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Title details for Possessed by Memory by Harold Bloom - Available

Possessed by Memory

The Inward Light of Criticism

by Harold Bloom
Stephen Mendel
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors— texts he has had by heart since childhood.
Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts—an inward journey from childhood to ninety—Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens—and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things."
As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memoryis with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."
Includes a PDF diagram from the book.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 16, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781984840448
      • File size: 482698 KB
      • Duration: 16:45:37

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This superb audiobook is a seminar in great poetry from the Old Testament to the century just past. Bloom, our most revered literary critic, who is in his late 80s now, looks back at the poems and authors he's most admired. Many of the recent poets are friends now departed, and a sense of nostalgia and loss pervades the material. Stephen Mendel is an especially effective narrator--energetic, strong paced, sensitive to poetic rhythm and nuance, yet free of accent and affect. Bloom's commentaries are brief, and he is generous, exceeding generous, in quoting his authors. Read with simple grace and clarity, these great poems come together with an immediacy and naturalism rarely found in audiobook readings of the classics. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 18, 2019
      Admirers of prolific polymath Bloom (Macbeth: A Dagger in the Mind) will treasure this assemblage of 76 pieces, ranging in length from brief reflections to full-length essays, and in genre from memoir to literary analysis. Bloom’s central interest—the role of influence in literary history—is highlighted in selections that showcase his deep immersion in canonical greats (Shakespeare, Milton ), Romantic-era poets (Byron, Keats, and Shelley), and the later Victorians (Browning and Tennyson), whom he sees as undervalued by recent criticism. Bloom also attends to American poets, including Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and longtime friend John Asberry, and religious writings, with character sketches of biblical figures such as Deborah, Moses, and Ruth and a meditation on the Kabbalah. Ample excerpts illustrate his assertions, such as that Edmund’s speech from King Lear on how “we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars” illustrates why the villainous character is nonetheless “surprisingly attractive” for his “candor and clarity.” However, general readers may find Bloom’s personal remarks most affecting, such as on how, while “nearing 88, I have to consider how little I know of time to come.” A rich lifetime of readership and scholarship can be found within the covers of this equally rich book. Agent: Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, Writers’ Representatives.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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