Harold Bloom adores the Hall of Literary Greats where he serves as high prophet, priest, and chief of homeland security. Atop his pantheon loafs Walt Whitman, putative père of the American Sublime. Now I do appreciate Whitman. Every few years I crack open my Library of America Leaves of Grass and marvel at those endless spun clouds of energy with plangent notes and subterranean heartbeats keeping rhythm. But I'll be damned if I'll flop to my knees alongside Harold to worship Walt. There are other fish in the sea, not to mention the Leviathan of the Living God, and one of those is enough. ( )

Yet another book of literary criticism from the ubiquitous pen of Harold Bloom.The focus of this collection is American literature. ( )

Harold Bloom discusses the works of 12 American authors in “The Daemon Knows.” With each author, Bloom focuses on the important works that they did to earn their place in this book. Bloom discusses them in pairs, so the first chapter talks about Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Walt Whitman is primarily a poet, so despite the fact that he wrote some prose, Bloom centers mainly on Whitman’s poems. With Herman Melville, we find the prototypical Great American Novel in Moby Dick. With these two authors, Bloom discusses the works and some of the critical reception of the time. Mainly he goes into what makes them great pieces of literature.

Now, although I read a lot, I am not really good with poetry. It isn’t that I can’t interpret what it means, it’s just that I really need to have something slapped in my face. Take the works of William Carlos Williams for example. I read the Red Wheelbarrow back in High School and didn’t really get it all that much. I didn’t really feel anything in reading it. Some poems I can get well, but a lot of them are really obvious in what they talk about. Poems that are subtle often elude me in meaning. That makes this book a good resource in that sense since Bloom discusses the elements that make these works sublime.

The book doesn’t exhaustively cover all of the works that every author put out. For Mark Twain Bloom only includes Huck Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. This selectivity makes this book far shorter than it would have otherwise been, and I appreciate that a great deal. Bloom contains plenty of musings and other information on each work.

I really enjoyed this book. Bloom’s wit and knowledge of each author shine through and the result is mesmerizing. ( )

The Daemon Knows is an exploration of what Bloom calls the American sublime; that class of literature that reaches beyond the human, in a way that is distictly American. What is beyond the human falls, by Bloom’s estimation, into three major categories; God, Nature, and the Daemon, and it is the last of these that Bloom is concerned with. What connects the twelve works that Bloom has chosen is what he calls, “their receptivity to daemonic influx.’ But what is the daemon? It is Emerson’s “God within”; the ‘American self’; the genius, the muse, that spark of the individual that transcends the everyday.

The American sublime then, is, like America itself, a self-created entity; forward-pushing, immediate, and individualistic, yet cut through with ambivalence. As Bloom remarks:

ambivalence has to mark the American Sublime: Think of Melville, Whitman, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Faulkner’s doomed landscapes. A selfhood endlessly aspiring to freedom from the past is bound to resist actual overdeterminations that bind us all in time.

The daemon of the American sublime is the very daemon that both haunts and yet makes possible the American Dream itself; a striving, fated never to succeed. It is this very essence that Bloom seeks to distil from the works he considers.

The authors Bloom selects for his study are considered in roughly chronological pairings, which are often left to bleed into one another. In his mid-eighties, the great critic has brought a lifetime of reading and thinking about authors from Herman Melville and Walt Whitman to T.S Eliot and Wallace Stevens, into one very personal volume. The personal tone of The Daemon Knows, with it’s anecdotes, opinions, and autobiographical details, marks out the confidence of its author, while allowing for a degree of intimacy in the reading.

As a critic, Bloom’s confident style has always maintained the capacity to meander into sweeping largesse and generalised pronouncements, but in this more intimate volume, there is perhaps a step back from the outright didacticism of some of his preceding works, into a more humble stance, and a slightly more personable style. In this volume, Bloom concedes that: ‘We do not read only as aesthetes – though we should – but also as responsible men and women.’ In accepting the subjectivity of his own reading experience, albeit a little grudgingly, there is a greater sense of openness to the book in general, and subsequently more room for the emotion that must form the bedrock of the sublime for a reader. Bloom’s love of Hart Crane in particular is at times quite moving, and I was left feeling much more sympathetic towards Harold Bloom the man after reading this volume, than some of his previous views and attitudes would have me be.

As well as the personal elements, the strength of Bloom’s knowledge, and his ability to select and deploy the most exquisite quotes, makes this book an absolute joy to read. My personal familiarity with American Literature does not extend to all of the major writers in this book, but where I was less familiar, my interest was piqued, and where I brought my own knowledge, my appreciation was deepened.

In many ways, this style of criticism harks back to the expansive ebullitions of critics like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a style that is certainly not to everyone’s taste. But for a general audience, with an interest in getting to know some of the great writers of American literary history, this makes a wonderful introduction from one of the most renowned critics of his generation.

For more reviews, visit my blog: https://ahermitsprogress.wordpress.com/ ( )