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Possessed by Memory

The Inward Light of Criticism

The Inward Light of Criticism

The Inward Light of Criticism

The Inward Light of Criticism

By Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom

By Harold Bloom
Read by Stephen Mendel

By Harold Bloom
Read by Stephen Mendel

Best Seller
Paperback $18.00

Mar 17, 2020 | ISBN 9780525562474

Hardcover $35.00

Apr 16, 2019 | ISBN 9780525520887

Ebook $12.99

Apr 16, 2019 | ISBN 9780525520894

Audiobook Download $27.50

Apr 16, 2019 | 1005 Minutes

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    Possessed by Memory by Harold Bloom
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    About Possessed by Memory

    “Wonderful. . . . Spectacular. . . . You feel the pulse of life, what poetry can bring to us if we let it.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

    “This audacious personal odyssey offers readers a cosmos of possibilities when contemplating what happens once we ‘shuffle off this mortal coil.'” —The Christian Science Monitor

    “An elegiac meditation on a life lived through books.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

    “The great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him.” —The New York Times Book Review

    Here is the daringly original literary critic’s most personal book: a four-part spiritual autobiography in the form of brief, luminous readings of poetry, drama, and prose—much of which he has known by heart since childhood. As one of his own mentors, M. H. Abrams, has said, to read Bloom’s commentaries is like “reading classic authors by flashes of lightning.” Gone are the polemics; here Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but himself. In “A Voice she Heard Before the World Was Made,” he offers startling meditations on foundational concerns of Biblical study. “In the Elegy Season” finds him coming to terms movingly, from a new vantage, with writers on whom he has brooded for much of his life. And with brio and bravura in “The Imperfect Is Our Paradise,” Bloom ranges dazzlingly through twentieth-century American poetry, from Wallace Stevens to Amy Clampitt. Possessed by Memory, in short, is essential Bloom.

    About Possessed by Memory

    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 Memory is 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.”

    About Possessed by Memory

    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 Memory is 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.”

    About Possessed by Memory

    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.

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    Also by Harold Bloom

    The Bright Book of Life
    The Daemon Knows
    Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
    Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
    Julius Caesar
    See all books by Harold Bloom

    Also by Harold Bloom

    The Bright Book of Life
    The Daemon Knows
    Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
    Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
    Julius Caesar
    See all books by Harold Bloom

    Also by Harold Bloom

    The Bright Book of Life
    The Daemon Knows
    Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
    Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
    Julius Caesar
    See all books by Harold Bloom

    Also by Harold Bloom

    The Bright Book of Life
    The Daemon Knows
    Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
    Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
    Julius Caesar
    See all books by Harold Bloom

    About Harold Bloom

    HAROLD BLOOM is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon… More about Harold Bloom

    About Harold Bloom

    HAROLD BLOOM is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon… More about Harold Bloom

    About Harold Bloom

    HAROLD BLOOM is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon… More about Harold Bloom

    About Harold Bloom

    HAROLD BLOOM is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon… More about Harold Bloom

    Product Details

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Poetry | Literary Criticism

    Paperback | $18.00
    Published by Vintage
    Mar 17, 2020 | 544 Pages | 5-3/16 x 8 | ISBN 9780525562474

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Poetry | Literary Criticism

    Hardcover | $35.00
    Published by Knopf
    Apr 16, 2019 | 544 Pages | 6-1/4 x 9-1/4 | ISBN 9780525520887

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Poetry | Literary Criticism

    Ebook | $12.99
    Published by Vintage
    Apr 16, 2019 | 544 Pages | ISBN 9780525520894

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Poetry | Literary Criticism | Audiobooks

    Audiobook Download | $27.50
    Published by Random House Audio
    Apr 16, 2019 | 1005 Minutes | ISBN 9781984840431

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    Praise

    “Describe is what he does, perhaps more brilliantly than anyone else alive.”
    —Esquire 

    “The great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him. “
    –The New York Times

    “Our era’s Samuel Johnson…Possessed by Memory really is a kind of valediction… Bloom has loved literature deeply—and that love is, even in the face of death, a life-giving force.”
    —Commonweal Magazine 

    “These essays reveal a deeply personal attachment and fresh perspective. An eloquent and erudite rereading of the author’s beloved works.”
    —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

    “A rich lifetime of readership and scholarship can be found within the covers of this equally rich book.”
    —Publishers Weekly

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