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Oct. 20th, 2011 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception61. Walt Whitman: Selected Poems, ed. Bloom
62. The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible
Putting it as delicately as I can: if you want to effectively praise the bible don't quote from it at length. Yes, there's a few exceptions, incongruously osmosed books like Ecclesiastes, Job et al. and scattered passages elsewhere.
I grew up with the bible but it was nevertheless foreign to me, which is a delightful thing to realize. Bloom grew up contingent, where the scriptures are something you live inside so you'd better find some way to be at home there. He very much did, his immense language consciousness soaked all of this up and reordered it at a primordial point. It makes him peerless at seeing how biblical modes, phrases and innovations seep into later culture - and explains how he could swim so easily and productively in Blake's tortured epics. But it makes for the one blind spot. Not that he isn't ambivalent, even frequently scornful, which he very much is. But one needn't be even that of this book, if they don't get you hard and early.
Yes, others' strong imaginings capture us, can control us. But so can weak ones early enough in our life, or in history. I raise an eyebrow at the notion that later enamelers made Shakespeare what he is to us, but that's exactly what happened with the bible. Bloom himself admits it about Tyndale's New Testament. There's often something beautiful about what people made of the book they were told was true at an age when a true book was needed. And that beautiful elaboration, and for context its source material, may be worthy of study as beauty, but rather less so than as the most important cautionary tale, ever, about what can go wrong in us.
Bloom himself muses that Shakespeare and Whitman, combined, would make a fine replacement for scripture. I second this with the whole press of my heart.
62. The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible
Putting it as delicately as I can: if you want to effectively praise the bible don't quote from it at length. Yes, there's a few exceptions, incongruously osmosed books like Ecclesiastes, Job et al. and scattered passages elsewhere.
I grew up with the bible but it was nevertheless foreign to me, which is a delightful thing to realize. Bloom grew up contingent, where the scriptures are something you live inside so you'd better find some way to be at home there. He very much did, his immense language consciousness soaked all of this up and reordered it at a primordial point. It makes him peerless at seeing how biblical modes, phrases and innovations seep into later culture - and explains how he could swim so easily and productively in Blake's tortured epics. But it makes for the one blind spot. Not that he isn't ambivalent, even frequently scornful, which he very much is. But one needn't be even that of this book, if they don't get you hard and early.
Yes, others' strong imaginings capture us, can control us. But so can weak ones early enough in our life, or in history. I raise an eyebrow at the notion that later enamelers made Shakespeare what he is to us, but that's exactly what happened with the bible. Bloom himself admits it about Tyndale's New Testament. There's often something beautiful about what people made of the book they were told was true at an age when a true book was needed. And that beautiful elaboration, and for context its source material, may be worthy of study as beauty, but rather less so than as the most important cautionary tale, ever, about what can go wrong in us.
Bloom himself muses that Shakespeare and Whitman, combined, would make a fine replacement for scripture. I second this with the whole press of my heart.
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Date: 2011-10-20 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-20 09:51 pm (UTC)Latter two are suggestive - Signs of the Times and Characteristics would fit well with Nature and Self-Reliance, and all those with Song of Myself. Maybe adding The Poet, Thoreau's Walking, bits of Walden and Shelley's Defense of Poetry for good measure. A kind of Orphic anthology.
Then maybe a bad news companion volume starting with Experience, Illusions, Fate and various Melville, Dickinson and Hawthorne.
I've also long pondered a prose and verse collection of many authors detailing the stages of quest. Bits that actually use quest imagery, or close enough: Childe Roland, The Lotos-eaters, that kind of thing.