MBS Newsletter
Literary critic and scholar Bloom has a passion for literary assemblages. He is also ardent in his articulation of the psychological, philosophical, and spiritual roles literature, especially poetry, plays in life, and in coping with death. So who better than Bloom to gather poets’ last poems? Bloom cites “three kinds of ‘last poems.’” The first is the obvious, the “final poems” composed by the 100 poets he holds dear. The second are poems “intended to mark the end,” even though the poet continued to write, and the third are poems Bloom reads as “an imaginative conclusion to a poetic career.” His great favorites are here––Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Hopkins, Emerson, and Stevens, as well as Conrad Aiken, A. R. Ammons, James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, and Agha Shahid Ali. Bloom introduces each poet and poem with his signature blend of knowledge, ardor, and, facing his eightieth year, poignancy. These are poems that embrace change, time, life, the self, and death. Poems that have lasted and that will “reverberate into the coming silence.” A collection of surpassing splendor and resonance. --Donna Seaman (Booklist)
Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.