Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I am honored to have as my guest someone who should have been my guest years ago.

It's Harold Bloom, and he's done an anthology of the best poems of the English language.

And it's from Harper Collins.

It's one of the most remarkable things I've encountered.

What I've said in a letter to listeners is that if you can imagine really decades' worth

of the most exciting lecture notes and observations compressed into one place

with the addition of a personality presiding over an anthology.

In other words, if you can imagine a Norton anthology by someone who is justifying his tastes and arguing against the inclusion of certain things.

In other words, a book that you can read because it has a human voice, a human shape behind it.

That is the best poems of the English language, and it's published by Harper Collins.

Now, one of the things I noticed, Harold, is that this book is not, in any sense, a beginner's book.

When I read your essay on how to begin poetry, I breathed the sigh of relief to see.

It's not for someone starting out, but is there a beginning?

Well, I think the beginning is always individual, Michael. It's that mysterious moment in the birth of the soul.

It happened in me in a kind of odd way. I grew up in the Bronx speaking Yiddish and because

Mama and Papa only spoke Yiddish and that was the language at home and I taught myself to

...