Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear,...
Discusses the concept of the sacred and the secular in western literature, and agrues that poetry cannot be judged by socially constructed criteria.