I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’d completely freed myself from academia and abandoned all hope of an academic career, even an academic life, did I return to those poems, again not even consciously, and find not just pleasure in them but meaning, which is also too earnest and defined a word to say what I discovered. And then in those moments I don’t hear Bloom’s voice at all, but I’m aware that the — pleasure is too soft a word — insight I receive from, say, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” takes place in a Bloomian universe: gnostic, agonistic, a beauty with terror in it, clashing structures and strange cohabitations, a poem as a play in as many acts as the poet needs.

If you got the Bloom experience at the right time of your life, as a poet or a person who loves poetry, then he could be perfect. At a crisis moment for such a person, he might also be terrible. There is something to be said for teaching that has no “deliverables,” for which the only answer to the evaluator’s question about what was learned is: “Ask me in five years, then again in ten, then in twenty.” In 1998, I had vague feelings for poetry that I didn’t know were at odds with the academic persona I was trying to cultivate. I put poems into meaning machines linked to my ambition and ground them into dust. Years later, once I’d relinquished the need to definitively interpret anything in such a way that it could be professionally recognized and circulated, in ways that credited the originality and rigor of my interpretations, the poems came back to me as poetry and I could hear them: sometimes as poems that did not transcend themselves; sometimes as individuals marked, as we are, by others living and dead.

[...] Chaudhuri’s antinarrative miniaturism (as per Hilary Mantel), his interest in modest worldliness and the domestic life of a city, won a select but influential cast of admirers, huddled together against the backdrop of the 1990s postmodern resuscitation of narrative. But as Coe’s phrasing suggests (“in that respect”), critics were also left wanting, or just bemused. They would praise the work for one or two thousand words and then, at the review’s end, start peering around the corner, as if suspecting they might have been waiting in the wrong room. The novels were delightful, but slight; elegant, but chilly; arrestingly plotless, but finally still plotless. Chaudhuri’s position solidified. He was a virtuoso of a minor literature, absorbed in the autumnal practice of recording the quiet pleasures of the small and the passed-over and the modern. The world inside, and out, of the bourgeois apartment. A fading afternoon in a past Calcutta, outmoded by globalization.

Today we might assume that the presence of churchgoers in the movement was a moderating force. But in the 1970s and ’80s, religious people who had spent time in countries to the south were bringing the teachings of liberation theology back with them. This movement, born in Latin America, insisted on reinterpreting Christian doctrine through the lived experience of the region. For the majority of people there, this was an experience of subjugation and impoverishment. Arguing that Christianity demanded a “preferential option for the poor,” religious workers used grassroots Bible-study groups as a means of radical consciousness-raising, and they organized parishioners into “base communities” dedicated to challenging oppression. Right-wing militaries took this challenge very seriously. By the end of the ’70s, leaflets were being circulated in the Salvadoran countryside reading “Be a patriot, kill a priest.”

Liberation theologians were not afraid to employ Marxist analysis in determining the root causes of exploitation and deprivation. Among the priests who joined the Sandinista government after the overthrow of Somoza, one renowned liberationist, the poet Ernesto Cardenal, became minister of culture, and another, Miguel d’Escoto, a Maryknoll priest, became foreign minister. Although not aligned with the guerrillas, Monseñor Romero — who was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2018 — believed that a person could not follow the example of Jesus without denouncing injustice. Like Martin Luther King Jr., Romero was well aware that his commitments might lead to martyrdom. Yet he nevertheless gave voice to an uncompromising vision of solidarity: “One who is committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor,” he stated. “And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, and to be found dead.” Just weeks before his murder, he insisted, “If they manage to carry out their threats, I shall be offering my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.”

With the recent return of figures such as Abrams and Bolton to the public stage, this analysis remains relevant. And yet it also does not seem fully fitting today. In the Trump era, the administration’s stance toward Latin America has followed a jumbled set of cues, but has tended toward xenophobic isolationism. In March, Trump announced that he was cutting US aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. “We’re not paying them anymore,” he stated, “because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

This is a far cry from the era when conservatives manufactured elaborate schemes to ensure that funding would flow unimpeded, so they could shape the region to their design. For the current occupant of the White House, El Salvador is not a sign of freedom won but a symbol of another kind: it represents the places and peoples that America must wall out. Should a more coherent isolationism become the defining stance of the Republican Party, El Salvador will be emblematic of the distance traveled between Reagan and Trump.