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Bloom - The daemon knows : literary greatness and the American sublime

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS

Hailed as the indispensable critic by The New York Review of Books, Harold BloomNew York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale Universityhas for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now he turns at long last to his beloved writers of our national literature in an expansive and mesmerizing book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Blooms most masterly book yet.
Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the daemonthe spark of genius or Orphic musein their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors.
As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon.
Praise for The Daemon Knows

Enrapturing . . . radiant . . . intoxicating . . . Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture.Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review
The capstone to a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching . . . The primary strength of The Daemon Knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. . . . Blooms books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground.The Washington Post

Audacious . . . The Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work.The Huffington Post
The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.John Ashbery

Mesmerizing.New York Journal of Books
Bloom is a formidable critic, an extravagant intellect.Chicago Tribune
As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Blooms any more.The Guardian (U.K.)

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Contents
The daemon knows literary greatness and the American sublime - photo 1
The daemon knows literary greatness and the American sublime - photo 2Copyright 2015 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 3
Copyright 2015 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 4Copyright 2015 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 5

Copyright 2015 by Harold Bloom

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Photo of Walt Whitman on : The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.255.75) Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA

Bloom, Harold.

The daemon knows : literary greatness and the

American sublime / Harold Bloom

pages cm.

ISBN 978-0-8129-9782-8 (hardback : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8129-9783-5 (eBook)

1. American literatureHistory and criticism. I. Title.

PS121.B594 2015

810.9dc23 2014040844

eBook ISBN9780812997835

www.spiegelandgrau.com

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman

Cover design: Evan Gaffney

v4.1

a

Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the decaying [verfallende] tradition chances upon [verfllt auf] a subject and only in decay does its greatness become visible.

G ERSHOM S CHOLEM ,

Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah

C ODA The Place of the Daemon in the American Sublime Hart Cranes - photo 6C ODA The Place of the Daemon in the American Sublime Hart Cranes - photo 7

C ODA :
The Place of the Daemon in the American Sublime:
Hart Cranes Achievement

T his book is about the dozen creators of the American Sublime Whether these - photo 8T his book is about the dozen creators of the American Sublime Whether these - photo 9

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

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