O Cânone Americano: o espírito criativo e a grande literatura

by Harold Bloom, Denise Bottmann (Translator)

Um dos maiores estudiosos da literatura americana e autor de livros que marcaram a história da crítica literária, Harold Bloom se dedica neste livro aos grandes escritores norte-americanos: Walt Whitman e Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson e Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne e Henry James, Wallace Stevens e T. S. Eliot, Mark Twain e Robert Frost, William Faulkner e Hart Crane. Um ensaio pessoal e brilhante, que reafirma sua declaração de amor pela literatura e seu papel essencial na vida do homem. “Aos 84 anos, só posso escrever tal como leciono, de maneira muito pessoal e passional. Poemas, romances, contos, peças só têm importância se nós temos importância. Oferecem-nos o venturoso dom de mais vida, quer iniciem ou não um tempo para além de qualquer fronteira.”

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Books About Books, Essays, Criticism, Literature, History

616 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2015

About the author

Harold 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.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloom wraps up our Reason for Writing in that One Metaphor. This is an INCREDIBLE book! (But may I suggest - for an easier starter - his wonderful short work How to Read?)

I bought this book during the winter of 2019, the year COVID-19 - unknown to us sleeping Westerners - first surfaced. To me it was a cataclysmic release.

All great literature is produced by trauma. OUR Trauma. It's the disturbing grain of sand that causes an oyster to produce a priceless pearl. That grain of sand is the oyster's Daemon. Writing critically is its Exorcism.

Exorcism is the Key to Mastery and Peace!

The winter of 2019 was the time I first realized I had a daemon, or interior emotional irritant somewhat like the oyster - similar to the ones whereof these great American writers were possessed.

Except it had driven me to a ridiculous and stilted, rather than a true Sublime - for in my ignorance it only seemed to me exalted. For I took refuge in appearances. Yet perhaps, too, these authors seemed likewise ridiculous and stilted to themselves - for I KNOW Eliot did.

But my resultant belief in appearances had its advantages. Like the "young man carbuncular" in The Waste Land, you are "assured of certain certainties." You have a foundation for your life.

Nevertheless, the Daemon rages on. And its sheer force eventually produced two ungainly disabilities in me:

First, my reversion to a condition of Asperger's disorder at the age of three (which I only later pinpointed), and second, the eruption of Bipolar disorder in my sleeping psyche at the age of 20.

I'm still largely autistic - the root problem of both conditions - which means I don't easily read people's signals. The other condition has responded well to treatment, helped by the diminishing affections of old age.

But, you know, I only recently saw that I could very WELL, in fact, read others' signals - but then had reversed that ability by consciously REFUSING to read them.

Why?

To see that you'll have to go back to the Spring of 1953 with me...
***

On a Sunday March morning in that year I slipped drowsily into my parent's bedroom expecting a welcome - but receiving a shock. They were in the act of love. To us adults, that's perfectly normal, but to a sheltered toddler it was bizarre.

Freud - after studying his grandson's play time seriously - called the punishment by isolation inflicted by a toddler on the toys that disturb his equilibrium the Da Fort method of coping.

So it was with me. I isolated that sudden shock deep within the fort of my subconscious to 'punish' it, and henceforth punished myself as well by living in that subconscious netherworld alongside it. My safe stockade. I became mildly autistic.

And autism being so apparently psychotic at moments of extreme danger, my second condition followed at the onset of adulthood.

But here's the thing, guys: the onset of autism stemmed from my inner child's ETHICAL choice. The orientation towards Goodness that characterised my subsequent life was therefore at that moment PREDETERMINED.

And so my future in adulthood would prove hard - but always Good.
***

There is a beautiful story by Frank Stockton that gripped my imagination just prior to the onset of puberty, when I was twelve - The Lady Or the Tiger. You may know it. If you don't, you would love its unresolved tension and romance.

Anyway, in the months that followed upon my reading of that story, a door was on the verge of opening. One door would contain, as Stockton says, a beautiful lady, and the other a man-eating Tiger. But which is which?

Of course I chose the Tiger.

As anyone who chooses the path of goodness in life does. A quick pre-emptive retaliation by the Enemy who never sleeps.

But - get this - in old age by Understanding it, I've now TAMED my Tiger: my driving Daemon.

My tranquillity is a bottomless well.

Am I Really happy - at peace with myself?

You BET I am. The bottom of my anguished emotions has fallen out. I am free.

If you read Bloom, YOU will be too - at the end of your battle.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harold Bloom has written a fascinating book which pairs 12 of those American writers he considers have achieved the sublime, which he defines as literature which can, in feeling and speech, transcend the human. Some of the pairings are common sense, some seem more peculiar. The pairings are supposed to represent affinities I'm not sure he always successfully demonstrates. Successful or not in matching didn't matter so much to me because he writes so wonderfully here--he's always been in love with these people--and glosses the work so magnificently that one is able to look at each of them independently. I wasn't surprised to see Ralph Waldo Emerson considered alongside Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman with Herman Melville. I raised my eyebrows at Nathaniel Hawthorne's combination with Henry James. That relationship is the most jarring, but I don't know James that well and may not understand Bloom's thinking.

The analyses aren't in depth. The works of these writers are too enormous and powerful, limiting Bloom to rather brief treatments, in some cases only a few examples from a lifetime of work. Only 3 Faulkner novels are discussed, for instance, and 3 poems by Robert Frost. By comparison, most of Hart Crane's work--admittedly he died young and left relatively little--is glossed. But Crane is also a Bloom favorite. I don't recall that he's written at length about him elsewhere.

Bloom has a word for these larger-than-life heroes of our literature. He says they've been oracles, they're the ones considered capable of inhabiting the eminent space of American oracle and singing in the Orphic voice.

[Jay Sandover · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times, he’s maddeningly repetitive. Chapters on Mark Twain and William Faulkner taught me a few things about how to read them.

[Gerald Weaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Seeking to Locate Bloom's Daemon . . .

This book could easily be titled "The Daemon Knows Harold Bloom," which is the appearance given on the cover. The two certainly seem to be on speaking terms. And the idea is actually humorous, almost as funny as Bloom himself. I am amazed that his critics do not see his humor and his humane amiability. The man loves great literature, knows it better than anyone, and has the grace to share his insights with us. He may never admit it, but perhaps one of his own greatest influences is Oscar Wilde, who like Bloom, raises the question: How can someone so wise also be so funny? Bloom channels Wilde's wit, humor, and orthodoxy of the aesthetic. His criticism is often as playful. And as to the question of Wilde's doom eagerness, perhaps Bloom shares that too, but sees it in himself from a clearer ironic distance, which may be the font from which flows his remarkable humanity.

There is too much in this book to love and it is a revelation and celebration of our American strain, our American difference, which Bloom rightfully recognizes as an Emersonianism. As an American and a lover of literature, I cannot feel but blessed that Bloom is still pushing his ball point pen across his tablet to write the sweeping anthologies, which are inevitably more accessible and broader in scope than his deeper set pieces on poetic influences.

In seeking to locate Bloom's daemon, I begin to find it here.

"Like so many socially awkward small boys of the 1930s, my first love affairs were with the heroines of novels, in my instance with Thomas Hardy's young women - Marty South and Eustacia Vye in particular - and with D.H. Lawrence's Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. As a nine-year-old, I wept when Marty South cut off her long hair, and I experienced exuberance when Hardy celebrated Eustacia Vye as his Queen of Night."

There is throughout this and other of his books a genius, of a very boyish cast, for the way in which great literature is an opening, a penetrating, a flowering of the inner life, as it is apprehending the world and itself. It is still always beyond us or perhaps only briefly possessed, but it is revelatory and immanent, taking us almost as the child we each are. None of this is absent from the strains of love, and in Bloom's case the innocent but still masculine and awed love of that nine-year-old boy.

So the next question becomes: How can someone so wisely well-read and so ironically humorous still see with eyes so fresh and accepting and yet so penetrating and critical?

Read this book, if you love American literature or love books, and read every other of the broader anthologies of Bloom's. And if you are fortunate, he will show you what you already know and love about reading and books, and about the way to see them, the world, and yourself.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Criticism is a talent not of creation but discovery. It takes intellectual flight off the springboard of someone else’s creative ground. You never know where it may land.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Note: By "I've read this book!," I mean that I've read through the chapters about the authors I am somewhat familiar with-- Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Dickinson, and Twain. As for the others: I've got no interest in spoiling Faulkner for myself, and not a ton of interest in Hawthorne, Frost, James, Eliot, Hart Crane, or Wallace Stevens. Okay, some of those guys seem alright. But aside from "The Scarlet Letter," "The Blithedale Romance," "The Turn of the Screw," and stupid poem about path in the woods, I haven't touched 'em! Plus... as you'll read, in a sec... I kinda lost patience with this book. Find out why below!)

Of all the Harold Bloom books, this one might be the Harold Bloomiest. Now 84 years old (as he reminds you every ten pages or so), the guy knows what he likes, and he knows that we know that he is somewhat of an expert on the subject of literature. So... here he goes, again, talking about pretty much the same cabal of authors he's been talking about for decades, with the emphasis this time being on "American-ness." As always, I admire the man's enthusiasm, which seems to have only intensified with age. Bloom finally cares about one thing-- is this shit any good?-- and his expertly selected passages confirm that, yes, the American canon is worth celebrating, regardless of your (ahempettyahem) political differences with folks who wrote 150 years ago. I do love seeing a book critic who's so focused on the big picture (a focus especially poignant here, as Bloom is, again, kinda old... he gets into weirdly (for him) personal territory on many occasions). And Bloom's style is still one-of-a-kind, a sort of intoxicated Whitmanian ramble that leaps around from century to century with reckless abandon... Often to the dismay of this reader, who wondered, often, "Who the hell is this book even for?" Bloom is so secure in his worldview, so lost in his tangle of references, so willing to turn chapters on one thing into screeds on totally different things, that you wonder if he really gives a shit about his audience, at all. Which might not matter if you've read every single thing that Bloom is read. But speaking as a novice, I ask: Is this man's critical jargon (Daemon, Agon, Sublime, etc, etc) any less impenetrable than those of the cultural critics Bloom has been at war with for decades? Does his passion forgive the almost unbelievable repetition of certain phrases, sentences, and whole paragraphs, some of which occurs within fifteen pages of each other? Does Bloom's confidence in his expertise excuse the lack of true analysis that ought to follow many of the book's examples? The guy is so content in his knowledge of literary greatness... It would be nice of him to try to explain how he knows what he knows.

Still, the book is worth skimming through, cuz when Bloom does give you a taste of his, err, pie, it can be delicious. Uhh. Just read this:

"We are at last bequeathed to an earthly shore and seek memorial inscriptions, fragments heaped against our ruins: an interval and then we are gone. High literature endeavors to augment that span: My twelve authors center, for me, that proliferation of consciousness by which he go on living and finding out own sense of being."

That's good!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book whilst writing my short fiction. Please, give it a read. http://littleblogofben.blogspot.co.uk...

Harold Bloom is the smartest person alive right now. Okay, he's sometimes a bit of a slog to get through, but behind all the ranting is a man very serious in his field. The respect that I have for Bloom coming out of this book is monumental.

Though it is meant to be literary criticism, it feels very much like a conversation - which is a nice change from the very politically, socially and philosophically motivated criticism that exists for most books. Sometimes Bloom talks about his childhood, his years at university, and his detachment from the English department at Yale.

There's no doubt in my mind that Bloom is the smartest person alive. I know that's a subjective judgment, but after reading that he had gone through and felt the impact of literary works like Moby Dick by the age of ten, there was no doubt in my mind.

If you can come out of this book without the desire to read Leaves of Grass and "chant" extracts of it to yourself, then you haven't read Bloom properly.

I know he is reaching the end of his life - and as sad as that moment will be, he will always be remembered as the most intelligent man in the world by me.

[Philemon - · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harold Bloom adores the Hall of Literary Greats where he serves as high prophet, priest, and chief of homeland security. Atop his pantheon loafs Walt Whitman, putative père of the American Sublime. Now I do appreciate Whitman. Every few years I crack open my Library of America Leaves of Grass and marvel at those endless spun clouds of energy with plangent notes and subterranean heartbeats keeping rhythm. But I'll be damned if I'll flop to my knees alongside Harold to worship Walt. There are other fish in the sea, not to mention the Leviathan of the Living God, and one of those is enough.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his 80s, Harold Bloom writes reflectively on a lifetime of his own passionate reading of great American authors, among them Whitman, Emerson, Faulkner and Hart Crane. Rather than an impersonal, objective critical overview, Bloom's book is a very personal, very subjective critical experience defining his own understanding of what makes these authors masters of the American sublime.

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Energy over morality. The daemon knows how it is done." Like reading shakespeare i only understand, or misunderstand only part of what bloom is saying, but i learned quite a bit.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harold Bloom discusses the works of 12 American authors in “The Daemon Knows.” With each author, Bloom focuses on the important works that they did to earn their place in this book. Bloom discusses them in pairs, so the first chapter talks about Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Walt Whitman is primarily a poet, so despite the fact that he wrote some prose, Bloom centers mainly on Whitman’s poems. With Herman Melville, we find the prototypical Great American Novel in Moby Dick. With these two authors, Bloom discusses the works and some of the critical reception of the time. Mainly he goes into what makes them great pieces of literature.

Now, although I read a lot, I am not really good with poetry. It isn’t that I can’t interpret what it means, it’s just that I really need to have something slapped in my face. Take the works of William Carlos Williams for example. I read the Red Wheelbarrow back in High School and didn’t really get it all that much. I didn’t really feel anything in reading it. Some poems I can get well, but a lot of them are really obvious in what they talk about. Poems that are subtle often elude me in meaning. That makes this book a good resource in that sense since Bloom discusses the elements that make these works sublime.

The book doesn’t exhaustively cover all of the works that every author put out. For Mark Twain Bloom only includes Huck Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. This selectivity makes this book far shorter than it would have otherwise been, and I appreciate that a great deal. Bloom contains plenty of musings and other information on each work.

I really enjoyed this book. Bloom’s wit and knowledge of each author shine through and the result is mesmerizing.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the reviews on the back of the book refers to Bloom as 'formidable', and this is completely correct. Bloom's erudition is immense, and he exhibits an incredible sensitivity, not only to language, but to the trends and currents that lie beneath the surface, as authors engage with their literary predecessors.

I have read most of the authors that Bloom chooses to discuss in this book, although some of them (Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain) not for many years. Stevens, Faulkner and Crane are ones that I have no familiarity with. Bloom pairs off authors and poets for discussion and contrast in ways that facilitate his arguments, beginning with Whitman and Melville. These two, particularly Whitman, set the stage for much of the discussion that follows. Each author is critiqued from the standpoint of numerous of his works.

This book is extraordinary in terms of the range of works that are discussed, and for the articulation of the 'agon' (Bloom's term) which the given author exercises with his predecessors. There is significant repetition of numerous statements/themes throughout the book, almost as if the chapters were to have been independently published. This is particularly true for references to Whitman, who Bloom essentially reveres for what he accomplished.

Difficulties with the book include the vocabulary used, which repeatedly used terms that forced me to a dictionary, which some of the time produced no results. Also, for a poet like Crane, a poet that Bloom also reveres, the text did little to help me understand or 'get into' what Crane did in his poems. They are still very opaque, at least to me.

[Ajdesasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bloom's value lies in his infectious love of reading literature, not so much in any of his critical opinions in the last decades of his life. Almost all of his books written in that time frame are essentially the same, with just different authors added in. The authors that he always includes (Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, etc) are always written about in the same manner, with the exact same list of reference points (Gnosticism, Sublime, etc). Once you've read one you've read them all. And anyways, Bloom's form of criticism is so personal that I question how much anyone could fully understand any particular essay of his. His form of criticism is dizzyingly full of his own personal interests and references (he can go from Shakespeare to Whitman to Emerson to Hart to Gnosticism in a paragraph) that unless you have read all the same books and have the same interests what anyone can truly absorb is limited. Bloom wrote criticism for his ideal reader, himself.

But like I said, actually understanding what Bloom is saying on a sentence by sentence or even paragraph by paragraph basis is unnecessary. I've read Bloom since I was in my early teens. Even with all his repetiveness and self-importance, he loves reading and if your interests are at all aligned with his it's hard not to have your own love of reading reaffirmed and reignited.

[Mark Kellermeyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find it surprising that one of our foremost literary critics confesses to belief in a spiritual force possessing the most powerful works of our Canon. It leaves me, a Christian and a huge fan of Eliot, with a lot to think about. What is the daemonic, the spiritual? Who haunts us?

Some of it's revelations are frightening to me. For one, the American Sublime differs from the European in that we seek the supernatural and God-like within ourselves (beginning with Whitman and Emerson), rather than in the external world. This seems like a recipe for disaster without a healthy dose of humility as well. This book is extremely combative with God, and with those who side with him, like Eliot.

What's the other side of the story? I feel like someone who holds such a strong opinion about some writers, and has spent his whole career battling alternative traditions, must be missing something.

[Solita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rather summoning it all up, an aging Bloom reflects back on his life as a lover of great literature, literary critic, and professor, focusing on his favorite literary greats. I respect and admire Professor Bloom, an extraordinarily intelligent man. I had to keep setting this aside; it took me two months to read. Parts of it were hard to get through. Sometimes he loses me, I'm afraid. My personal faves are Dickinson, Faulkner, Twain, and Hawthorne. I read his analysis of Hart Crane with great interest. I've never read Hart Crane, it occurs to me.

The daemon is the muse, the creative force. Apparently, some people are unable to fathom this.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only read the parts about the authors that I know, a very good review of those things.

He always likes to speak of great literature in terms of the Gnostic Times when people had to create their own illusion of social reality out of chaos and different powers inside and outside of us.

in this one the descriptions of Ahab's interior energies that powers him and drives his actions is a wonderful read. I wish that he could have gone into the sublime gnostic reality that I love so much a bit more;

[Ed Kaitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like this book. The author is very, very well read, and his language, while commentary, is often almost poetical itself. The New York Review of Books once called him "The indispensable critic". This book is about the American Muse and it's greatness, as sought after by Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and several others. It is NOT about contemporary American authors. Mr. Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.

[Alec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental in scope, honest in its biases (and convincing in them as well), I found Bloom's charting of American literature's Odyssey illuminating and expansive. It brought new light to writers I thought I knew while introducing varried interpretations to those who have begged for endless nuance. It is a tome I will return to frequently for reference and to be wowed again each time.

[Ainslie Marksen · Rating 4 out of 5]

America's great literary critic takes on the American canon, focusing on some of our most 'sublime' writers: Hart Crane, Faulkner, Whitman, Eliot, Hawthorne, Frost. He doesn't include Poe, in my opinion a massive misstep. Longer than it needs to be.

[Kevin Yee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great!

[Fede La Lettrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloom è sempre illuminante

[Melissa]

Goodreads review

[David A. Beardsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This very big (nearly 500 pages) work appears to be the capstone to the literary career of Harold Bloom, longtime professor at Yale. I am aware that politically he invites polarization, but I’ll stick here with the literary aspects of the book, since that’s what he emphasizes. And my hat is off to anyone who can read it cover to cover. I admit I haven’t, and realize the dangers of trying to appraise it in a few words here.

So what to make of it? First, what relevance does it have to a forum for ancient Greek heroes and literature? Well, as the title implies, Bloom does refer often to the idea of the daemon, that guiding or misguiding angel that we all have, but with which some are more in touch than others, and some of which are more knowledgeable than others. That The Daemon Knows is an ongoing theme of the book. Bloom acknowledges his own on p. 156 with the words:

The obscure being I could call Bloom’s daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my eighty-fifth year.

(Those of us who have some familiarity with watching “our” work appear, and then putting our name on it, will have some appreciation of his humility in saying this.)

Some at least of the writers he surveys acknowledge their debt to the traditions that originated with the Greeks. It is a survey of twelve American writers: Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Dickinson, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Faulkner, and (Hart) Crane. Of course I can hear the PC’s among you counting up: eleven dead white men, one dead white woman, to whom I would just say: choices not mine to defend or criticize.

And the book itself is hard to defend or criticize. It is rambling and repetitious, with many extensive digressions to writers other than the names on the chapter. It is very personal, relying much on anecdotes and luncheon talks with his colleagues at Yale (don’t expect many quotes from any Harvard or Princeton guys here, let alone any lesser schools). Also the definition of “sublime” is very subjective, and I doubt will convince anyone not resonating with any of the authors to begin with. I of course appreciate his love of Emerson and Whitman (and Dickinson, to an extent). Eliot and Crane, still leave me pretty cold. And befuddled.

By turns self-deprecating and pompous, he does shed light on the mythical themes common in Melville and Hawthorne for example, but faces the same problems many others have encountered when writing about Emerson: how do you clarify someone who writes well enough for himself? The quotes themselves overpower anything Bloom has to say about them.

So of course the inevitable question: would I recommend this book? I cannot without reservations. If any of the writers named appeal to you, then by all means, keeping in mind that you may not learn anything all that new about them. If your heart is really with the classics, with Homer, with Plato, with Sophocles, then stay there. Their daemon does in fact know.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine finish for Harold Bloom. Fun to read about the American authors and how he reads their works. Not sure he always adheres to his focus on the daemon and the American Sublime, but in any event his observations are compelling and themselves provocative. Intentionally or not, the book also serves as an autobiography lite, with insights into his entry into the world of literature. I thought The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry would be his final book, but he has managed at least this one more effort. If this one is his last, I will miss his observations and readings, though I can always reread the many of his books I have in my library.

[Kevin Dedes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked it. First time reading Bloom and probably lit crit, really. Wasn't all that familiar with the people he mentions, but have been interested in the idea of the 'daemon' for a while, both in terms of Ancient Greek religion and creative writing, etc. His stuff about 'American Religion' is pretty interesting too, and I think on to something. Makes me want to read more of the work of the subjects in it, especially Hart Crane.

[Jim Krotzman · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was quite a slog through The Daemon Knows, taking several weeks. The book discusses American literature by analyzing authors and poets in couplets: Walt Whitman & Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne & Henry James, Mark Twain & Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens & T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner & Hart Crane. I encountered several poems I had not read before, and that is good. The reading was difficult,both Bloom's and the poets' writing. I'm glad I read it, and I hope I read all or parts of it again. I furthered my interest in Hart Crane.

[Dan Graser · Rating 4 out of 5]

As only he can, Harold Bloom surveys this vast landscape of American sublime with great joy and (for the most part) incisiveness. On occasion he does run a bit away from the main point of the book and his opinions, though very thoughtfully-expressed, outnumber his supporting arguments with several of the authors discussed here. Extremely enjoyable especially if you're familiar with these authors intimately, would not recommend for those who are casual readers without some grounding in the artists presented here.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's my review of The Daemon Knows:
< http://www.sobriquetmagazine.com/book... >

[Daniel Schulof · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not at all persuaded by the argument. I also find Bloom's portrayal of himself to be both repellant and false (the bit about his reaction to Moby Dick when he was five is laughable). Still, plenty of wonderful observations about specific works. Solid but unspectacular as a reference.

[Sam Torode · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed dipping into this. Like sitting in on lectures from a great professor...