Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles - by Harold Bloom

This last book written by literary critic Harold Bloom is a fitting testament to one of America's leading 20th-century literary minds.

In this dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death, Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life's troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading.

Generous and clear-eyed, this is among Harold Bloom's most ambitious and moving books.

With passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others.

Bloom helps us grasp what Dickinson calls "vaster attitudes," allowing us to take a proud flight and to disdain, for a time, our own mortality.

This book is superb, utterly convincing, and absolutely invigorating.

It is a revelation.