In this thin book, Bloom defines poetry as "figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.” (Ch 1) and suggests that one needs to master "allusiveness" to appreciate great poetry. When considering how to judge whether one poem is better than another, he cautions against "extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and assorted ideologies" (Ch 7) and rely principally on what he calls "inevitability" which seems to mean using a word or a phrase that seems to the reader to be unavoidable and yet not predictable, much like Aristotle in his Poetics asserts that a plot twist (he calls it a 'reversal') should come as a surprise and yet be causally connected to the previous events in such as way that, in retrospect, the reader (or viewer of a drama) should see it as an inevitable consequence of what came earlier. Finally, Bloom suggests that a great poem expands our consciousness through what he calls "strangeness".
It is an interesting book although Bloom uses some difficult words which I had to look up (including the word 'etonym' which I can't find in my dictionary; is it a misprint for 'metonym'?)
The third of the book is a (long) list of recommended poems.
April 2026; 82 pages
- The book is an excerpt from The Best Poems of the English Language by Bloom, published in 2004 by Harper Collins.
- My copy was published as a paperback in 2005
This review was written by
the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling
and The Kids of God
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