Colin Burrow

The idea of the ego as a potential god within that seeks to encompass and swallow up all around it is the deep, hidden nasty within American culture which makes it at once so powerful and so attractively repellent. In The American Canon this world in which ‘all secretly believe themselves to be no part of the creation and all feel free only when they are quite alone’ is presented as the defining quality of the American mind and the American sublime. Bloom acknowledges that its energies are deeply equivocal: ‘Place everything upon the nakedness of the American self, and you open every imaginative possibility from self-deification to absolute nihilism.’ The self-deification becomes, Bloom argues, outright auto-eroticism in Whitman, and in Trumpland ‘Self-Reliance translated out of the inner life and into the marketplace is difficult to distinguish from our current religion of selfishness.’ But this focus on the two extremes of the American self – self-deification and absolute nihilism – indicates where Bloom believed the real literary action is at.

Ilya Kaminsky​ was born in 1977 in Odessa, the Ukrainian city named after Odysseus. In his first full-length collection of verse, Dancing in Odessa (2004), he let his readers in on a ‘secret’: ‘At the age of four I became deaf. When I lost my hearing, I began to see voices.’ When he was 16 his parents were granted asylum in the US and left ‘Odessa in such a...

Wordsworth​ was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man’. Never afraid of being thought either solemn or unsexual I persevered, and even persuaded my history teacher...

Not much​ is known about Propertius beyond what he says or implies about himself in the four books of elegies he wrote between roughly 30 BC (when he was probably in his mid to late twenties) and about 16 BC. He was born in Assisi and came from a wealthy Umbrian family which seems to have resisted Octavian – the future Emperor Augustus – in the battle of Perugia of 41 BC....