The Yale professor writes confidently about the ‘dozen creators of the American sublime’ he lionises – but he ignores the way power acts on their work
What more do we have to learn from Harold Bloom? In his 85th year, the critic and author of 36 books, including the monumental Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, returns with a new study that fuses literature and faith. The Daemon Knows focuses on “the dozen creators of the American sublime”, in familiar or unexpected pairings, including Melville and Whitman, Emerson and Dickinson, Faulkner and Hart Crane.
Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom’s any more. “I do not consider Walt a product of the sensibility of his own time,” Bloom proclaims at one point. “Genius or the daemon is rare and of its own age.” This is a typical Bloom pronouncement, both personal and universal: he’s perfectly comfortable on first-name terms with “Walt”. His declarative authority is daunting to readers who are able to count on their fingers how many times they’ve read Moby-Dick.
