116 - Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present

By Harold Bloom

Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989. 204 Pp. $20.00.

In this study, Harold Bloom inquires into the ever shifting and recondite problematics of "poetry and belief," construed somewhat cryptically as "antithetical modes of knowledge" that "share the peculiarity of taking place between truth and meaning, while being somewhat alienated both from truth and from meaning." The path he follows from the Bible and Homer, through Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Wordsworth, to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett has been blazed before; one immediately thinks of Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye. What makes Bloom's contribution original, however, is his intensely personal insight into the ways "All strong poets... must ruin the sacred truths to fable and old song, precisely because the essential condition for poetic strength is that the new song, one's own, always must be a song of one's self."

Eric J. Ziolkowski, Lafayette College, Easton, Penn.