The Daemon Knows

March 30, 2015
Literary critic and Yale professor Bloom (The Anxiety of Influence), a distinctive, contentious voice in American letters for decades, offers a massive, discursive survey of six pairs of eminent American authors: Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, Mark Twain and Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, and William Faulkner and Hart Crane. Bloom defines “the daemonic impulse” as transcending the human world “in feeling and in speech,” and, except in Eliot’s writing, achieving the sublime in the absence of God and Christianity. In this personal book, which is in many ways a memoir, Bloom at 84 still relishes settling scores and dropping names. Most of the book reads like a lovefest with old canonical friends. Bloom is on a first-name basis with “Walt.” Eliot “brings out the worst in me,” Bloom admits, judging him a “virulent” anti-Semite. He concludes his panoramic study with a long, adoring, and obscure tribute to Crane. What Bloom’s instructive, entertaining abracadabra adds up to is uncertain. Many serious readers will thrill to his energetic take on post-Christian transcendence, American-style. Others will find his themes so broad and protean as to be baffling. Agent: Glen Hartley and Lyn Chu, Writers’ Representatives.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
Elegiac, gracious literary ponderings that group and compare 12 giants of American literature. Pairing these seminal authors of the "American Sublime" sometimes by influence (Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James) or because they are contemporaneous (Walt Whitman and Herman Melville) or populist and ironical (Mark Twain and Robert Frost), literary titan Bloom (Humanities/Yale Univ.; The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, 2011, etc.) lends his enormous, shaggy erudition to their works. Now 84, the author examines the poems of Whitman or of Hart Crane (his avowed favorite), as well as such characters as Isabel Archer from James' novel The Portrait of a Lady, Candace Compson from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Hester Prynne from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Wildness might be another way of characterizing the "daemonic" elements in the works of these authors, a ferocious unbounded self-reliance, as espoused in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was full of ambivalence, pageantry, and "heroic erotic vitality." With each author, Bloom carefully considers his or her specific work (Emily Dickinson is the only female), cited in fairly robust extracts, in terms of "tricks, turns and tropes of poetic language," which he delights in tossing up and playing with-e.g., Shakespearean influences and great American tropes such as the white blankness of Ahab's whale. Yet as gossamer as Bloom's pearls of literary wisdom are, his personal digressions seem most true, striking, and poignant. He characterizes himself as the "Yiddish-speaking Bronx proletarian" who arrived at Yale at age 21 and was not made to feel welcome. He brought with him a boundless enthusiasm for Hart Crane and uneasiness with the "genteel anti-Semitism" of T.S. Eliot (one of Bloom's "Greats," but grudgingly so). As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.

May 15, 2015
For five decades, eminent and contentious literary critic Bloom (The Anatomy of Influence, 2011) has energetically explicated the Bible, Shakespeare, and other giants in the Western canon, tracing the bond between spirituality and art. In his thirty-sixth book of erudite and passionate exegesis, Bloom illuminates the daemonic, or sublime aspect of American literature as expressed in the writings of 12 seminal American geniuses: Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Dickinson, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Faulkner, and Bloom's lifetime favorite, Hart Crane. The daemon, an ancient and universal concept, is a divine or mystical spirit attending to humankind, and each of these titans of letters shares receptivity to daemonic influx, albeit in different modes. These Bloom analyzes at length with vigor and pleasure, quoting clarion passages and, moving forward in time, mapping influences and variations. His buoyancy and intrepidity as he navigates the grand river of myth, archetype, theology, and humanism; his unabashed gratitude for the power and beauty of the works he parses so meaningfully; and his unalloyed joy in the discipline and discovery of criticism charges his latest inquiry with inspiriting radiance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2014

One of our best-known and most influential critics, especially noted for his work on Shakespeare, Bloom at 84 makes a welcome swerve to highlight 12 authors he sees as foundational to American literature.

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April 15, 2015

In his 36th book, Bloom (humanities, Yale Univ.; The Shadow of a Great Rock) returns to his early championship of the romantics, putting it in the context of the sweep of America's history. He argues, sometimes persuasively, other times overzealously, that writers don't emerge clear of influence: they borrow and deliberately misread the works of their predecessors. The influence may be buried, but it's there--just read the text closely, and Bloom is nothing if not a close reader. This book, at times perceptive, at others slapdash, argues that the great writers, possessed by their creative daemon, strive to achieve the American sublime, a truth of feeling and will that lies behind the mask. They experience epiphany not through God's grace but as new Adams, innocents in a new country. Bloom discusses his writers in pairs: Walt Whitman and Herman Melville; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James; Mark Twain and Robert Frost; Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot; William Faulkner and Hart Crane. The best readings are of Melville and Whitman, Emerson and Hawthorne, and Frost. Interestingly, his appreciation of Crane, his self-confessed favorite among poets, reads like afterthought. Bloom calls himself "an experiential and personalizing literary critic." It's an apt characterization that points both to his strengths and his weaknesses. VERDICT Bloom is the real thing so lots of people will read this book. But it's a perplexing mix of perceptive and self-indulgent. [See Prepub Alert, 11/3/14.]--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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