This rounded, wet, weedy, windy earth, with its opposing poles, was born into contraries: Apollo and Dionysus, Talmudist and kabbalist, sober exegete and rapt ecstatic. Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture. He is himself no Whitman or Melville, no Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens, no Hart Crane or Emerson. And yet he seems at times almost as large as any of these, so vital and particularized is his presence. If, as Emerson claims, the true ship is the shipbuilder, then is the true poem the critic who maps and parses and inhabits it? Can poet and critic be equal seers?
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