The most productive, opinionated, and erudite literary critic of modern times has done it again in this volume which gathers 100 ‘last poems’ from Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” written in 1590 and the source for the title, to “The Veiled Suite” by Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali who died in 2001.

Not all of these poems are their actual final works, but Bloom characterizes those that are not by observing that they are “intended to mark the end” or “seem…an imaginative conclusion to a poetic career.”

Each of the 100 poets is introduced in a brief biography in which Bloom interestingly always included their parents’ names and professions, birth order and home town, social class, education, marriage, children, and their religion.  The poems are often not those the poet is best known for or even characteristic of their body of work.  Most of the poets were known to me, but Bloom introduced me to new ones, as he always does, e.g. W. S. Graham, Keith Douglas, Vicki Hearne.  All of Bloom’s favorites are here:   Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Samuel Johnson, and more contemporary  Ammons, Merrill, Wright, Bishop, Stevens, Crane.

Reading the book straight through was way too much. Some of the poems were inaccessible to this reader and the sheer volume proved to be overwhelming.  Keeping it on my nightstand to dip into from time to time will prove to be a better approach, no doubt.

Bloom by his choice of 84 white men, 1 African-American man, and 15 women, showed his Western canon orientation and bias, but that being said, the collection along with that of Said has real value as a source of wisdom about aging and dying as expressed by great creative artists.