AMERICAN RELIGION: DIVINITY OF THE SELF

Harold Bloom, American Religious Poems: An Anthology, edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba (New York: Library of America, 2006) ("After the birth of the United States, we produced no devotional poets of high merit." Id. at xxviii. "Any distinction between sacred and secular literature is finally a political judgment, and therefore irrelevant in the realms if the aesthetic. The United States, already of plutocracy, flickers these days towards theocracy. A theocratic American doubtless will distinguish between sacred and secular utterances, but Whitmanian democracy fuses them in the divinity of the self, which is our native understanding of the Resurrection  as an escape form history, that is to say, from European time." Id. at xxviii-xxix.).