“I write for children and angels.” – William Blake

The posthumous book THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: THE LITERARY LETTERS OF HAROLD BLOOM was recently published (in 2026) by Yale University Press. It is a small, thin book, and there is no doubt that many of the literary letters Bloom wrote over his 89-year-life are not included. But this book is a representative sample, condensed and where every example has its relevance; as such, this book is like part of the gospel for anyone who loves creative literature in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Creative HUMAN literature, that is. In a world of lies and delusions, both mass and personal, one thing (at least) is for sure: the half dozen or so technical “wizards” right now who are building AI do not understand human artistic creativity, or its importance for our species, at all.

They are purely technical minds, so divorced from an understanding of real and true human, artistic creativity that they themselves are almost inhuman. THIS is why they have no problem trying to turn everyone who is now (still) human into a dollar-making (for them) robot.

THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING was published by Yale University Press with a grant. That means this is not a commercial book. The number of people who purchase this book will not be enough to make back the money it took to publish it. Whoever was behind this project understands that some things in the world are more important than money.

I said it was gospel. The letters of Paul (including the ones written in his name after his style that are included in the canonical Gospels) are some of the greatest creative writing that has been written on Planet Earth, any place, any time. THAT is why they’ve had such a profound impact for both (mostly) good, and ILL (just barely behind the good they have done). The surviving letters of Paul amount to a double handful; they were written for free and have changed the world more than any other human writing, ever. That is because they are WRITTEN SO WELL. (Paul’s letters survive all translations, and become new things that have grown from the old and so are part of the original source with consistent ties going back two thousand years, more relevant now than they were then.)

Bloom spent his life channeling the fact that HOW WELL something is written is the first criteria that should be considered when considering creative Literature with a capital L. Political considerations are also commercial considerations, one way or another. Any political agenda the good and true reader of classic imaginative literature brings to the material will be a highly imaginative, extremely fluid one, and it will be secondary. Rigidity of thought and purpose are not part of the highest (human) creative arts. Bending the mind and breaking the rules is what creative writing is for. Therefore, it will always be trampled into the dust by THE MACHINE, but it will never die there. It will rise from the mud like the most beautiful flowers that have ever been born on Planet Earth. This is because imaginative literature in its highest forms contains the very wisdom of humanity itself, not less and not more. So many of the greatest writers are essentially comedians in the end because this viewpoint finally transcends the tragic viewpoint. It sometimes seems heartless to make the mind rise above it all but this is what the greatest writing actually does, which is one reason (but just one reason) why it is often called “transcendent.” It strips away the delusions and shows humans what they are, what they were, and what they might become. The comic viewpoint in the highest levels of writing transcends all tragedies. After taking very deep account of them first.

In one of these letters, Bloom writes about himself: “Lord knows what I am. Not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher, or theosophist – but a worthless mélange of the gang of it.”

All creative writers worth anything in 2026 need to be all of the above, and even more, somehow. That is just one reason why it takes almost all the best of the best writers so long to find their voices, starting now, or yesterday. The complexity of the world has blown itself way out of proportion. The writer who ignores this is not doing their (or his or her) job.

There are at least 200 separate academic disciplines in the world today. In most of them, the number of experts in the world who can truly understand the real and true cutting edge of that discipline amounts to a few dozen at most.

This is probably also true for the most cutting-edge imaginative human literature right now, which is the most cutting-edge discipline there is (by far).

As such, it is a dark time.

As the world plunges down toward more darkness now, in the end the light will grow – or it will be extinguished.

“Theosophist” means imagining somewhere else (without abandoning the here and now).

Dale the Drifter (images by Dale the Drifter)