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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm. Today I have two guests,

and we're all three of us going to celebrate and pay memorial to the passing of the remarkable Harold Bloom,

who was one of the very great professors of literature of his time,

and left behind, just before his death, a book called

Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death.

Now, we all feel the presence of a universe of death.

But Harold Bloom in this book goes through all of the poetry he wrote about during his life.

He writes about Milton, about Shakespeare, about Shelley, about Keats.

I mean, he goes all the way through the great American and English writers.

It's a thrilling opportunity to re-learn these great classics.

I found myself absorbed and even lost in this book.

So I'm going to begin talking to Peter Cole, who is both a poet and translator.

He not only is a poet and translator, he's a poet and translator from both the Hebrew and the Arabic.

The first time I encountered Peter Cole's name was in an article by Harold Bloom in the New York

Review of Books because Peter Cole had basically written about a time in Spain when the Jewish and the Arabic poets were of a

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