The Daemon Knows Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

Enrapturing . . . radiant . . . intoxicating . . . Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture. Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review

The capstone to a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching . . . The primary strength of The Daemon Knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. . . . Bloom s books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground. The Washington Post
 
Audacious . . . The Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work. The Huffington Post
 
The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one. John Ashbery
 
Mesmerizing. New York Journal of Books
 
Bloom is a formidable critic, an extravagant intellect. Chicago Tribune
 
As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom s any more. The Guardian (U.K.)