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

“[Bloom] is the Satan of criticism...he is heroic even in those passages in which we are permitted to suspect that he may be a charlatan.”—Dennis Donoghue, New York Review of Books

The most prodigious literary mind of his generation on the transcendent acts of self-creation that define the Western canon, from the Torah to Samuel Beckett.

John Milton’s contemporary Andrew Marvell once confessed that reading Paradise Lost troubled his faith. Milton’s lyrical prowess was beyond doubt, but precis...