Bloom’s Giant Forms

Mark Edmundson

  • Ruin the sacred truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present by Harold Bloom
    Harvard, 204 pp, £15.95, February 1989, ISBN 0 674 78027 2
  • Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics by Peter de Bolla
    Routledge, 155 pp, £25.00, October 1988, ISBN 0 415 00899 9

One way to think of Harold Bloom is as a professor and scholar of Romantic poetry who has Romantic aspirations of his own. He writes in the passionate style of Emerson and Shelley, and he has a penchant like Blake’s for system-building. Bloom would subscribe to that poet’s declaration in Jerusalem that his business isn’t to reason and compare, but to create. The characters in Blake’s cosmological fiction are named Urizen, Los, Enitharmon; in Bloom’s they include Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, Stevens and Blake.

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