On Reading Poetry with Harold Bloom
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart. —Walter Savage Landor, "On His Seventy-fifth Birthday" "Poetry is the crown of imaginative literature, in my judgment, because it is a prophetic mode." —Harold Bloom I come to the literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom much as I come to the poets who mean the most to me. At his best, and maybe at my best,