Henry v

In the prologue to his biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson evokes the Hero’s Journey in its most pop-culture incarnation: It’s one of the most resonant tropes in mythology. To what extent does the epic quest of the Star Wars hero require exorcising demons bequeathed by Darth Vader and wrestling with the dark side of the Force? Isaacson’s assumption is that Luke Skywalker is the hero of the original film A New Hope. His preamble is titled “Muse of Fire,” a reference to the most famous prologue in literature, the opening lines of Henry V. In Shakespeare’s play, the poet, recognizing the gargantuan feat before him, asks the Muse for help: O, for a muse of fire that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

In a time when literature is held to be futile, it is cheering that some literary values persist. One of those values, confirmed by T.S. Eliot in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), is that writing a book is almost invariably less futile than writing a book about books. Criticism, Eliot wrote, could not be ‘autotelic’, expressing only itself, because criticism was about other things, like ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’. The critic, then, performs a kind of clean-up operation after the party.Harold Bloom, who died yesterday at 89, was a rare exception to that rule. For Bloom, criticism was the vehicle of spiritual autobiography.