Now Quit Bugging Him
So He Can Get Back to Rereading Milton

Harold Bloom dazzles the hell out of James Marcus with his ability to recite scads of poetry from memory, in a Newsday profile that focuses on The Best Poems of the English Language, his recent compendium of, well, the best poems of the English language (at least up to mid-20th century works) rather than the recent unpleasantess. Giving Bloom a chance to argue about how critical standards have declined in recent decades, and about why poetry is still easily loved:

"You don't have to absolutely, thoroughly, cognitively grasp a poem to be fascinated by it. When I was a little boy, already madly in love with William Blake and Hart Crane, I couldn't possibly have understood what I was reading. There is certainly some layer of understanding that is nonrational. And for the common reader, allusiveness registers as a riddling, enigmatic element: a richness of impact that troubles us, even as we can't quite locate where that trouble is from."