Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind over a Universe of Death

by Harold Bloom

Overview

“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.”So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry.

"Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly

“An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable”—Seamus Perry, Literary Review

"Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear‑eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300247282
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Pages:	672
Sales rank:	1,082,258
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. His books include The Anatomy of Influence, The Shadow of a Great Rock, and Poetry and Repression.

Hometown:

New York, New York and New Haven, Connecticut

Date of Birth:

July 11, 1930

Date of Death:

October 14, 2019

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955

Table of Contents

Prelude Reading to Stay Alive-Poetic Thinking 1

Introduction The Rhetoric of Poetic Thinking 14

1 William Shakespeare and John Milton: In Every Deep, a Lower Deep 38

2 Milton: The Shakespearean Epic 83

3 Milton and William Blake: The Human Form Divine 110

4 William Wordsworth and John Keats: Something Evermore About to Be 159

5 Wordsworth: The Myth of Memory 170

6 Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron: Serpent and Eagle 180

7 Keats: They Seek No Wonder but the Human Face 297

8 Robert Browning: What in the Midst Lay but the Tower Itself? 333

9 Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Lest One Good Custom Should Corrupt the World 356

10 Walt Whitman: I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You 379

11 Robert Frost: Drink and Be Whole Again beyond Confusion 409

12 Wallace Stevens: The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind 422

13 William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence: Start with the Shadow 460

14 Hart Crane: The Unknown God 500

15 Sigismund Schlomo Freud: Speculation and Wisdom 559

16 Dante/Center and Shakespeare/Circumference 577

Credits 629

Index 631

Editorial Reviews

09/14/2020

Late critic and Yale professor Bloom (Possessed by Memory) leaves behind a passionate reflection on a lifetime of reading. Conscious of his own limited time left, he reflects that “if life is to be more than breathing, it needs the enhancement of knowledge or the kind of love that is a form of knowledge,” as he describes gaining from his favorite authors. These include Walt Whitman, from whom “I never stop learning,” whether about poetry or about the capacity to simply enjoy nature. Another is Samuel Johnson, Bloom’s model reader—the lexicographer “devoured books as he did his meat” from his early days in London, “when he walked the streets knowing where the next meal or bed or book was to be found.” Bloom also shares fascinating glimpses of his academic career, from his testy run-in with British critic F.R. Leavis as a PhD student (Leavis’s statement, “I have buried Shelley,” elicited the “rather brash” reply “Shelley always buries his own undertakers”), to “the theoretical and pragmatic disputes I had been having with Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida at Yale” at a later point. Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading 20th-century literary minds. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading 20th-century literary minds.”—Publishers Weekly

“Early on in this astute collection, [Bloom] marks his terrain: ‘What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.’ Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“The arms Bloom advises we take up against our sea of troubles are the poems and prose that gave him so much joy, inspiration, sadness, pain, and vigor over the course of his life.”—Lucas Spiro, Arts Fuse

“We hear the intuitive Bloom, the open and receptive reader, the brooder and fabulous conversation partner, talking and chuckling, searching and scowling; we see him rubbing his brow and thinking aloud . . .”—Peter Cole, Caesura

“In the end, only words have a chance of outliving us, and Bloom records his best guesses at the words that might endure. Until the end, Bloom was a man of incessant curiosity, with more questions than answers about an essential poetic imagination.”—Thylias Moss, Professor Emerita, University of Michigan

“This book is superb, utterly convincing, and absolutely invigorating. Bloom’s final argument with mortality ultimately has a rejuvenating effect upon the reader, and is nothing short of a revelation.”—David Mikics, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

"I felt reading this book the way Virginia Woolf in her diary describes her feeling about reading Shakespeare: 'I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed . . . is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own.'"—Laura Quinney, author of William Blake on Self and Soul

“Bloom helps us grasp what Dickinson calls ‘vaster attitudes,’ allowing us to take a proud flight and to disdain, for a time, our own mortality.”—William Flesch, Brandeis University

"Bloom! The life, the voice, the sorrowful countenance, the Emersonian swoon, the feasting intellect, the daemonic rapture. His I is an Eye, all-seeing, a container of multitudes, a volcanic primer on the crisis of enchantment in what he dares to name ‘a universe of Death.’ And here, in this last masterwork—an impassioned meditation on the poets who made him—his living breath is indomitably felt.”—Cynthia Ozick

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-02
The eminent scholar revisits his literary passions.

In 16 dense, erudite, and surprisingly intimate essays, Bloom (1930-2019) offers a sweeping overview of major Western poets, from Homer to contemporary African American Jay Wright, whom Bloom praises as “among the best American poets of whatever origin or complexion.” As well as celebrating beloved writers, Bloom also reassesses his own work. “If you live ninety years,” he admits, “you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down.” To assuage those feelings, he advises, “Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” He reconsiders his argument in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), analyzing ways in which writers respond to their predecessors. Now, he reveals, the anxiety of influence “seems to me literary love tempered by ambivalence, as all love is.” Throughout, Freud looms large as “a major essayist in the tradition of Montaigne and Emerson, and not as a supposed scientist”; not as “the master of dream interpretation (where I doubt him) and certainly not the would-be therapist (talking cures) but the pessimistic seer of the human condition.” Bloom’s visceral connection to poets results in vivid, vigorous portraits, whether of poets he knew—Auden, Frost—or those he has read for so long that “it scarcely seems reading anymore.” As he writes of Wallace Stevens, “I am now perpetually on oxygen yet still have the sensation that I breathe the clear air of Stevens.” Early on in this astute collection, the author marks his terrain: “What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.”

Reading, this stirring collection testifies, “helps in staying alive.

Kirkus Reviews