One morning in September 2002, Harold Bloom was shaving in his upstairs bathroom, preparing to commence yet another year of teaching at Yale. Suddenly he collapsed. “It was,” he recalls, “like a bad motion picture: everything turned into blood.”

Apparently an overdose of arthritis medication had led to a ruptured stomach ulcer. In a sense, however, the author, teacher, and fly in the ointment of American academia had gotten lucky: during Bloom’s

initial treatment, doctors discovered that all three of the arteries leading to his heart were clogged or fragmenting. He was rushed to an operating room, where surgeons performed an emergency triple-bypass; a lengthy recuperation followed.

Twenty months later, sitting in a brown leather chair in his living room, Bloom is even more grateful for the collapse that revealed his heart condition: quoting Milton, he refers to it as a fortunate fall. Yet readers have an additional cause for gratitude. During his convalescence, this author of 27 previous books was forced to slow his customary pace of composition. Instead he passed the time by reciting to himself some fraction of the poems he knows by heart—thousands upon thousands of lines, which Bloom began committing to memory at age 12. And eventually he decided to assemble this hoard for the general public. The result, published in March, is The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, a 972-page behemoth with copious commentary scattered throughout.

“I must have begun it when I returned to life and went out into the world again,” he says. “About a year ago. But I always wanted to put together such an anthology, knowing that I would end it with poets born in 1899. Why? For two reasons. First: during the twentieth century, there has been a kind of Malthusian explosion, a tremendous overpopulation, of very good poets.”

The second reason, it becomes clear, is that Bloom wished to dodge the pressures of political correctness that come to bear on any anthology of contemporary poetry. “The standards of judgment which matter to me,” he insists, “are cognitive achievement, aesthetic splendor, and wisdom: only those three. And those are not the standards now applied in the universities and colleges of the English-speaking world. Nor are they the standards applied in the media. Everyone is now much more concerned with gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, skin pigmentation, and twenty other irrelevancies. I have stood against that very fiercely for 35 years now, and I continue to do so today.”

In fact he has already gotten some critical flack for his choices. A long piece in the recent Virginia Quarterly Review (which Bloom quotes by heart, after repeatedly assuring me that he doesn’t read his reviews) takes him to task for his “scorched-earth policy toward women and minority writers.” There is, to be a sure, a preponderance of Dead White Males in Bloom’s book. Yet it’s also worth pointing out that he ranks Emily Dickinson with Walt Whitman at the very pinnacle of American poetry, edging out such manly contenders as Frost, Stevens, and Eliot. This is hardly the judgment of a raving misogynist.

In any case--and despite the definitive ring of the title--this is a personal anthology. Bloom advances a litmus test of his own in the introduction, called “inevitability,” which he defines as “phrasing that cannot be avoided, that must be.” In our conversation, however, he admits that inevitability is impossible to pin down: some elusive combination of verbal music and what Emerson refers to as “meter-making argument.”

No, what holds this volume together is Bloom’s ardent attachment to its contents. More than once during our interview he interrupts himself and launches into verse, closing his eyes for the final stretch of Hart Crane’s “Voyages II,” caressing the syllables. “Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song,” an Elizabethan showpiece he calls “the greatest anonymous poem in the language,” elicits a Cockney accent and some suitably demented eye-popping: at the climax, he stretches his legs in agitation, revealing a pale segment of ankle above his blue slippers.

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