![]() ![]() I would go so far as to nominate him as Abraham Lincoln’s only rival for greatest American.” -HB Its originality and humane stance have a healing function, which is what he so deeply desired. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (also rec’d by Ai Weiwei, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Lisa Simpson & Maya Angelou) “Whitman’s poetry defines what is American and not European in our national literary tradition. From Whitman to Melville, find his recommendations below. He wrote more than 50 books over the course of his career, including over 40 books of literary criticism, and edited hundreds of anthologies on literary and philosophical figures.īloom was a relentless champion of the Western canon, and one of his final books, 2015’s The Daemon Knows, celebrates 12 writers whose work shaped what he calls the ‘American Sublime.’ In a complementary reading list for The Week, he highlighted 6 benchmark books that define America’s national literary tradition. ![]() He discovered the words of Hart Crane and William Blake as a boy, citing the “aesthetic experience” of their work as the spark behind his lifelong passion for poetry.Ī Fulbright Scholar, MacArthur Fellow, National Book Award finalist and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bloom was a member of Yale’s English department for 64 years – teaching his final class just four days before his 2019 death. ![]() Oft-called the most notorious literary critic in America, Harold Bloom was born in 1930 to a family of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Russia. ![]()
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