I've been reading Harold Bloom's /The Daemon Knows, Literary Greatness
and the American Sublime, /published in 2015. Bloom is 83 when he wrote
it -- seems like I've been reading Bloom all my life, usually to
disagree or at least argue with him, but in this book he is different
from what I remember, more open and disarming. His goal is to discuss
the twelve American poets he believes represent the American Sublime,
not always the best poets he says, but the ones he likes the best, the
ones in whom he finds this sublimity. But everything he has been
discussing as far as I've read has also been about himself -- not in a
triumphalist lecturing sense but as a meek seeker: someone in the
shadows watching and listening and especially reading.
On page 33, Bloom writes, "Perhaps Shakespeare helped Johnson avoid
madness, a function he has served for me whenever I waver in my own
perilous balance."
in 1986 - 1991 he toured the South and Southwest lecturing upon American
poetry. As he toured he visited churches, "whatever churches were kind
enough to allow me to attend . . ."
"Hearing them discourse, in and out of their divine assemblies, taught
me that the American Jesus suffered no crucifixion and experienced no
ascension. Instead, he manifested himself only in the forty days he
spent with disciples after his resurrection, and for the Mormons,
Pentecostalists, and Independent Baptists, he sojourned still in their
America, walking and talking with them. because of that, some told me
they were already resurrected and would never die, while nearly all
affirmed they had heard him speak, and quite a few had seen him."
". . . Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in
America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate."
Then moving on to the first poet, Whitman, he writes, "Hopkins loved and
feared Whitman, while Yeats rather nastily disliked the American
upstart, dismissed in /A Vision/ with weak misunderstanding. Writing to
Robert Bridges in 1882, the Jesuit poet remarked: ". . . I always knew
in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other
man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant
confession. And this makes me the more desirous to read him and the
more determined that I will not."
Bloom quotes Whitman's poem "The Dalliance of Eagles" saying of it, "An
astonishing vision, in just ninety words or so; I prefer this to Gerard
Manly Hopkin's /The Windover /and William Butler Yeats' /Leda and the
Swan . . ."
//The Dalliance of the Eagles /by Walt Whitman
Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse
flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.
