Harold Bloom - The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

T his book is about the dozen creators of the American Sublime. Whether these are our most enduring authors may be disputable, but then this book does not attempt to present an American canon. For that I can imagine alternative choices such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, and Flannery OConnor, without including later figures.

Yet my own selection seems more central, because these writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.

Thomas Weiskel, my friend and former student, who died tragically in a vain attempt to save his little daughter, left as memorial his seminal book The Romantic Sublime (1976). A humanist sublime is an oxymoron is his cautionary adage. Do my twelve masters of the sublime confirm Weiskel?

The American Sublime of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman is knowingly self-contradictory. You could not be a self-created Adam early in the morning with no past at your back, in 1830 or in 1855, even in the American vein.

Weiskel gave a pithy account of what the literary sublime asserts:

The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies beyond the humanGod or the gods, the daemon or Natureis matter for great disagreement. What, if anything, defines the range of the human is scarcely less sure.

Except for T. S. Eliot, none of my twelve believed in God or the gods, and when they spoke of Nature they meant the American Adam. An Emersonian vision, the American Adam is the God-Man of the New World. He is self-created, and if he ever fell it was in the act of initial creation. What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers is the daemon, who is described and defined throughout this book.

The common element in these twelve writersalbeit covertly in Eliotis their receptivity to daemonic influx. Henry James, the master of his art, nevertheless congratulates his own daemon for the greatest of his novels and tales. Emerson was the family sage for the James clan, including Henry James, Sr., as well as the novelist and the psychologist-philosopher William, whose essay On Vital Reserves is a hymn to the daemon.

I have paired these twelve figures in juxtapositions of no single pattern. I begin with Walt Whitman and Herman Melville because they are the Giant Forms (William Blakes term) of our national literature. Moby-Dick (1851) and the first Leaves of Grass (1855) have the aura and resonance of the Homeric epics and in that sense share a primacy among all our imaginative writers.

Exact contemporaries in time and space, Whitman and Melville must have passed each other often on the streets of New York City, and both attended the same lectures of Emerson but had no interest in each other. Whitman had read the early Typee yet nothing more. Melville, without a public from Moby-Dick on, resented Whitmans self-advertisements and the little shreds of notoriety they gathered.

I have avoided direct comparisons between Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass except in a few places, though they might be redundant, since Melville and Whitman inaugurate the American fourfold metaphor of night, death, the mother, and the sea that has become perpetual for us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson met when he lectured in Amherst and stayed for dinner and overnight at her brothers home next door. Her references to him in her letters are wistful and humorous, while her poems offer a sly critique of him. I bring them together here because he is her closest imaginative father, as Walter Pater was Virginia Woolfs. What they share are powers of mind surpassing any others in our literature.

The relation of Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James is one of direct influence and so I bring them close together, in a way James would have disliked. I interpret all four of Hawthornes major romances but fewer of the tales than I should for want of space. Emerson, Hawthornes walking companion, deeply contaminates Hester Prynne and Hawthornes other heroines, and his mark is as strong on Isabel Archer and Jamess later women protagonists. The ghostly Henry James, as in The Jolly Corner, also emanates from Hawthorne.

Mark Twain and Robert Frost have little in common despite their mutually concealed savagery, but they are our only great masters with popular audiences. Both dissemble and move on two levels, implying deeper meanings to only an elite.

With Wallace Stevens and Thomas Stearns Eliot, I turn to an intricate interlocking: a polemic conducted by Stevens against Eliot. The eclipse of