The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

By Harold Bloom

Book Overview

" Bloom] is the Satan of criticism...he is heroic even in those passages in which we are permitted to suspect that he may be a charlatan."--Dennis Donoghue, New York Review of Books

The most prodigious literary mind of his generation on the transcendent acts of self-creation that define the Western canon, from the Torah to Samuel Beckett.

John Milton's contemporary Andrew Marvell once confessed that reading Paradise Lost troubled his faith. Milton's lyrical prowess was beyond doubt, but precisely because of his poetic genius Marvell feared "That he would ruin (for I saw him strong) / The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song." If heaven, hell, and rebelling angels were reduced to fodder for the poet's imagination, how could they remain objects of sincere religious belief?

In this fascinating series of lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1987-1988, Harold Bloom confirms Marvell's worst fear: all serious poets, Bloom argues, must ruin the sacred truths, unraveling cherished beliefs and literary traditions to create a world in their own image. From the earliest source documents of the Torah, written by a hypothetical author called the Yahwist or simply "J," to the heretical reinterpretations of Judaism in Freud, Kafka, and Gershom Scholem, Bloom shows us how great authors construct the new by destroying the old. In the process they wrest divinity from the hand of the deity: Milton's Satan, infinitely more complex and compelling than his God, embodies the author's pursuit of humanity and literary greatness against the strictures of received religion; Wordsworth, prophet of nature, "celebrates his own godhood"; and Shakespeare's characters, as much as the Bible's, establish a ubiquitous and inescapable framework for representing the human personality.

Brisk and impassioned, Ruin the Sacred Truths gives us Bloom in all his dimensions. Jewish Gnostic, reverent Freudian, and relentless proselytizer of the sublime, he was convinced, above all, that if salvation could be found anywhere, it would be in poetry.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674780280
• ISBN13: 9780674780286
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

The slightly less strong Bloom

This is not the best of Bloom. It contains much which will be found in the later bestselling works but here comes in a more disjointed and often lackluster fashion. Bloom too exaggerates here in the name- dropping of critics, in the making of what may seem at times an esoteric set of arguments which only literary critics are capable of understanding. Still as enthusiast and great reader and lover of the world's best Literature Bloom provides much here worth reading and thinking about. This is not an easy work to read, and the arguments are often tangled. But it is like all of bloom's work rich in ideas , and interesting suggestions.