Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems

"By definition, all living poets are excluded from this book. Myself seventy-nine years of age, I grieve still for many of these poets who were my friends. But knowledge, not pathos, is my purpose in gathering this anthology. Lastness is a part of knowing". (Harold Bloom). From Harold Bloom, the foremost literary critic of our time, comes a delightful anthology of the final works of great poets. In "Till I End My Song", Bloom has meticulously curated the last poems of one hundred influential poets. These poems, sometimes the literal end and other times the imagined conclusion to a poetic career, offer a lens through which to contemplate the enduring nature of art and the inevitability of death. Bloom's selections highlight the work of the canonized poets T.S. Eliot, Alexander Pope, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare, but also revive interest in distinguished but long-neglected poets, such as Conrad Aiken, William Cowper, Edwin Arlington Robinson, George Meredith, and Louis MacNeice. An authoritative collection of last poems, "Till I End My Song" will reverberate long into the coming silence.