Harold Bloom at NYT laments the pending doom of Limbo:
Limbo has a rich literary history, in honor of which I hope the pope and his International Theological Commission will refrain from exiling this amiably ambiguous realm. Hell, Purgatory and Heaven may seem rather strictly demarcated and limited destinations, without Limbo as an interesting outrider. In the Italian Renaissance poet Luduvico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso," the knight Astolfo visits the moon's Limbo and discovers there all of earth's wastages: talents locked up in named vases, bribes hanging on gold hooks, and much besides.
In "Henry VIII," Shakespeare uses the "Limbo of the Fathers" as a synonym for prison, while John Milton in "Paradise Lost" gives us the Paradise of Fools as a "limbo large and broad," where winds blow about Roman Catholic cowls, hoods, habits, relics, beads, indulgences, pardons and Papal Bulls.
The 18th-century satirical poet Alexander Pope expands on Ariosto and Milton in "The Rape of the Lock," where the lunar Limbo contains "the smiles of harlots and the tears of heirs." Much more somber is the "Limbo" of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, most famous for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." Coleridge's Limbo is not on the moon, nor on Hell's borders, but on the phantasmagoric line between what is and what is not, the waking nightmares of an opium addict: "The sole true Something - This! In Limbo's Den/It frightens Ghosts, as here Ghosts frighten men."
