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Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles - Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

Release Date: 2020-10-13

Genre: Literary Criticism

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“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry.
 
"Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly

“An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable”—Seamus Perry, Literary Review

"Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear†‘eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.

Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles - Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

Release Date: 2020-10-13

Genre: Literary Criticism

(0 ratings)
Read Download
“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry.
 
"Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly

“An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable”—Seamus Perry, Literary Review

"Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear†‘eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.

More by Harold Bloom

Frankenstein

The Iceman Cometh

The Western Canon

The Daemon Knows

The Anatomy of Influence

The Best of the Best American Poetry

Falstaff

The Bright Book of Life

The Shadow of a Great Rock

Possessed by Memory

Lear

The Tempest

Macbeth

Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles

Romeo and Juliet

Iago

Henry the Fourth, Part One

Cleopatra

Till I End My Song

Ursula K. Le Guin: Collected Poems (LOA #368)

Ruin the Sacred Truths

El canon occidental

Il canone occidentale

Shakespeare

Macbeth

Yago

Lear

Hur läsa och varfÜr

Falstaff

Cleopatra

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