Harold Bloom's epic poem

Bloom's written a great long poem.

It's in his The Art of Reading (Harper Collins, 2004) pps.16-20.

I've been walking around and around with his book for three days now, holed up in the cabin.

Bloom's great long poem--stitched seamlessly from excerpts Bloom chose from poems by Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens and presented in numbered sequence--not only proves academics can write superb lyric poetry but demonstrates once and for all that all great poets are, perforce, great critics.

"A faltering of voice mars, and can destroy, any poem whatsoever. Sustained and justified pride of performance is a frequent attribute of the best lyric poetry," Bloom writes (p.33).

While writing a poem, the word performance has never occurred to me. Perhaps it should have; I think it will from now on; perhaps I'll write a great poem.

Cavafy is supposed to have said something like: if you write one poem in your lifetime, be glad, consider yourself blessed, or lucky. My lunar paraphrase: be content with what's given, what's given is all you get.

I saw somewhere that Bloom's written an introduction to a Beckett miscellany; now that might be fun to read. Maybe he'll write a long short poem or a short long poem, an appropriate epic, for the language poets.

Great poetry has inevitability, says Bloom. Oppen said the same thing, as least as well if not better, when he said, "if a poem is a poem it could only have been that poem."