The daemon knows Literary greatness and the American sublime

Review by New York Times Review

THIS ROUNDED, WET, weedy, windy earth, with its opposing poles, was born into contraries: Apollo and Dionysus, Talmudist and kabbalist, sober exegete and rapt ecstatic. Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture. He is himself no Whitman or Melville, no Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens, no Hart Crane or Emerson. And yet he seems at times almost as large as any of these, so vital and particularized is his presence. If, as Emerson claims, the true ship is the shipbuilder, then is the true poem the critic who maps and parses and inhabits it? Can poet and critic be equal seers? Read Bloom, and you may be led to suppose it so. "Walt Whitman," he writes, "overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others - Dante, Shakespeare, Milton - consistently flood my entire being. ... Without vision, criticism perishes." And: "I rejoice at all strong transports of sublimity" And again: "True criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir." And finally, emphatically: "I believe there is no critical method except yourself." It is through intoxicating meditations such as these that Bloom has come to his formulation of the American Sublime, and from this to his revelation of the daemon: the very Higgs boson of the sublime. Bloom's beguiling daemon can be construed as the god within; he is sire to the exaltations of apotheosis, shamanism, Gnosticism, Orphism, Hermeticism and, closer to home, Emerson's "Self-Reliance." He is made manifest through the voice of poets and in the chants of those weavers of tales, like Melville and Faulkner, who are kin to poets. "The Daemon Knows," the enigmatic title of Bloom's newest work of oracular criticism, is strangely intransitive. What is it that the daemon knows? We are meant to understand that the daemon is an incarnation of an intuition beyond ordinary apperception, and that this knowing lies in the halo of feeling that glows out of the language of poetry. "To ask the question concerning the daemon is to seek an origin of inspiration," Bloom asserts, and his teacherly aim is to pose the question in close readings of 12 daemon-possessed writers whom he interrogates in pairs: Whitman with Melville, Emerson with Dickinson, Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Frost, Stevens with T. S. Eliot, Faulkner with Hart Crane. He might well have chosen 12 others, he tells us, reciting still another blizzard of American luminaries, but dismisses the possibility "because these [chosen] writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism." (A question Bloom does not put - we will approach it shortly - is whether shamanism, Orphism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and all the other mystical isms, including the idea of the daemon, do in fact cling to humanism.) For Bloom, the origin of inspiration is dual: the daemon who ignites it from within, and the genealogical force that pursues it from without. The bloodline infusion of literary precursors has long been a leitmotif for Bloom, from the academic implosion of "The Anxiety of Influence" more than 40 years ago to the more recent "The Anatomy of Influence." Here he invokes the primacy of Emerson as germinating ancestor: "For me, Emerson is the fountain of the American will to know the self and its drive for sublimity. The American poets who (to me) matter most are all Emersonians of one kind or another: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Henri Cole. Our greatest creators of prose fiction were not Emersonians, yet the protagonists of Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James frequently are beyond our understanding if we do not see Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab and Isabel Archer as self-reliant questers." Though Bloom's persuasive family trees are many-branched, the power of influential predecessors nevertheless stands apart from daemonic possession. According to Bloom, the daemon - "pure energy, free of morality" - is far more intrinsic than thematic affinity. However aggressively their passions invade, it is not Whitman alone who gives birth to Melville, or Emerson to Dickinson, or Hawthorne to James, or Mark Twain to Frost; and certainly it is not the lurid Faulkner, all on his own, who rivals the clay that will become Hart Crane. Literary heritage is half; the rest is the daemon. "'Moby-Dick,'" Bloom sums up, "is at the center of this American heretical scripture, our worship of the god within, which pragmatically means of the daemon who knows how it is done." But there is yet another pragmatic demonstration to be urged and elaborated. "Hart Crane's daemon," he adds, "knows how it is done and creates an epic of Pindaric odes, lyrics, meditations and supernal longings without precedent." Without precedent: Surely this is the earliest key, in Bloom's scheme, to the daemon's magickings. Theme and tone and voice may have authorial ancestors; what we call inspiration has none. Turning to one of his two commanding touchstones (the other is Whitman), Bloom cites Emerson: "This is that which the strong genius works upon; the region of destiny, of aspiration, of the unknown....Far the best part, I repeat, of every mind is not that which he knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him." So when Bloom tells us there can be no critical method other than the critic himself - meaning Bloom - we should not take it as blowhard hyperbole. With Emerson, he intends to pry open the unpossessed and to possess it, and to lead the reader to possess it too: a critical principle rooted in ampleness and generosity. In this way, the illustrative excerpts Bloom selects from the work of his hallowed dozen are more than concentrated wine tastings; they are libraries in little. In considering Hawthorne, he discusses - in full - "Wakefield" and "Feathertop," two lesser-known stories, as well as "The Blithedale Romance," "The Marble Faun" and the canonical "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables." In his descant on James, Bloom supplies entire scenes from "The Portrait of a Lady," "The Bostonians" and "The Wings of the Dove," in addition to long passages of "The Jolly Corner." And in crisscrossing from Hawthorne to James and back again, he leaves nothing and no one unconnected. "Where indeed in American fiction," he asks, "could there be a woman loftier, purer, as beautiful and as wise as Hester Prynne? Isabel Archer is the only likely candidate," though he goes on to lament her choice of the "odious Osmond." For Bloom, Moby-Dick consorts with Huck Finn, and Emily Dickinson with Shakespeare, while Whitman underlies, or agitates, Stevens, Hart Crane and, surprisingly, T. S. Eliot. Of all Bloom's couplings, Stevens and Eliot are the oddest and the crankiest. Despite the unexpected common link with Whitman, the juxtaposition is puzzling. Bloom's veneration of Stevens, sometimes "moved almost to tears," is unstinting. "From start to end, his work is a solar litany," he confesses. "Stevens has helped me to live my life." Yet nearly in the same breath Bloom is overt, even irascible, in his distaste for Eliot, partly in repudiation of "his virulent anti-Semitism, in the age of Hitler's death camps," but also because of his clericalism: "Is it my personal prejudice only that finds no aesthetic value whatsoever in the devotional verse of T. S. Eliot?.. .His dogmatism, dislike of women, debasement of ordinary human existence make me furious." In the same dismissive vein, he disposes of Ezra Pound: "I at last weary of his sprawl and squalor." Nowhere else in this celebratory volume can such a tone - of anger and disgust - be found. Not even in Bloom's dispute with what he zealously dubs "the School of Resentment" (the politicization of literary studies) is he so vehement as here. Still, emotive disclosures are not foreign to this critic's temperament. He has, after all, already told us that criticism can be a form of memoir. "I am an experiential and personalizing literary critic," he explains, "which certainly rouses up enmity, but I go on believing that poems matter only if we matter." Out of this credo grows a confiding intimacy: "The obscure being I could call Bloom's daemon has known how it is done, and I have not. His true name (has he one?) I cannot discover, but I am grateful to him for teaching the classes, writing the books, enduring the mishaps and illnesses, and nurturing the fictions of continuity that sustain my 85th year." A touching reminder of the nature of the human quotidian, its riches and its vicissitudes, its successes and its losses: tangled mortal life itself, pulsing onward in the daylight world of reality. But is this what Bloom's exalted 12 have taught of how the daemon, that rhapsodic creature of "pure energy, free of morality," is purposed? The daemon who is trance, who is the mystical whiteness of the white whale, who is harp and altar of Hart Crane's bridge, and who enters solely into seers and poets? Can the daemon's lover - who is Bloom - harbor the daemon in himself? Or, to put it otherwise: May the professor of poetry don the poet's mantle? Meanwhile, the daemon knows, and Bloom knows too, who are his most dedicated antagonists. They are those verifiable humanists, the rabbis who repudiate the kabbalists, who refute the seductions of Orphists and Gnostics, who deny the dervishing god within and linger still in that perilous garden where mortals dare to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and daemons of the sublime are passing incantatory delusions. Well, never mind - at least while Bloom's enrapturing book is radiant in your hand. The daemon knows, and Bloom knows too, that in Eden, birthplace of the moral edict and the sober deed, there never was a poet. 'True criticism/ Bloom announces, 'recognizes itself as a form of memoir/ CYNTHIA OZICK'S most recent book is the novel "Foreign Bodies." Her new collection, "Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays," will be published next year.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]

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Review by Booklist Review

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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 withe.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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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I. Walt Whitman and Herman Melville Foregrounding the Giants Walt Whitman and Herman Melville abide as the giants of American literary tradition. Their vaunting overreach is not matched until Hart Crane and William Faulkner, each equally ambitious in scope and drive, assault the frontiers already extended outward by Moby-­Dick (1851) and the first three Leaves of Grass (1855, 1856, 1860). Rich as North American literary culture became--­at least before the twenty-­first century--­it brought forth no peers of Dante and Cervantes, Montaigne and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Joyce. Only Moby-­Dick and Whitman in his half-dozen major poems--­Song of Myself, The Sleepers, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and the three elegiac meditations (Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd)--­suggest Tolstoyan resonances. Søren Kierkegaard found in Shakespeare "the resonance of the opposite." All twelve writers centering this book share in that antithetical strain. It is not that Whitman and Melville possess it more deeply than Emerson, Emily Dickinson, or Henry James, but I do not hear in them the sea crying out, as we listen to the earth calling aloud in Tolstoy. Yet Melville and Whitman have little else in common. Walt was interested in Typee but nothing by Melville after that, and the defeated seer of Moby-­Dick rather resented whatever notoriety the self-­promoting Whitman achieved. I doubt he ever read a line of Leaves of Grass. Foregrounding Dante and Shakespeare depends upon intricate inferrings. Their direct precursors, Guido Cavalcanti and Christopher Marlowe, were major poets, but the authors of the Commedia and of Hamlet and King Lear are beyond all simplicities of inheritance. Certainly there was an anguish of contamination. The Inferno places Cavalcanti's father and father-­in-­law among the damned and poignantly allows the father anxiously to question the Pilgrim: Why is it Dante rather than Cavalcanti who makes the Divine Journey? Kit Marlowe haunts Shakespeare, though scarcely in style and hardly in the creation of personalities. The art of achieving rhetorical power over an audience was bequeathed by Marlowe to his contemporary Shakespeare, who might not have seen its possibilities without this apprenticeship to the dramatic oratory of Tamburlaine, the Guise, Barabbas, and Doctor Faustus. Foregrounding Whitman and Melville is difficult, because of the radical originality of Leaves of Grass and Moby-­Dick. Emerson, Walt's only begetter, evoked considerable resistance from Melville, who attended the sage's New York City lectures and annotated his essays. Melville's ambivalence led to his satirizing Emerson as Plotinus Plinlimmon in Pierre and as Mark Winsome, savaged in The Confidence-­Man. Ahab and Ishmael nevertheless are partial Emersonians, while Hester Prynne and Isabel Archer are his daughters. Only Southerners, from Poe to Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, have been immune from the Concord contagion. Though Emerson rubbed his eyes to puzzle out "the long foreground somewhere" of Leaves of Grass 1855, nobody was unlikelier to probe inferential origins. A man without a handle (the complaint of Henry James, Sr.), Emerson was skilled in the art of slipping away from categories and persons alike. His greatness allowed for a singularity that could thrill to the commonplace and that enabled Walt, the child who went forth. Whatever Whitman looked upon, he became. Melville massively resisted so promiscuous a cavalcade of identifications. Ahab is a hard transcendentalist: Hark ye yet again,--­the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--­in the living act, the undoubted deed--­there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think that there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Walt, confronted by sunrise, now and always could send forth sunrise from himself. Melville, opposing titan, would strike at and through the sun as another pasteboard mask. Moby-­Dick is our national counter-­sublime and Leaves of Grass the American Sublime, incarnated in a book that is also a man. That man cannot be confused with Walter Whitman, Jr. He is Hermetic Man, poised over the abyss of death and sleep in a precarious balance before falling outward and downward into the sea of space and time. Whitman had encountered the Hermetic Speculation, the second-­century c.e. secular gnosis, in George Sand's novels, though his taste for Egyptian antiquity might have guided him anyway to the doctrines of "Thrice-­Greatest Hermes." Hermetic Speculation came out of Alexandria, proclaiming itself as ancient Egyptian wisdom, and deceived Renaissance Europe, though "deceived" itself is deceptive. Hermetism, like Christian Gnosticism, expressed the spirit of religiously eclectic Macedonian and Roman Alexandria, a fecund "Jewgreek is greekjew" (James Joyce) hybrid. American literary selfhood, or the American Religion, participates in a gnosis. The American androgyne (Song of Myself's protagonist) is not part of the creation and fall but emanates from the prior abyss, foremother and forefather invoked by transfigured Captain Ahab, electrified by the corposants, Saint Elmo's fire: "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-­freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee." (Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.) "I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-­hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-­balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!" I resume this intricate rhapsody for close commentary later in this chapter but emphasize now how strenuously it manifests what has been called our Native Strain. The American Sublime in Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Hart Crane relies upon extraordinary hyperbole--­not an exaggeration but an untamed casting, in which the images of voice break and scatter ashes and sparks. Whitman calls this the breaking of the tally. In Melville, we hear it marvelously in the lament of Urania (quite possibly Margaret Fuller) that ignites After the Pleasure Party: For, Nature, in no shallow surge Against thee either sex may urge, Why hast thou made us but in halves--­ Co-­relatives? This makes us slaves. If these co-­relatives never meet Self-­hood itself seems incomplete. And such the dicing of blind fate Few matching halves here meet and mate. What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder The human integral clove asunder And shied the fractions through life's gate? That Gnostic anarch-­archon cleaving asunder of the cosmic androgyne shies Aristophanic fragments (women and men) through the gate of human birth. Call this Melville's breaking of the vessels, akin to Emerson's "there is a crack in everything God has made." Intransigent Ahab is the truest daemonic Emersonian, unlike Melville, who loved the Concord sage's deep diving yet dissented from what he took to be an affirming force. Seventy years of deeply reading Emerson make me wary of any account of him that neglects his powers of thinking by and through negations. Disputes between anyone--­even Melville and Emerson--­are hard to sustain; Waldo will not rest for long in any one stance or proposition. Polymorphic, he proclaims that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. He is large, contains multitudes, and likes seeing them escape containment. He was the perfect reader for Leaves of Grass 1855. Imagine what the then-­twelve-­year-­old Henry James, already a deep reader, could have made of Whitman's inaugural self-­presentation. A decade later, James wrote an absurd review of Drum-­Taps, demonstrating a total refusal to actually read the poet he later came to regard, rightly, as our nation's finest. At twenty-­two, James skipped over such magnificences as Reconciliation and Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night, while devoting himself only to what he dismissed as bardic pretensions. The Lilacs elegy for Lincoln was not in the edition that James saw, but I doubt he could then have absorbed it, though he came to love the threnody and to chant it with what Edith Wharton and other rapt auditors termed an organ's resonance. Probably he was disturbed by the homoeroticism already emergent in his own nature. I have pondered for decades Emerson's wonderful initial receptivity toward Whitman and have come to believe that the sage's daemon recognized itself in his shamanistic godson. Could anyone else then in America or in the world have been that perceptive? In a long lifetime of championing new poets at first reading, I have attempted to emulate Emerson, but only because he broke the new road for American pragmatic criticism. In my life, the comparable experience began when I was ten and found The Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Melrose branch of the Bronx Public Library. I had never seen any reference to Crane, but I opened the book at the Atlantis conclusion to The Bridge and was transformed by invocatory splendor: O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits The agile precincts of the lark's return . . . What I construed of this or the rest of Hart Crane seventy years ago, I cannot recall. Yet the drive, rhetoric, syntax, and flight beyond limits overwhelmed me, precisely as my initial reading of Christopher Marlowe had been a transport to the sublime. More than that, Crane's image of voice permanently altered my sensibility and sent me back to the Shakespeare of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as to Marlowe, George Chapman, and the earlier, pre-­conversionary T. S. Eliot. Had I been born in 1899 rather than 1930, I would have been an earlier champion of Crane and perhaps would have known or tried to meet him. There is a curious wonder in discovering the undebatable art of a living writer, as I did with the works of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Alvin Feinman, and Henri Cole, among the poets, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The experience grows rarer, but it may be that in my eighties I am less open to fresh splendors. Falling in love seems the aptest analogue to the first discovery of aesthetic glory. For a time, all perspectives shift and demarcations become ghostlier; sounds, keener; vistas democratize. Teaching is nearly akin. In the third week of a new semester, the students I have taught in prior years begin to seem refreshingly stranger, illuminated by the group of recent young women and men who so rapidly become familiar. To be four times their age renders the classroom a phantasmagoria at moments, in which I seem the Button Moulder from Peer Gynt or a grotesque emergent from Faust: Part Two. I lead a discussion on Falstaff, whose years I now match, or on Walt Whitman in the final Mickle Street phase, worn out by the sufferings of thousands whom he had nursed yet holding fast to the still-­powerful press of his sole self, a single separate person. Perhaps all that Whitman shared with Shakespeare, Goethe, and Henrik Ibsen was an implicit insight that the self was a necessary fiction, an illusion so desired that leaves of grass would sprout from the barren rock of being. A smoky taste flows but then ebbs in our reception of agonies as one of Walt's changes of garments. Rancidity gathers, though it does not fall, and our self-­vividness grows less bright. We turn blankly and discover that no direction is at home in us. Certain mornings in midwinter, my wife asks me: Why at eighty-­four continue teaching full-­time? It is fifty-­eight years since first we courted but fifty-­nine since I commenced full-­time teaching in the Yale faculty. I mutter that I fear breaking the longest continuity of my life. Is that my deeper motive? What can I know? The daemon only knows how it is done. Excerpted from The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime by Harold Bloom All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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