![]() ![]() ![]() Falstaff dies, plucking at flowers and singing the twenty-third Psalm.ĭante or Shakespeare? We need not choose. Prospero acknowledges Caliban, this thing of darkness, as his own. Shakespeare’s protagonists sometimes are obsessive or besieged. This is particularly true in the Latin meaning of the word: besiege or be besieged. The book ranges over writers from Milton to Walt Whitman, but the excerpt shared below comes from the concluding chapter, which focuses on Dante and Shakespeare.ĭante, poet and man, is obsessive. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” Bloom reads as a way of “taking arms” against a sea of life’s troubles. Published by Yale University Press on October 13, the book borrows a famous line from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy for its title: Taking Arms Against a Sea of Troubles. “Setting aside the ancients, the two indispensable European poets have to be Dante and Shakespeare,” writes American literary critic Harold Bloom in his final book, completed just weeks before he died in 2019. ![]()
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