The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

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)