For a time, all perspectives shift and demarcations become ghostlier, sounds, keener vistas democratize.” Falling in love seems the aptest analogue to the first discovery of aesthetic glory. “There is a curious wonder in discovering the undebatable art of a living writer, as I did with the works of Wallace Stevens. If at times I become queasy, it is because Frost can be cruel, ambiguous toward women, and thoroughly morbid, but a great poet can afford all that and more.” I admire what so endlessly disconcerts me. Frost’s daemon is a trickster and mischief-maker, to the aesthetic benefit of the poetry. “Frost is not the American Wordsworth, but he holds up as only a few other modern American poets can.”. Why? We can surmise that his vein of Swiftian irony cost him too much, as it did Jonathan Swift himself.” The later writings disappoint me when I reread them. “Parody could not save Mark Twain from himself, yet it opened his daemon to the great achievement of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nothing is got for nothing, and James sacrificed some of his own exuberance of being upon the altar of form.”

“My own love for the novels of Henry James- The Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of a Dove in particular-does not blind me to the still greater literary power of Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy. Shamanistic shape-shifter, hermetic androgyne, he indeed is prelapsarian Adam in the morning of what has become our evening land.” His still-undervalued art abides in nuance, indirection, gesture, subtle evasiveness, insinuation, ineluctable modalities of the visible, the signature of all things that he summons us to come and see. “Whitman is not one of the poets extraordinary for cognitive power, such as Shakespeare, Blake, or Dickinson. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.’ ” Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!. “ ‘This world’s grievances’ are the Jobean burden of Moby-Dick, of so massive a heft that Melville’s fighting motto transcends American hyperbole: ‘Give me condor’s quill. “Hawthorne, the sage’s silent walking companion, might seem antithetical to Emerson, yet he had to be aware that his Hester Prynne, worshipping only the god within herself, stemmed from the selfhood of ‘Self-Reliance.’ ”

The american canon harold bloom