Volume 36, Number 3 · March 2, 1989
The Sad Captain of Criticism
By Denis Donoghue
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present
by Harold Bloom
Harvard University Press, 204 pp., $20.00
One of the many histrionic vivacities in Harold Bloom's book is its title. Ruin the sacred truths: apparently an admonition, the verb an imperative. But why would Harold Bloom, hitherto not known as a vandal, urge his readers to do such a dreadful thing? The point of the title, but not the justification of the ruin it proposes, emerges on page 125, where Bloom alludes to Andrew Marvell's poem on Paradise Lost, in which Marvell, referring to Milton, feared
Review, 3854 words
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