s Song of Myself’s humanity through reflections –
I Celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Wonderful. Mutability of matter. Matter/mother/matrix/metro . . . . all the same thing . . .
He put Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark in here. I hadn’t put together that the Baker, the one who puts together that some Snarks are Boojums, quotes Lord Nelson’s signal from the battle of Trafalger; that’s the source for “England Expects Every Man to Do His Duty.” Or that was a concept communicated by signal flags; mutable in phrasing. The nameless Baker (they are all nameless; his is the only one whose lack of a name is pointed out) tells them all the day the embark – but forgets that they speak English. So the message is not received. The world screaming at us in languages we can’t understand.
Bloom utterly rejects the notion that Carroll was a pedophile, or that the Snark is little girls. He suggests the hint to the meaning is in the repeated stanza:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Life, itself? Meaning, itself? Whatever the object of our desire might be? The foolishness of using our toolset to find it? What could one find with thimbles, care, forks, hope, smiles, and soap, while armed with a railway share?
And the banker uses a check? The baker comes himself?
Finally, I should look into the poems of John Brooks Wheelwright. Socialist and mythmaker. Hark at “Fish Food: An Obituary to Hart Crane”
As you drank deep as Thor, did you think of milk or wine?
Did you drank blood, while you drank the salt deep?
Or see through the film of light, that sharpened your rage with its stare,
A shark, dolphin, turtle? Did you not see the Cat?
Who, when Thor lifted her, unbased the cubic ground?
You would drain fathomless flagons to be slaked with vacuum –
The sea’s teats have suckled you, and you are sunk far
In bubble-dreams, under swaying translucent vines
Of thundering interior wonder. Eagles can never now
Carry parts of your body, over cupped mountains
As emblems of their anger, embers to fire self-hate
To other wonders, unfolding white, flaming vistas.
Fishes now look upon you, with eyes which do not gossip . . .
[skipped a bit]
. . . the will seeped from your blood. Seeds
of meaning popped from the pods of thought. And you fall.
And the unseen
Churn of time changes the pearl-hurled ocean
Like a pearl-shaped drop, in a huge water-clock
Falling from came to go, from come to went. And you fell.
Waters received you. Waters of our Birth in Death dissolve you.
Now you have willed it, may the Great Wish take you.
As the Mother-Lover takes your woe away, and cleansing
Grief and you away, you sleep, you do not snore.
Lie still. Your rage is gone on a bright flood
Away; as, when a bad friend held out his hand
You said, “do not talk any more. I know you meant no harm.”
What was the soil whence your anger sprang, who are deaf
As the stones to the whispering flight of the Mississippi’s rivers?
What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?
Did it make you drunken with hearing?
I will not ask any more. You saw or heard no evil.
To life, to die, to strive with gods, to try to do no evil. Wonderful stuff. Good book.
I’d never really appreciated Tennyson’s Ulysses before. Maybe that’s a function of age. But these words hit me like never before:
Come my friends
‘Tis not to late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sale beyond the sunset, and the baths
Off all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I have tears in my eyes. Everything from Robert Heinlein’s creepy swan song to Frodo boarding the ship to the western kingdom, to a death well earned, to Angel taking on the dragon.
He also reminded me how much of poetry is about politics. At least from Elizabeth I, poets were in the great battles of the age. Milton, of course, I knew. Propping up or tearing down . . .
Weird bit from Pope’s Dunciad, book 4: (261)
Yet, yet a moment, one dim ray of light
Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!
Of darkness visible so much be lent,
As half to show, have veil, the deep intent.
Ye Powers! Whose mysteries restored I sing,
To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing,
Suspend a while your force inertly strong,
Then take at once the poet and the song.
Now flamed the Dog-star’s unpropitious ray,
Smote every brain and withered every bay;
Sick was the sun, the owl forsook its bower,
The moon-struck prophet felt the madding hour:
Then rose the seed of Chaos and of Night
To blot out order and extinguish light,
Of dull and venal a world to mould,
And bring Saturnian days of lead and gold.
She mounts the throne: her head a cloud concealed,
In broad effulgence all below revealed;
(‘Tis thus aspiring Dulness every shines)
Soft on her lap her laureate son reclines.
Okay, I read the poem as Pope bemoaning the fall and debasement of the Enlightenment in the hands of slackers and posers, but it could also be read to prophesize Dru’s siring of Spike. I’ve always believed Spike was really an enlightenment figure, after all.
Moving on through the scifiverse to William Blake, seems he did work called the “Orc-Urizen” cycle about the fallen existence. In one poem, the Mental Traveller, “The human cycle moves between an infant Orc an aged, beggared Urizen, and then back again. The natural sequence is Tirzah (Nature-as-Necessity), Vala (Nature-as-Temptress), and Rahab (Nature-as-Destroyer) and then back again.” 311.
So we get this poem, a classic of the English Canon, which Harold Bloom, Harvard and Yale professor and a man I adore, calls one of the best in the English language. It says in part (spelled as in the original):
I traveld thro’ a Land of Men
A Land of Men & Women too
And hard & saw such dreadful things
As cold Earth wanderers never knew
For there the Babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe
Just as we Reap in joy the fruit
Which we in bitter tears did sow
And if the Babe is born a Boy
He’s given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold
She binds iron thrones around his head
She pierces both his hands & feet
She cuts his heart out at his side
To make it feel both cold & heat
Her fingers number every Nerve
Just as a Miser counts his gold
She lives upon his shrieks & cries
As she grows young as he grows old.
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a Virgin bright
Then he rends up his Manacles
And binds her down for his delight
He plants himself in all her Nerves
Just as a Husbandman his mould
And she becomes his dwelling place
And Garden fruitful seventy fold.
Well, huh. That’s . . . making me look at the possible relation between Vala and Danny boy in a whole new light. And there seems to be something of the Go’uld lurking in there too. And certain fan sites I always feel guilty about peaking at.
Other good bits – Whitman’s Song of Myself’s humanity through reflections –
I Celebrate myself, and sing myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Wonderful. Mutability of matter. Matter/mother/matrix/metro . . . . all the same thing . . .
He put Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark in here. I hadn’t put together that the Baker, the one who puts together that some Snarks are Boojums, quotes Lord Nelson’s signal from the battle of Trafalger; that’s the source for “England Expects Every Man to Do His Duty.” Or that was a concept communicated by signal flags; mutable in phrasing. The nameless Baker (they are all nameless; his is the only one whose lack of a name is pointed out) tells them all the day the embark – but forgets that they speak English. So the message is not received. The world screaming at us in languages we can’t understand.
Bloom utterly rejects the notion that Carroll was a pedophile, or that the Snark is little girls. He suggests the hint to the meaning is in the repeated stanza:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Life, itself? Meaning, itself? Whatever the object of our desire might be? The foolishness of using our toolset to find it? What could one find with thimbles, care, forks, hope, smiles, and soap, while armed with a railway share?
And the banker uses a check? The baker comes himself?
Finally, I should look into the poems of John Brooks Wheelwright. Socialist and mythmaker. Hark at “Fish Food: An Obituary to Hart Crane”
As you drank deep as Thor, did you think of milk or wine?
Did you drank blood, while you drank the salt deep?
Or see through the film of light, that sharpened your rage with its stare,
A shark, dolphin, turtle? Did you not see the Cat?
Who, when Thor lifted her, unbased the cubic ground?
You would drain fathomless flagons to be slaked with vacuum –
The sea’s teats have suckled you, and you are sunk far
In bubble-dreams, under swaying translucent vines
Of thundering interior wonder. Eagles can never now
Carry parts of your body, over cupped mountains
As emblems of their anger, embers to fire self-hate
To other wonders, unfolding white, flaming vistas.
Fishes now look upon you, with eyes which do not gossip . . .
[skipped a bit]
. . . the will seeped from your blood. Seeds
of meaning popped from the pods of thought. And you fall.
And the unseen
Churn of time changes the pearl-hurled ocean
Like a pearl-shaped drop, in a huge water-clock
Falling from came to go, from come to went. And you fell.
Waters received you. Waters of our Birth in Death dissolve you.
Now you have willed it, may the Great Wish take you.
As the Mother-Lover takes your woe away, and cleansing
Grief and you away, you sleep, you do not snore.
Lie still. Your rage is gone on a bright flood
Away; as, when a bad friend held out his hand
You said, “do not talk any more. I know you meant no harm.”
What was the soil whence your anger sprang, who are deaf
As the stones to the whispering flight of the Mississippi’s rivers?
What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?
Did it make you drunken with hearing?
I will not ask any more. You saw or heard no evil.
To life, to die, to strive with gods, to try to do no evil. Wonderful stuff. Good book.
November 18, 2018
Nothing could be more flattering to the amateur than finding his opinion in accordance with a great eminence in the field, as if one’s position, which felt unpopular when formed, was intuitively in tune with a deeper and broader knowledge, waiting for the right moment to commune.
Reading Harold Bloom’s boldly titled The Best Poems of the English Language, I had to suppress this feeling on a number of occasions, knowing full well the instances in which I agree with Bloom are as coincidental as those in which we disagree, and that furthermore, the value of a critic as great and as Bloom is not his correctness but his potential to stimulate thinking. A critic should encourage his reader to take risks.
Fortunately, Bloom is terrible lifeguard, and will not save you from floundering out of your depths. Instead, he delights in tricking you to swim out ever deeper, away from safety. While I disagree with much of his theoretical apparatus, I nevertheless highly recommend this book.
But let’s start on where I found Bloom vindicating: He deeply distrusts Eliot and Pound, the principal architects of poetry’s Modernist movement, and strives to see their status discounted in comparison to other modern eminences, in particular Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. The problem is of course that Bloom dislikes these two for different reasons than I do. Yes, Bloom is quick to state that Pound suffers from a “...relative failure to transmute or transcend his precursors.” Which is obvious enough--most of Pound’s poetry is so overburdened by allusion that it is better described as collage. Yet Bloom seems ready to forgive him for this, explaining that his sin merely one of degree, since he believes the same hyperliterary approach is used successfully by others, including Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. What he cannot forgive--in several pages worth of scorn--is his mistreatment of Walt Whitman. Bloom feels Whitman is the preeminent influence on 20th century American poetry, and when Pound disavows his Whitman in verse and prose, Bloom is as incredulous as he is appalled.
As for Eliot, Bloom seems to genuinely like much of his poetry, calling “The Waste Land” a “masterpiece”, while calling “Prufrock” the “perhaps the slyest and oddest ‘Love Song’ in the language”. “Preludes” and the slightly obscure “La Figlia Che Piange” also make his cut, while oddly, his charming “Four Quartets”, and oft-anthologized “The Hollow Men” do not. Bloom’s objection to Eliot is not his poetry, chiefly, but the the damage he did as a literary and cultural critic. Personally I am not especially bothered by Eliot has a literary critic; I’m bothered by the pretentiousness of his poetry and find he shares many of the faults Bloom attributes to Pound. But then there is the matter of politics. Bloom singles out both men for their antisemitism, writing of Pound’s Cantos that they “contain material that is not humanly acceptable to me, and if that material is acceptable to others, then they themselves are thereby less acceptable, at least to me”. And also to me, and hopefully to you.
Bloom hates the politics but loves the method. Personally I am less sure. The attempt to incorporate allusion, paraphrase, and whole phrase from disparate Western traditions (and languages) to forge a Anglo-English racial myth seems like one of the clear missteps of 20th century literature, though given the current level of sophistication of antisemitism and fascism--spread through algorithm, Russian spies, and the giant cudgel of populist anti-intellectual ignorance--seems almost quaint. I acknowledge that their technique of heavy allusion does not automatically lead to Hitler apologetics, but if you examine its track record, this type of top-heavy tradition-worship tends to fracture culture even further, in the same way all eschatologies seem keen on bringing about the end they prophesize.
Bloom needs the Modernists, though, even if he is the only critic I have found who seems to close to redeeming them. He needs them because they enact his critical theories of literature more completely than anyone else. Bloom’s central literary concern is influence, and as he rightly believes poetry is an art of remembering and understanding--both equally and at the same time. As a corollary, Bloom posits each new poet recalls and attempts to understand the poems before him, and that one of the central features of any poem is its relation to those before it, in a way that is more intense and more self-conscious than in any other human endeavor.
I have my doubts. Predecessor is certainly an important element to consider when writing a poem. But it is paralyzing to obsess over it. Poets are like athletes. A sprinter knows full well the same course has been contested by millions of similar athletes before. But at the time of the contest, the only thing that matters is the act itself. It’s key to be in the moment, in the now. Otherwise the energy will be wasted. Anyway, who can compete with Wordsworth? If that’s the standard one aspires to, it’s better to just give up before the starting gun. Worse, any kind of self-conscious comparison between oneself and previous greats is the mark of self-importance and pretension. It’s like when Oasis remarked they were bigger than the Beatles--it’s an idiotic thing to say, and where, exactly, is Oasis now?
Sure, reading the poetry of others--especially the greats--is absolutely critical to developing one’s ear and sensibility. But poets write their best when those voices from the past aren’t so loud as to overwhelm one’s own, when it’s more of a distant chorus than deafening trading floor. So the problem with the Modernist project to me isn’t just politics. It’s aesthetics. A good poem isn’t necessarily about other poems. It’s about the what the poem reports to be about, in the moment it’s read, as the act unfolds.
I think to a large extent Bloom knows this; I pick on him for the Modernists but in reality this a quibble with a handful of poets in a collection containing 108 of them. Most of the time I’ve spent thus far in this anthology was in surprise at discovering another underrated poet who I had only heard of in passing but never read anything of theirs convincing until now. There’s a lot of meat on these bones. Yes, his opinions on the brightest stars are interesting. But his ability to rescue the lesser lights is where this collection comes into its own.
Reading Harold Bloom’s boldly titled The Best Poems of the English Language, I had to suppress this feeling on a number of occasions, knowing full well the instances in which I agree with Bloom are as coincidental as those in which we disagree, and that furthermore, the value of a critic as great and as Bloom is not his correctness but his potential to stimulate thinking. A critic should encourage his reader to take risks.
Fortunately, Bloom is terrible lifeguard, and will not save you from floundering out of your depths. Instead, he delights in tricking you to swim out ever deeper, away from safety. While I disagree with much of his theoretical apparatus, I nevertheless highly recommend this book.
But let’s start on where I found Bloom vindicating: He deeply distrusts Eliot and Pound, the principal architects of poetry’s Modernist movement, and strives to see their status discounted in comparison to other modern eminences, in particular Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. The problem is of course that Bloom dislikes these two for different reasons than I do. Yes, Bloom is quick to state that Pound suffers from a “...relative failure to transmute or transcend his precursors.” Which is obvious enough--most of Pound’s poetry is so overburdened by allusion that it is better described as collage. Yet Bloom seems ready to forgive him for this, explaining that his sin merely one of degree, since he believes the same hyperliterary approach is used successfully by others, including Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. What he cannot forgive--in several pages worth of scorn--is his mistreatment of Walt Whitman. Bloom feels Whitman is the preeminent influence on 20th century American poetry, and when Pound disavows his Whitman in verse and prose, Bloom is as incredulous as he is appalled.
As for Eliot, Bloom seems to genuinely like much of his poetry, calling “The Waste Land” a “masterpiece”, while calling “Prufrock” the “perhaps the slyest and oddest ‘Love Song’ in the language”. “Preludes” and the slightly obscure “La Figlia Che Piange” also make his cut, while oddly, his charming “Four Quartets”, and oft-anthologized “The Hollow Men” do not. Bloom’s objection to Eliot is not his poetry, chiefly, but the the damage he did as a literary and cultural critic. Personally I am not especially bothered by Eliot has a literary critic; I’m bothered by the pretentiousness of his poetry and find he shares many of the faults Bloom attributes to Pound. But then there is the matter of politics. Bloom singles out both men for their antisemitism, writing of Pound’s Cantos that they “contain material that is not humanly acceptable to me, and if that material is acceptable to others, then they themselves are thereby less acceptable, at least to me”. And also to me, and hopefully to you.
Bloom hates the politics but loves the method. Personally I am less sure. The attempt to incorporate allusion, paraphrase, and whole phrase from disparate Western traditions (and languages) to forge a Anglo-English racial myth seems like one of the clear missteps of 20th century literature, though given the current level of sophistication of antisemitism and fascism--spread through algorithm, Russian spies, and the giant cudgel of populist anti-intellectual ignorance--seems almost quaint. I acknowledge that their technique of heavy allusion does not automatically lead to Hitler apologetics, but if you examine its track record, this type of top-heavy tradition-worship tends to fracture culture even further, in the same way all eschatologies seem keen on bringing about the end they prophesize.
Bloom needs the Modernists, though, even if he is the only critic I have found who seems to close to redeeming them. He needs them because they enact his critical theories of literature more completely than anyone else. Bloom’s central literary concern is influence, and as he rightly believes poetry is an art of remembering and understanding--both equally and at the same time. As a corollary, Bloom posits each new poet recalls and attempts to understand the poems before him, and that one of the central features of any poem is its relation to those before it, in a way that is more intense and more self-conscious than in any other human endeavor.
I have my doubts. Predecessor is certainly an important element to consider when writing a poem. But it is paralyzing to obsess over it. Poets are like athletes. A sprinter knows full well the same course has been contested by millions of similar athletes before. But at the time of the contest, the only thing that matters is the act itself. It’s key to be in the moment, in the now. Otherwise the energy will be wasted. Anyway, who can compete with Wordsworth? If that’s the standard one aspires to, it’s better to just give up before the starting gun. Worse, any kind of self-conscious comparison between oneself and previous greats is the mark of self-importance and pretension. It’s like when Oasis remarked they were bigger than the Beatles--it’s an idiotic thing to say, and where, exactly, is Oasis now?
Sure, reading the poetry of others--especially the greats--is absolutely critical to developing one’s ear and sensibility. But poets write their best when those voices from the past aren’t so loud as to overwhelm one’s own, when it’s more of a distant chorus than deafening trading floor. So the problem with the Modernist project to me isn’t just politics. It’s aesthetics. A good poem isn’t necessarily about other poems. It’s about the what the poem reports to be about, in the moment it’s read, as the act unfolds.
I think to a large extent Bloom knows this; I pick on him for the Modernists but in reality this a quibble with a handful of poets in a collection containing 108 of them. Most of the time I’ve spent thus far in this anthology was in surprise at discovering another underrated poet who I had only heard of in passing but never read anything of theirs convincing until now. There’s a lot of meat on these bones. Yes, his opinions on the brightest stars are interesting. But his ability to rescue the lesser lights is where this collection comes into its own.
August 9, 2024
'A KNIGHT ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To ryden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre,
As wel in Cristendom as in hethenesse,
And evere honoured for his worthinesse.'
'With him ther was his sone, a young SQUYER,
A lovyere, and a lusty bacheler,
With lokkes crulle, as they were leyd in presse.
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.
Of his stature he was of evene lengthe,
And wonderly delivere, and of greet strengthe.
And he hadde been somtyme in chivachye
In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Picardye,
And born him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his lady grace.
Embrouded was he, as it were a mede
Al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and rede.
Singinge he was, or floytinge, al the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
Short was his gowne, with sleeves longe and wyde.
Wel coude he sitte on hors, and faire ryde.
He coude songes make and wel endyte,
Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtreye and wryte.
So hote he lovede that by nightertale
He sleep namore than dooth a nightingale.
Curteys he was, lowly, and servisable,
And carf biforn his fader at the table.'
'To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
The flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards [of us all],
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.'
'That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang:
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all the rest:
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by:
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.'
'When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With tosspots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.'
'When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh, the doxy over the dale!
Why, then comes in the sweet of the year
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh, the sweet birds, O how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge,
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark that tirra lirra chants,
With heigh, with heigh, the thrush and the jay!
Are summer songs for me and my aunts
While we lie tumbling in the hay.'
'Lawn as white as driven snow,
Cyprus black as e'er was crow,
Gloves as sweet as damask roses,
Masks for faces and for noses,
Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,
Perfume for a lady's chamber,
Golden quoifs and stomachers
For my lads to give their dears,
Pins and poking sticks of steel
—What maids lack from head to heel.
Come buy of me, come; come buy, come buy,
Buy lads, or else your lasses cry.'
'Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which is my sin, thought it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two, but wallowed in a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.'
'Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever:
He, at length, our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain:
Suns that set may rise again;
But if once we lose this light,
'Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumour are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
Or his easier ears beguile,
So removèd by our wile?
'Tis no sin love's fruit to steal,
But the sweet theft to reveal:
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.'
'Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe
And sent'st it back to me,
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear
Not of itself, but thee.'
'Still to be neat, still be to be dressed
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed—
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.'
'With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to Tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end—
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing "Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?"
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.'
'Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.
Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wile lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thought will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"'
'She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!'
'Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To hear; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell."
Thus Nature spake—The work was done—
how soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.'
'A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in Earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.'
'I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know til then
What love I bore to thee.
'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
To love thee more and more.
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.
Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.'
'Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.
Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.
Well, let it take them! What have we to do
With Kaikobád the Great, or Kaikhosrú?
Let Zál and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to Supper—heed not you.
With me along the strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sultán is forgot—
And Peace to Mahmúd on his golden Throne!
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!
Look to the blowing Rose about us—"Lo,
Laughing," she says, "into the world I blow,
At once the silken tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw."
And those who husbanded the Golden grain,
And those who flung it to the winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn'd
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.'
'I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.'
'Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears
TO-DAY of Past Regrets and Future Fears:
To-morrow!—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend—ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?'
'Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd—
"I came like Water, and like Wind I go."
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate;
And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was—and then no more of THEE and ME.'
'Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—"While you live
Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return."
I think the Vessel, that with fugitive
Articulation answer'd, once did live,
And drink; and Ah! the passive Lip I kiss'd,
How many Kisses might it take—and give!'
'Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press
End in what All begins and ends in—Yes;
Think then you are TO-DAY what YESTERDAY
You were—TO-MORROW you shall not be less.
So when that Angel of the darker Drink
At last shall find you by the river-brink,
And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul
Forth to your Lips to quaff—you shall not shrink.'
'When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
A Moment's Halt—a momentary taste
Of BEING from the Well amid the Waste—
And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach'd
The NOTHING it set out from—Oh, make haste!'
'Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute;
Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.'
'For "Is" and "IS-NOT" though with Rule and Line
And "UP-AND-DOWN" by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom, I
Was never deep in anything but—Wine.'
'The Grape that can with Logic absolute
The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice
Life's leaden metal into Gold transmute:
The mighty Mahmúd, Allah-breathing Lord
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.
Why, be this Juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a Snare?
A Blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a Curse—why, then, Who set it there?
I must abjure the Balm of Life, I must,
Scared by some After-reckoning ta'en on trust,
Or lured with Hope of some Diviner Drink,
To fill the Cup—when crumbled into Dust!
Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn'd,
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep,
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd.
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"
Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.'
'I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.'
'A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.'
'The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.'
'Silent we went an hour together,
Under grey skies by waters white.
Our hearts were full of windy weather,
Clouds and blown stars and broken light.'
'There were four apples on the tree,
Gold stained on red that all might see
The sweet blood filled them to the core:
The colour of her hair is more
Like stems of fair faint gold that be
Mown from the harvest's middle floor.'
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To ryden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye.
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,
And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre,
As wel in Cristendom as in hethenesse,
And evere honoured for his worthinesse.'
'With him ther was his sone, a young SQUYER,
A lovyere, and a lusty bacheler,
With lokkes crulle, as they were leyd in presse.
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.
Of his stature he was of evene lengthe,
And wonderly delivere, and of greet strengthe.
And he hadde been somtyme in chivachye
In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Picardye,
And born him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his lady grace.
Embrouded was he, as it were a mede
Al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and rede.
Singinge he was, or floytinge, al the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
Short was his gowne, with sleeves longe and wyde.
Wel coude he sitte on hors, and faire ryde.
He coude songes make and wel endyte,
Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtreye and wryte.
So hote he lovede that by nightertale
He sleep namore than dooth a nightingale.
Curteys he was, lowly, and servisable,
And carf biforn his fader at the table.'
'To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
The flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards [of us all],
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.'
'That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang:
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all the rest:
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by:
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.'
'When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With tosspots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.'
'When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh, the doxy over the dale!
Why, then comes in the sweet of the year
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh, the sweet birds, O how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge,
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.
The lark that tirra lirra chants,
With heigh, with heigh, the thrush and the jay!
Are summer songs for me and my aunts
While we lie tumbling in the hay.'
'Lawn as white as driven snow,
Cyprus black as e'er was crow,
Gloves as sweet as damask roses,
Masks for faces and for noses,
Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,
Perfume for a lady's chamber,
Golden quoifs and stomachers
For my lads to give their dears,
Pins and poking sticks of steel
—What maids lack from head to heel.
Come buy of me, come; come buy, come buy,
Buy lads, or else your lasses cry.'
'Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which is my sin, thought it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two, but wallowed in a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.'
'Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we may, the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever:
He, at length, our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain:
Suns that set may rise again;
But if once we lose this light,
'Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumour are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
Or his easier ears beguile,
So removèd by our wile?
'Tis no sin love's fruit to steal,
But the sweet theft to reveal:
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.'
'Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe
And sent'st it back to me,
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear
Not of itself, but thee.'
'Still to be neat, still be to be dressed
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powdered, still perfumed—
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
Give me a look, give me a face,
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all the adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.'
'With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to Tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end—
Methinks it is no journey.
Yet will I sing "Any food, any feeding
Feeding, drink or clothing?"
Come dame or maid, be not afraid:
Poor Tom will injure nothing.'
'Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the Lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.
When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening moon.
Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wile lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.
And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.
In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eyes I kept
On the descending moon.
My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thought will slide
Into a Lover's head!
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"'
'She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!'
'Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To hear; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell."
Thus Nature spake—The work was done—
how soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm, and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.'
'A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in Earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.'
'I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know til then
What love I bore to thee.
'Tis past, that melancholy dream!
Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem
To love thee more and more.
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.
Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.'
'Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.
Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.
Well, let it take them! What have we to do
With Kaikobád the Great, or Kaikhosrú?
Let Zál and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to Supper—heed not you.
With me along the strip of Herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where name of Slave and Sultán is forgot—
And Peace to Mahmúd on his golden Throne!
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!
Look to the blowing Rose about us—"Lo,
Laughing," she says, "into the world I blow,
At once the silken tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure on the Garden throw."
And those who husbanded the Golden grain,
And those who flung it to the winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn'd
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.'
'I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.'
'Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears
TO-DAY of Past Regrets and Future Fears:
To-morrow!—Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend—ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?'
'Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.
With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd—
"I came like Water, and like Wind I go."
Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate;
And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There was—and then no more of THEE and ME.'
'Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean'd, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—"While you live
Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return."
I think the Vessel, that with fugitive
Articulation answer'd, once did live,
And drink; and Ah! the passive Lip I kiss'd,
How many Kisses might it take—and give!'
'Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.
And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press
End in what All begins and ends in—Yes;
Think then you are TO-DAY what YESTERDAY
You were—TO-MORROW you shall not be less.
So when that Angel of the darker Drink
At last shall find you by the river-brink,
And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul
Forth to your Lips to quaff—you shall not shrink.'
'When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea's self should heed a pebble-cast.
A Moment's Halt—a momentary taste
Of BEING from the Well amid the Waste—
And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach'd
The NOTHING it set out from—Oh, make haste!'
'Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavour and dispute;
Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.'
'For "Is" and "IS-NOT" though with Rule and Line
And "UP-AND-DOWN" by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom, I
Was never deep in anything but—Wine.'
'The Grape that can with Logic absolute
The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice
Life's leaden metal into Gold transmute:
The mighty Mahmúd, Allah-breathing Lord
That all the misbelieving and black Horde
Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul
Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.
Why, be this Juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a Snare?
A Blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a Curse—why, then, Who set it there?
I must abjure the Balm of Life, I must,
Scared by some After-reckoning ta'en on trust,
Or lured with Hope of some Diviner Drink,
To fill the Cup—when crumbled into Dust!
Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain—This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn'd,
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep,
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return'd.
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:"
Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.
We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;
But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.'
'I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.'
'A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.'
'The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.'
'Silent we went an hour together,
Under grey skies by waters white.
Our hearts were full of windy weather,
Clouds and blown stars and broken light.'
'There were four apples on the tree,
Gold stained on red that all might see
The sweet blood filled them to the core:
The colour of her hair is more
Like stems of fair faint gold that be
Mown from the harvest's middle floor.'
October 30, 2023
IT’S ALWAYS A TREAT TO READ HAROLD BLOOM’S BOOKS. HE WAS ONE OF THE BEST LITERARY CRITICS. HE WROTE HIS BOOKS FOR THE GENERAL READER THAN ACADEMICS WHICH MADE THE BOOKS READABLE, AND UNDERSTANDABLE. HE TAUGHT FOR OVER 50 YEARS AT YALE. HE WROTE OVER 50 BOOKS, AND HUNDREDS OF ARTICLES.
July 24, 2016
I think the first things I should mention about this collection are the positives aspects about it. Bloom is unforgiving in his evaluation of poets and rarely gives contradictory views (perhaps in 2-3 instances, most notably he revered Dr. Samuel Johnson). This is a positive because it allows for simplicity. Secondly, the quality of the poems in this collection are superb. Bloom does a fantastic job also setting expectations and giving a very brief, yet effective bio. It should be noted the downfalls are not so much downfalls as they are minor, but me, a curmudgeon, lament them nonetheless. Bloom doesn't provide consistent evaluation of the poets, in some he gives very brief bios and evaluation of poems and in some they are large didactic passages. It is expected that he would vary the word length of these but these varied on poets of the same caliber. The book is also heavily focused on the earlier poets, eg Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. As for a guide to the 1800s in English poetry this book does meet expectations.
tl;dr The collection met and exceeded my expectations with minor "issues."
tl;dr The collection met and exceeded my expectations with minor "issues."
September 7, 2018
There are plenty of bad poem in here, but where else can you get such a compact history of English poetry selected by a critic who is usually right? For example, he cuts the first and last stanzas of John Clare's Badger, and I trust completely that this was the right decision and that I am not missing anything.
There is less Pope here than Samuel Johnson, but he insists Pope is still far the better poet. The 400 or 500 pages of Wordsworth's The Prelude are reduced to six. Shakespeare is reduced to 20 pages or so. So you feel like you are reading the concentrated distillation of a lifetime of Bloom reading poetry. A lifetime distilled to about 900 packed pages.
I learned a lot and felt like afterwards I was seeing the world through the eyes of poetry. So much human knowledge eventually feels like a philosophy, as person after person circles back to the same themes.
"Something authentically exalted ended with Hart Crane," Bloom writes of a writer I thought I loathed. The compressed expression here converted me and now I love him.
I count myself lucky this book exists.
There is less Pope here than Samuel Johnson, but he insists Pope is still far the better poet. The 400 or 500 pages of Wordsworth's The Prelude are reduced to six. Shakespeare is reduced to 20 pages or so. So you feel like you are reading the concentrated distillation of a lifetime of Bloom reading poetry. A lifetime distilled to about 900 packed pages.
I learned a lot and felt like afterwards I was seeing the world through the eyes of poetry. So much human knowledge eventually feels like a philosophy, as person after person circles back to the same themes.
"Something authentically exalted ended with Hart Crane," Bloom writes of a writer I thought I loathed. The compressed expression here converted me and now I love him.
I count myself lucky this book exists.
April 3, 2021
"Best Poems of the English Language" is a presumptuous title, but Bloom seems to be known for his provocatively assertive opinions. He is, no doubt, a product of his time: his self-importance is heavily derived from his position in the patriarchy and the resultant attitudes show. There are pitifully few women poets among the lot, but I will not fault him for growing up in the environment in which he did. It was not so many years ago I realised, through cultural revolt, that I'd read twenty books written by a man for every one I'd read written by a woman.
Regardless of these issues, this volume is certainly a very, very good collection, made all the more intriguing by Bloom's biographies accompanying each poet, often written in a frame of context to their development as a poet. His thoughts on the poets and on each poem are interesting reads - it's the next best thing to having a lively discussion with a friend over a poem you've both recently read. At the very least, it's a wonderful primer on classic English-language poets and poetry.
Regardless of these issues, this volume is certainly a very, very good collection, made all the more intriguing by Bloom's biographies accompanying each poet, often written in a frame of context to their development as a poet. His thoughts on the poets and on each poem are interesting reads - it's the next best thing to having a lively discussion with a friend over a poem you've both recently read. At the very least, it's a wonderful primer on classic English-language poets and poetry.
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