“I think of Whitman and Melville, in their relation to the contemporary United States, as our resource akin to Isaiah’s prophecy:
And a man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. —ISAIAH 32:2
“We have a need to heal violence, whether from without or from within. Our strongest writers—Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Hawthorne, James, Twain, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Crane, and Faulkner, among others—can meet that imaginative poverty and help protect the individual mind and society from themselves. I now have come to see that as the highest use of literature for our way of life.”
Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows