Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of a Reader's Mind over a Universe of Death

Written by Harold Bloom

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry

This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed days before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.”
Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,”
he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.”

In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He
feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear-eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705003978

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He has written more than sixty books, including Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air, Falstaff: Give Me Life, The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and How to Read and Why. He is a MacArthur Prize fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Criticism. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.