[lbo-talk] Bloom gets all excited about Whitman

[Dennis Redmond]

> Wall Street Journal - July 29, 2005
>
> Whitman's America
> By HAROLD BLOOM
>
> He is the greatest artist his nation has brought
> forth. Indeed, no comparable figure in the arts has emerged in the
> last 400 years in the Americas: North, Central, South, or the
> Caribbean.

Damn, what a load of imperialist crap, and a dishonor to Whitman, who was
of course a great poet (though not greater than, say, Emily Dickinson).
Bloom has long been a Shakespeare fetishist, going on and on and on about
how Willy the Shakes is the be-all and end-all of human experience. So now
he's moved on to Walt the Whit.

This must be part of the ideological life-cycle of the Yale professoriat -
first decades of seething, never-satisfied British-envy, and finally the
late breakthrough to a safely neutralized and canonic American, whose
settler colonialism and patriarchal mannerisms can be reclaimed wholesale
for the age of the Terror War.

-- DRR