Harold Bloom's Top 12 American Authors

In The Daemon Knows, the literary critic and Yale professorHarold Bloom—who has written more than 40 books—nominates 12 writers whose inner spirits most fully exemplify what he calls “the American Sublime.” The “daemon” of the book title represents,in Bloom’s view, “the creative forces in an individual, which are deeper and more pervasive than what you might want to call the mere conscious. . . . The daemon is the creative spirit.” Bloom’s book will be published on May 12, a moment deliciously anticipated byChristopher BuckleyandEdward Sorelin the May issue ofVanity Fair.Herewith a roundup of Bloom’s top 12, and a few comments from the book about why each author made the cut. 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson “Emerson may not have invented the American Sublime, yet he took eternal possession of it. You don’t take a candle to see the sunrise, he wryly observes. . . . Away from Emerson, one forgets too readily how wonderfully extreme he can be.” 2. Emily Dickinson “Is there a more radical nihilist in American literature than Miss Dickinson of Amherst? Hamlet-like again, she thinks not too much but much too well and thinks her way to the truth. She possesses her art lest she perish of the truth, and her truth is annihilation: The rest is silence.” 3. Nathaniel Hawthorne “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.’ ” 4. Herman Melville “ ‘This world’s grievances’ are the Jobean burden ofMoby-Dick, of so massive a heft that Melville’s fighting motto transcends American hyperbole: ‘Give me condor’s quill. Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! . . . To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.’ ” 5. Walt Whitman “Whitman is not one of the poets extraordinary for cognitive power, such as Shakespeare, Blake, or Dickinson. 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. Shamanistic shape-shifter, hermetic androgyne, he indeed is prelapsarian Adam in the morning of what has become our evening land.” 6. Henry James “My own love for the novels of Henry James—The Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of a Dovein particular—does not blind me to the still greater literary power of Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy. Nothing is got for nothing, and James sacrificed some of his own exuberance of being upon the altar of form.” 7. Mark Twain “Parody could not save Mark Twain from himself, yet it opened his daemon to the great achievement ofThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. . . . The later writings disappoint me when I reread them . . . the daemon abandoned him. Why? We can surmise that his vein of Swiftian irony cost him too much, as it did Jonathan Swift himself.” 8. Robert Frost “Frost is not the American Wordsworth, but he holds up as only a few other modern American poets can.” . . . Frost’s daemon is a trickster and mischief-maker, to the aesthetic benefit of the poetry. I admire what so endlessly disconcerts me. 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.” 9. Wallace Stevens “There is a curious wonder in discovering the undebatable art of a living writer, as I did with the works of Wallace Stevens. . . . Falling in love seems the aptest analogue to the first discovery of aesthetic glory. For a time, all perspectives shift and demarcations become ghostlier, sounds, keener; vistas democratize.” 10. T.S. Eliot “Eliot was the prophet who had proclaimed the onetime existence of a great blob of Classical and Christian butter that started to melt in the later 17th century, slid down Enlightenment and Romantic slopes, and at last superbly congealed inThe Waste Land.” 11. William Faulkner “We have a need to heal violence, whether from without or from within. Our strongest writers— . . . Faulkner, among others—can meet that imaginative poverty and help protect the individual mind and society from themselves. I now have come to seethatas the highest use of literature for our way of life.” 12. Hart Crane “Like John Keats, he had a truer sense of other selves than most of us can attain. From the start, Crane knew his doom, in the mode of a Faulknerian hero. . . . Hart Crane’s extraordinary images of voice, whether a broken tower or a vaulting bridge, undo my expectations, even after more than 70 years of reading and knowing him. At 84 I lie awake at night, after a first sleep, and murmur Crane, Whitman, and Shakespeare to myself, seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/harold-bloom-the-daemon-knows-12-authors