proximoception

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

"Walt wanted to be a populist ... and couldn't." On the contrary, "he is an esoteric, hermetic, immensely delicate, evasive artist on the highest possible level of the aesthetic." Bloom has therefore set himself the task of "trying to do for him what for various complex reasons he couldn't do for himself."

The result is the forthcoming "Walt Whitman: A Pageant," a combination of biography, poetry and music. With admiration and merriment, Bloom describes his characters, which include Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anne Gilchrist ("who crosses the Atlantic because she has fallen in love with Whitman through his poems, proposes to him, and arrives to throw herself upon him, but he has to gently explain to her that he is not of that persuasion"), Elias Hicks ("the great, radical, Quaker circuit rider, half African American, half Native American") and Adah Isaacs Menken ("who performed buck naked, riding upside-down and right-side up on a stallion galloping across a New York stage").

Although different from his usual mode, for Bloom it's part of the same project of bringing difficult literature to life. He is not a dramatist, he insists: "I'm more a teacher than anything else. But I have a large view of what teaching is."

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