Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems

by Harold Bloom

Overview

A gathering of last poems by great poets from W.H. Auden to Walt Whitman with extensive commentary by esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom,  hailed by Booklist as “a collection of surpassing splendor and resonance.”

In this charming anthology, Harold Bloom collects the last poems of history's most important and celebrated poets. As with his immensely popular Best Poems of the English Language, Bloom has carefully curated and annotated the final works of one hundred poets in Till I End My Song, with selections from John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, John Milton, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, and others. Written with the same wise and discerning commentary of earlier books—including his acclaimed Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and The Book of J—Till I End My Song is a moving and provocative meditation on the relationship between art, meaning, and ultimately, death, from the literary titan of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061923067
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	12/20/2011
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,229,799
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Harold Bloom was a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He was a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.

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

Editorial Reviews

A collection of surpassing splendor and resonance.

Booklist

A collection of surpassing splendor and resonance.

Booklist

Bloom may be the most famous poetry critic in the English language. As he approached his 80th birthday, he turned his critical faculties toward the subject of death: this surprisingly enjoyable anthology contains the last poems--or the poems that most profoundly contemplate "lastness"--by 100 poets, from Edmund Spenser (d. 1599) to Agha Shahid Ali (d. 2001). Bloom seeks to show, through his selections and commentaries on each poem, that death can be as much an inspiration as a terror. With their last breaths, these poets address God (as John Donne does: "Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,/ Which is my sin, though it were done before?"); future generations (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his "Epitaph," tells those who pass his gravestone, "Beneath this sod/ A poet lies" who "Found death in life" and who hopes to "find life in death!"); a vast public and private self (Frost said, "I opened the door so my last look/ Should be taken outside a house and book"). James Wright finds a new kind of life in the apprehension of his mortality: "How can I feel so warm/ Here in the dead center of January?" Throughout, Bloom's brief prose comments illuminate and entertain. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

[Bloom looks] to poems for clarity about the end of life.

New York Times Book Review

"O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,/ I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death" (Walt Whitman). As Bloom (Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale Univ.; The Western Canon) writes in his introduction, the choices here fall into three categories: literal "final poems," poems that were intended to mark the end of a career, and "imaginative conclusion[s] to poetic career[s]." Spanning 400-plus years and 100 poets, from Edmund Spenser to Agha Shahid Ali, these poems were chosen first for their artistic excellence. An introduction for each grounds it within historical context and the poet's career while sharing delightful tidbits. For example, Hart Crane's father invented Lifesavers, while Robert Frost said that his favorite poem was James Shirley's "Dirge." As this anthology reveals, too many promising poets died too young from war and disease. Regardless of whether readers agree with Bloom's assertion that Shakespeare is the "greatest of all writers in human history," many will praise Bloom's selection of last songs. In the words of F.T. Prince's "Last Poem": "Stand at the grave's head/ Of any common/ Man or woman,/ Thomas Hardy said,/ And in the silence/ What they were,/ Their life, becomes a poem." VERDICT Essential for all poetry collections.—Karla Huston, Appleton Arts Ctr., WI

Library Journal

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