The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

530 Pages·04.264 MB·english

by  Harold Bloom

Copyright © 2015 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Photo of Walt Whitman on this page: Mathew Brady. Photo of Emily Dickinson on this page: ©
Three Lions / Getty Images. Photo of Mark Twain on this page: courtesy of The Mark Twain
House and Museum. Photo of Wallace Stevens on this page: © Corbis. Photo of T. S. Eliot on this
page: © George Douglas / Picture Post / Getty Images. Photo of William Faulkner on this page:
Carl Van Vechten photograph by permission of the Van Vechten Trust. Photo of Hart Crane on
this page: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.255.75) © Walker
Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bloom, Harold.
The daemon knows : literary greatness and the
American sublime / Harold Bloom
pages cm.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9782-8 (hardback : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-8129-9783-5 (eBook)
1. American literature—History and criticism. I. Title.
PS121.B594 2015
810.9—dc23 2014040844
eBook ISBN 9780812997835
www.spiegelandgrau.com
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman
Cover design: Evan Gaffney
v4.1
a
Authentic tradition remains hidden; only the decaying
[verfallende] tradition chances upon [verfällt auf] a subject
and only in decay does its greatness become visible.
—GERSHOM SCHOLEM,
Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Why These Twelve?
Daemonic Preludium
I. WALT WHITMAN and HERMAN MELVILLE
FOREGROUNDING THE GIANTS
Walt Whitman
AN INDUCTION
OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING
LEAVES OF GRASS 1855
Song of Myself
The Sleepers
LEAVES OF GRASS 1856
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
LEAVES OF GRASS 1860
A Word Out of the Sea
As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life
WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D
Herman Melville
MOBY-DICK
II. RALPH WALDO EMERSON and EMILY DICKINSON
Ralph Waldo Emerson
JOURNALS
ESSAYS
Emily Dickinson
III. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE and HENRY JAMES
Nathaniel Hawthorne
TALES AND SKETCHES
THE SCARLET LETTER
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES
THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE
THE MARBLE FAUN
Henry James
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
THE BOSTONIANS
THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
“THE JOLLY CORNER”
IV. MARK TWAIN and ROBERT FROST
Mark Twain
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
PUDD’NHEAD WILSON
Robert Frost
A WITNESS TREE
NORTH OF BOSTON
DIRECTIVE
V. WALLACE STEVENS and T. S. ELIOT
THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN
FOUR QUARTETS
VI. WILLIAM FAULKNER and HART CRANE
William Faulkner
AS I LAY DYING: DARL
SANCTUARY: POPEYE
LIGHT IN AUGUST: JOE CHRISTMAS
Hart Crane
WHITE BUILDINGS: URBAN PURGATORIO
Praise for an Urn
Possessions
Passage
Repose of Rivers
At Melville’s Tomb
Voyages
THE BRIDGE
Atlantis
Ave Maria; National Winter Garden
Van Winkle; The River
The Tunnel
To Brooklyn Bridge
The Harbor Dawn
Cutty Sark
The Dance
Southern Cross; Virginia
THE BROKEN TOWER
CODA:
The Place of the Daemon in the American Sublime:
Hart Crane’s Achievement
Dedication
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
By Harold Bloom
About the Author
T
his book is about the dozen creators of the American Sublime.
Whether these are our most enduring authors may be disputable, but
then this book does not attempt to present an American canon. For that I
can imagine alternative choices such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David
Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Edwin Arlington Robinson,
Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos
Williams, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, and Flannery O’Connor,
without including later figures.
Yet my own selection seems more central, because these writers
represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking
humanism.
Thomas Weiskel, my friend and former student, who died tragically in
a vain attempt to save his little daughter, left as memorial his seminal
book The Romantic Sublime (1976). “A humanist sublime is an
oxymoron” is his cautionary adage. Do my twelve masters of the sublime
confirm Weiskel?
The American Sublime of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman is
knowingly self-contradictory. You could not be a self-created Adam early
in the morning with no past at your back, in 1830 or in 1855, even in the
American vein.
Weiskel gave a pithy account of what the literary sublime asserts:
The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling
and in speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies
beyond the human—God or the gods, the daemon or Nature—
is matter for great disagreement. What, if anything, defines
the range of the human is scarcely less sure.
Except for T. S. Eliot, none of my twelve believed in God or the gods,
and when they spoke of “Nature” they meant the American Adam. An