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Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
The Power of the Reader's Mind over a Universe of Death
By: Harold Bloom
Paperback | 23 November 2021 | Edition Number 1
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"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.
Industry Reviews
"An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of his passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable."-Seamus Perry, Literary Review
"A magnificent meander through the flames and the breezes, by the waters and over the earth of those creations, intimations and thoughts that most matter. There will be few grand streams-of consciousness like this in the future."-Stoddard Martin, Jewish Chronicle
"This is Bloom at his most capacious and fierce of thought, always ready to surprise. For all the losses he tallies, a great smile hovers through the book."-Kenneth Gross
"In the end, only words have a chance of outliving us, and Bloom records his best guesses at the words that might endure. Until the end, Bloom was a man of incessant curiosity, with more questions than answers about an essential poetic imagination."-Thylias Moss, Professor Emerita, University of Michigan
"This book is superb, utterly convincing, and absolutely invigorating. Bloom's final argument with mortality ultimately has a rejuvenating effect upon the reader, and is nothing short of a revelation."-David Mikics, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
"I felt reading this book the way Virginia Woolf in her diary describes her feeling about reading Shakespeare: 'I never yet knew how amazing his stretch and speed . . . is, until I felt it utterly outpace and outrace my own.'"-Laura Quinney, author of William Blake on Self and Soul
"Bloom helps us grasp what Dickinson calls 'vaster attitudes,' allowing us to take a proud flight and to disdain, for a time, our own mortality."-William Flesch, Brandeis University
ISBN: 9780300261530
ISBN-10: 0300261535
Published: 23rd November 2021
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 672
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: Yale University Press
Country of Publication: GB
Edition Number: 1
Dimensions (cm): 23.4 x 15.5 x 4.4
Weight (kg): 0.85
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You Can Find This Book In
This product is categorised by
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureLiterary Studies of Plays & PlaywrightsShakespeare Studies & Criticism
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureLiterary Studies of Poetry & Poets
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureGeneral Literary Studies
- Non-FictionEducation