The Best Poems of the English Language
ed. by Harold Bloom
HarperCollins, $34.95

Harold Bloom doesn't so much publish books as come down from the mountain with them. Beleaguered, shrill, and seemingly without self-doubt, he is a sort of literary Jeremiah—and more than a little easy to make fun of. The thing is, he's also genuinely passionate and consistently interesting, particularly when he is addressing an entire oeuvre and situating a given writer within literary history. (His close readings, like the close readings of most academic critics who have become utterly invested in the theories which made them famous, tend to be useless.) This book starts with Chaucer and ends with Hart Crane. There are some surprising stops along the way—Trumbull Stickney, John Brooks Wheelwright, a baffling twenty pages of Lewis Carroll—and any scholar or poet is going to quibble with some of the selections representing well-known poets, but for the most part this book is solidly "canonical"—at least if you forget the last few decades of scholarship and culture wars. In recent years Bloom has become famous—or infamous—for his refutations of what he calls "extra-poetic" considerations when judging greatness. The long introductory essay to this book is a dogged, perhaps somewhat desperate effort to articulate some definitive criteria for determining aesthetic value, which, Bloom contends, is the only true measure of greatness. The argument recurs repeatedly in the often splendid individual introductions to the poets, though at one point Bloom, alluding to his weak heart, says that he has "retired from combat." It's like some huge bear telling you he's a vegetarian, while his tongue hangs out, and his eyes gleam, and the floor of the cave is littered with bones.

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