Harold Bloom has been one of the most beloved literary critic, essayist, of our age.
In this final book Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death published by Yale Press
and completed some days before his departure in 2019, Bloom leaves a message for every reader: read! And keep alive the power of deep reading that in our society is disappearing.
No one of the old and loved poets taken in consideration by the writer, could prolong his existence, admits Bloom, but reading is researching, reading means new discoveries everyday and when you arrive at 90 years and you have spent your entire life or the most of it, and maybe you don't sleep well at night, at dawn, "read something that matters as soon as you can."
But read. Bloom affirms that "The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress."
A man he admired a lot in grade of devouring wagons of books as did with meat was Samuel Johnson and thinking at Johnson Bloom confesses that everytime he receives a book he devours it instantly if he can; when he was little, confesses, he didn't have a lot of books and he couldn't buy them; now he is "fighting" with his wife because everday receives new books and their house is overwhelmed.
I love this passage: "What you read and how deeply read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy and workship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading."
Scared of death? Well Epicurus once wrote these words "...Death is nothing to us, since as long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist."
Appreciating poems is important: Emersone wrote once in The Poet that "The Poet are thus liberating gods." They are free and they make free.
Bloom loved to reread or recite Shakespeare day and night. "He gives me voices lost and found. His generous abundance is the perpetual harvest of voice."
While literal immortality appears to Bloom like a horror, he writes that he was born as an ortodox Jewish and so there weren't perspectives of immortality or resurrection. One day one of his cardiologists told him that his brain "...Could live on and keeps it's memory after I have gone into the Great Perhaps. I gently said him: no thanks."
At 90, attracted more powerfully than before by Homer and Shakespeare because free, they can't keep him completely free.
He is a poet I personally love a lot because the poet of the optimism: Walt Whitman. "I never stop learning from Whitman" confesses Bloom, remarking the beauty of the poem written by Whitman for the assassination of Linclon, in which lilacs play the gentle role of the situation. Ageing, meant to Bloom starting the appreciation of flowers, in particular roses; but there was that gentle bush of lilac in the house of the neighbor that sometimes moved his soul much more.
An essay this one that will explore Whitman but also Homer and Shakespeare, Milton and William Blake, Wordsworth, Shelly, Gordon and Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Yeats and D.H.Lawrence, Hart Crande, Robert Browning, ending with Dante
An important book for all the passionate of poets, poems and the meaning of life, and our existence passing through creative minds of all ages whispering to us their messages of hope love, and friendship.
Highly recommended.
I thank Yale University Press for the physical copy of the book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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