Book: The Daemon Knows

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The Daemon Knows

Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities

(Spiegel & Grau)

Harold Bloom has for decades been sharing with readers and students his passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. In “The Daemon Knows,” he turns to writers of our national literature.

Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers’ works “in conversation” with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon” — the spark of genius or Orphic muse — in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors.



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