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Seminar We were discussing (Bloom was discussing) “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” by Browning, 1855. We had followed the hero off the road, across a poisoned stream and waste, past instruments of torture and a horse that “must be wicked to deserve such pain,” the hero tells us – Bloom interpreting at every step, or saying more interpretation was needed. At last the Tower lifelong training has failed to prepare him for astounds the knight. “And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. ‘*Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came*.’” “Why,” asked Bloom – that big voice partly a frantic angel’s, partly from the tomb – “that period? I really do not know. Why not a comma, or nothing? It isn’t a misprint.” I thought a long time (my fellow students looked like they were thinking) and said, “He becomes a song. The period is an equals sign. Everything to the left of it equals that sentence.” It was my finest academic moment. It was during his seminar on the Romantics in ’66. The affectations and manias we made a cult of smoothed, his clothes neater, Bloom became famous. One in that class was in Clinton’s White House, one died towards the end in Vietnam. Students became profs. Poems became footnotes. I appear to have become an Expressionist study of a knight on horseback. It isn’t a normal Expressionist motif. They would have preferred the unbounded, natural energy of the horse. With me on it – three-hundred-plus pounds of man and armor – and despite the fierce brushwork, it looks sad and seems to be going nowhere, the lance at my side to be elsewhere.