The Epic (Bloom's Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection)

281 Pages·2005·1.52 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

B
L
O
O
M
’
S

L
THE I
T
E
R
EPIC A
R
Y

C
R
I
T
I
C
I
S
M

2
0
T
H
A
N
N
I
V
E
R
S
A
R
Y

C
O
L
L
E
C
T
I
O
N
BLOOM’S LITERARY 20THANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
CRITICISM
Dramatists and Dramas
The Epic
Essayists and Prophets
Novelists and Novels
Poets and Poems
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
B
L
O
O
M
’
S

L
THE I
T
E
R
A
R
EPIC Y

C
R
I
T
I
C
I
S
M

2
0
T
H
A
N
N
I
V
E
R
S
A
R
Y

C
O
L
L
E
C
T
I
O
N
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
®
©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
®
www.chelseahouse.com
Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloom, Harold.
The epic / Harold Bloom.
p. cm. -- (Bloom's 20th anniversary collection)
ISBN 0-7910-8229-6 HC ISBN 0-7910-8368-3 PB
1. Epic literature--History and criticism. I. Title.
PN56.E65B66 2005
809'.93358--dc22
2005005379
Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi
Cover illustration by David Levine
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Table of Contents
•
T
H
PREFACE
Harold Bloom E
ix

INTRODUCTION
E
Harold Bloom
xii P
I
Genesis and Exodus
1 C
•
Homer (c. 8th cen. B.C.E)
The Iliad / The Odyssey
18
Virgil (c. 84–54 B.C.E)
Aeneid
29
Anonymous (written c. 700–750)
Beowulf
39
Lady Murasaki (978–1014)
The Tale of Genji
43
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
The Divine Comedy
49
Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400)
The Canterbury Tales
69
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599)
The Faerie Queene
83
John Milton (1608–1674)
Paradise Lost
99
William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
The Prelude
110
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
140
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
Moby-Dick
162
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Song of Myself
168
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
War and Peace
182
Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
In Search of Lost Time
187
Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
The Magic Mountain
203
James Joyce (1882–1941)
Ulysses
217
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)
The Waste Land
224
Hart Crane (1899–1932)
The Bridge
238
FURTHERREADING 254
INDEX 257
ABOUTTHEAUTHOR 266

•
T
H
E

Preface E
P
Harold Bloom
I
C
•
I BEGAN EDITING ANTHOLOGIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM FOR CHELSEA
House in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical
Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary of
a somewhat Quixotic venture. If asked how many separate books have been
issued in this project, I no longer have a precise answer, since in so long a
span many volumes go out of print, and even whole series have been dis-
continued. A rough guess would be more than a thousand individual
anthologies, a perhaps insane panoply to have been collected and introduced
by a single critic.
Some of these books have surfaced in unlikely places: hotel rooms in
Bologna and Valencia, Coimbra and Oslo; used-book stalls in Frankfurt
and Nice; on the shelves of writers wherever I have gone. A batch were sent
by me in answer to a request from a university library in Macedonia, and I
have donated some of them, also by request, to a number of prisoners serv-
ing life sentences in American jails. A thousand books across a score of
years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four I am a lit-
tle bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it
has leaped between centuries.
It cannot be said that I have endorsed every critical essay reprinted,
as my editor’s notes have made clear. Yet the books have to be reasonably
reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them
provoking my own enthusiasm. But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully nam-
ing myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.” I accept only three crite-
ria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive
power, wisdom. What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in
ix