The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, selected and with Commentary by Harold Bloom, New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 972 pp. HAROLD BLOOM is to be congratulated for his courage in speaking up for literary standards in an age of intellectual decline. It is difficult to fault a man who called the New York Times Book Review "not very literate" and summed up Stephen King as an "immensely inadequate writer on a sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, book by book basis." In 2003, the noted Professor of Literature at Yale chided the National Book Foundation for "recognizing nothing but the commercial value" of books. To his credit, Bloom has also spoken out regarding the "menace" to reading, "from grade school through graduate school throughout the English speaking world." The menace is "a reading governed by ideological and social considerations."
