SOURCE: "The Sad Captain of Criticism," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, March 2, 1989, pp. 22-4.

In the following review of Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, Donoghue explores Bloom's discussion of the influence of religious forms in Romantic literature.

One of the many histrionic vivacities in Harold Bloom's book is its title. Ruin the sacred truths: apparently an admonition, the verb an imperative. But why would Harold Bloom, hitherto not known as a vandal, urge his readers to do such a dreadful thing? The point of the title, but not the justification of the ruin it proposes, emerges on page 125, where Bloom alludes to Andrew Marvell's poem on Paradise Lost, in which Marvell, referring to Milton, feared

That he would ruin (for I saw him strong)

The sacred Truths to Fable and Old Song.

I assume, then, that...