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Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems Kindle Edition
“A colossus among critics. . . . His enthusiasm for literature is a joyous intoxicant.” —New York Times
In this charming anthology, esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom collects the last poems of history's most important and celebrated poets. As with his immensely popular Best Poems of the English Language, Bloom has carefully curated and annotated the final works of one hundred poets in Till I End My Song, with selections from John Keats, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, John Milton, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, and others. Written with the same wise and discerning commentary of earlier books—including his acclaimed Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and The Book of J—Till I End My Song is a moving and provocative meditation on the relationship between art, meaning, and ultimately, death, from the literary titan of our time.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateOctober 12, 2010
- File size1419 KB
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Review
From the Back Cover
From Harold Bloom, the foremost literary critic of our time, comes a delightful anthology of the final works of great poets. In Till I End My Song, Bloom has meticulously curated the last poems of one hundred influential poets. These poems, sometimes the literal end and other times the imagined conclusion to a poetic career, offer a lens through which to contemplate the enduring nature of art and the inevitability of death. Bloom's selections highlight the work of the canonized poets T. S. Eliot, Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare, but also revive interest in distinguished but long-neglected poets, such as Conrad Aiken, William Cowper, Edwin Arlington Robinson, George Meredith, and Louis MacNeice. An authoritative collection of last poems, Till I End My Song will reverberate long into the coming silence.
About the Author
Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.
Product details
- ASIN : B003V1WS14
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Reprint edition (October 12, 2010)
- Publication date : October 12, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 1419 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 419 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #533,491 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #97 in Poetry About Death
- #126 in Poetry Anthologies (Kindle Store)
- #199 in Religious & Inspirational Poetry
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"If your next birthday will be your eightieth, and you have read the greatest poetry all your life, then you begin to know that in the face of dying and death, the imagination is at once nothing and everything."
I especially like that phrase, "begin to know". Even at near-80, "in the face of dying and death", there's still a "begin to know". That fits, as does much that Bloom writes in his introduction.
Regardless, this collection is a gift to us -- when we're ready. And because in this past year, I've faced the approaching and actual deaths of those dear to me, I've found it a gift. Because, too, I'm over 60, and my own death is more real -- maybe I can bring death & dying more truly into my mind and heart.
I dip into this book from time to time. I'll read something new or re-read something well-known; sometimes I'll read several poems, sometimes just one or two. What I've gained -- I wouldn't call it solace, but a kind of peace. Maybe it's a peace from having my own thoughts better and more deeply said. Maybe it's a peace from an opening, a bit of light on a subject that can become very dark. Maybe it's a peace from joining the poem's sadness, its grieving to my own.
It's a wondrous collection. I'm not a pro with poetry, but I do read & enjoy, and I've done so for a while. Some selections, here, are what I suspect a good poetry/drama reader would expect: Marlow's Faustus in the last hour of life, Shakespeare's Prospero renouncing his magical powers; Donne's beautifully obsessive fear of sin and death in his Hymn to God the Father; George Herbert's gentle yet persistent Love (God), who "bade me welcome".
Other poems and poets were dimly known or unknown -- at least to me. Yet all of them so far (I've read most but not yet all of the poems.) have given me a line, usually several lines that I want to linger over, to savor and take inside as this or that death comes closer or happens.
Just today, for example, I read the poem, "Days of 1994", by James Merrill, whom I did not know. It was written just before his death. Merrill is looking around "these days in my friend's house, Light seeks me underground." Closing with:
Before day ends:
The spectacles, the book,
Forgetful lover and forgotten love,
Cobweb hung with trophy wings,
The fading trumpet of a car,
The knowing glance from star to star,
The laughter of old friends.
And a poet I know well, Wilfred Owen, I also read today with a poem I didn't know, this after listening last week to a young soldier talk about the death of friends. As I read that poem, "Futility", I was thinking of him & his friends as well as of the deaths of young men and children I, as therapist, have heard other soldiers describe. And I was thinking of the on-coming death of one of my own friends. "Futility" was clearly written on the death of a young friend during the trench madness of WWI, and it written only a half-year before Owen's own death:
Move him into the sun --
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, --
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved -- still warm -- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
All the 80+ poets and poems are given Bloom's focused introductions, leading us into the poem, the poet, and (as Bloom says) its "lastness".
If you sense, within yourself, a resonance with death, dying and "lastness", I highly recommend this book. I find it a welcome companion.
I recommend Till I End My Song to people of mature years. It's not a book for the youthful crowd. A. M. Seidler
The lion in winter is in the sunset of his life, and he is giving us perhaps his last book. He is the scholar's scholar, and in this book he has done something unique. He has taken his gargantuan mind and perused 100 of the Western world's most influential poets. He has studied and absorbed their last poems. These are literally the last works these literary giants have written. In certain instances these poems were written in contemplation of death or the end of a career.
You will recognize the vast majority of those represented. The book is organized in chronological order by the poets' birthdate. This means Edmund Spenser born in 1552 is first, and Agha Shahid Ali 1949 is last. Among those represented are Kipling, Yeats, Frost, Lawrence, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Lowell. Of course such early poet masters as Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare are represented.
I believe that if you open yourself to this book, it will become treasured by you and the one you pass it onto, for this is a book that you will pass on. It will become a family treasure. Harold Bloom is a very special professor at Yale University, he's been there forever. It is true that he personifies what teaching is all about. Think back and do you remember a time in your life when a teacher really made a difference. His impact on you lasted a lifetime. This is a person who helped shape your life, who and what you have become, what you think about. Harold Bloom is such a teacher, and his life has been extraordinary.
Only a few times in a century does a Harold Bloom come along. Earlier in the 20th century there was Mortimer Adler, now we have Bloom. As a Yale professor he cast a wide shadow on his students, but as an essayist, as an author, as a critic, his shadow has been cast on all of us.
Reading "Till I End My Song - A Gathering of Last Poems" will transform you. It will make you a better human being. It will enlighten you. You will reflect, grow, and become. They are all very powerful poems that Bloom has selected. Each poem is introduced with a page or two of Bloom's thoughts on the poet, and his impact. This alone is worth the price of the book, then comes the poem, each magnificent. Read several at a time, read one a day. Bring an open mind to each and allow yourself to enjoy the last words of the giants who have walked among us. From Dylan Thomas's "Poem on his Birthday", to Michael Drayton's "Last Verses, So well I Love Thee". I promise you an adventure like no other.
Who Should Read This Book?
I would not give it to a young person except in rare instances. This book is meant for those who have lived a long and introspective life, an intellectual life, for readers, for those desperate for enlightenment - you decide and thank you for reading this review.
Richard C. Stoyeck