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. I find that they are woven into what I read. 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.

I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented. ". This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. 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. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. 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.

Here, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, instead, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature.

Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind Shakespeare's Personalities Book 5

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. From the greatest shakespeare scholar of our time, iago, one of william Shakespeare’s most complex and compelling anti-heroes—the final volume in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities: Falstaff, Lear, comes a portrait of Macbeth, Cleopatra, Macbeth.

From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife lady macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba.

Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, transforms into a brutal, who over the course of the play, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.

He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

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Lear: The Great Image of Authority Shakespeare's Personalities Book 3

Now he brings that insight to his “measured, thoughtful assessment of a key play in the Shakespeare canon” Kirkus Reviews. The aged, like bloom himself—is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from grace and widely agreed to be Shakespeare’s most moving, abused monarch—a man in his eighties, tragic hero.

He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. From one of the greatest shakespeare scholars of our time, a beloved professor who has taught the bard for over half a century—an intimate, arguably Shakespeare’s most tragic and compelling character, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Lear, the third in a series of five short books hailed as Harold Bloom’s “last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination” The New York Times Book Review.

King lear is one of the most famous and compelling characters in literature. Lear is a “short, superb book that has a depth of observation acquired from a lifetime of study” Publishers Weekly. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make.

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Iago: The Strategies of Evil Shakespeare's Personalities Book 4

From one of the greatest shakespeare scholars of our time, Harold Bloom presents Othello’s Iago, perhaps the Bard’s most compelling villain—the fourth in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities. Few antagonists in all of literature have displayed the ruthless cunning and deceit of Iago.

It remains widely performed across professional and community theatre alike and has been the source for many film and literary adaptations. One of william shakespeare’s most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, trust, love, betrayal, and repentance.

He delivers exhilarating intimacy and clarity in these pages, writing about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that Iago also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Now award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Iago’s motives and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion.

Denied the promotion he believes he deserves, Iago takes vengeance on Othello and destroys him. Why and how does iago use lies and deception—the fake news of the 15th century—to destroy Othello and several other characters in his path? What can Othello tell us about racism? Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, treating Shakespeare’s characters like people he has known all his life.

There are few readers more astute than Bloom” Publishers Weekly, and his Iago is a provocative study for our time.

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years.

A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on a scale that the author will not again attempt, The Anatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with a sense of something ever more about to be. The result is "a critical self-portrait, browning, ashbery, tennyson, and crane—as well as inspired appreciations of emerson, yeats, how it comes to be, " a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets—Shakespeare, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, Whitman, and why it matters.

Literary criticism, that is to say, as i attempt to practice it, "is in the first place literary, " writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, personal and passionate. For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers.

How the Classics Made Shakespeare E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series Book 3

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek. But he was exaggerating. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of classical drama, and he read deeply in Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca.

. At the heart of the book is an argument that Shakespeare’s supreme valuation of the force of imagination was honed by the classical tradition and designed as a defense of poetry and theater in a hostile world of emergent Puritanism. Rounded off with a fascinating account of how shakespeare became our modern classic and has ended up playing much the same role for us as the Greek and Roman classics did for him, accessibility, and scholarship, How the Classics Made Shakespeare combines stylistic brilliance, demonstrating why Jonathan Bate is one of our most eminent and readable literary critics.

Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. In a book of extraordinary range, acclaimed literary critic and biographer Jonathan Bate, one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare, offers groundbreaking insights into how, perhaps more than any other influence, the classics made Shakespeare the writer he became.

Revealing in new depth the influence of cicero and Horace on Shakespeare and finding new links between him and classical traditions, ranging from myths and magic to monuments and politics, Bate offers striking new readings of a wide array of the plays and poems. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, he moved to London, history, and rhetoric, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome.

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Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air Shakespeare's Personalities Book 2

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Cleopatra with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime.

Cleopatra is supremely vexing, tragic, and complex. She has fascinated readers and audiences for centuries and has been played by the greatest actresses of their time, from Elizabeth Taylor to Vivien Leigh to Janet Suzman to Judi Dench. With cleopatra, “bloom brings considerable expertise and his own unique voice to this book” Publishers Weekly, delivering exhilarating clarity and inviting us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world.

The result is an invaluable resource from our greatest literary critic. From harold bloom, comes an intimate, one of the greatest shakespeare scholars of our time, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Cleopatra—one of the Bard’s most riveting and memorable female characters—in “a masterfully perceptive reading of this seductive play’s endless wonders” Kirkus Reviews.

Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history—and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. The book becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our own humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make.

She is lover of marc antony, and, perhaps most enduringly, defender of Egypt, a champion of life.

Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

If we give ourselves the chance to look at tragedy, we might see further and more clearly. From the moderator of the new york times philosophy blog "the stone, to the stage of our livesTragedy presents a world of conflict and troubling emotion, " a book that argues that if we want to understand ourselves we have to go back to theater, a world where private and public lives collide and collapse.

A world where morality is ambiguous and the powerful humiliate and destroy the powerless. A world rather like our own. The ancient greeks hold a mirror up to us, in which we see all the desolation and delusion of our lives but also the terrifying beauty and intensity of existence. This is not a time for consolation prizes and the fatuous banalities of the self-help industry and pop philosophy.

Tragedy allows us to glimpse, in its harsh and unforgiving glare, the burning core of our aliveness. A world where justice always seems to be on both sides of a conflict and sugarcoated words serve as cover for clandestine operations of violence.

The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

Bloom’s books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground. The washington Post“Audacious. Radiant. Intoxicating. New york times bestseller • named one of the best books of the year by the washington post and kirkus reviewshailed as “the indispensable critic” by the new york review of books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters.

The primary strength of the daemon knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. Eliot, and william faulkner with hart crane, bloom places these writers’ works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon”—the spark of genius or Orphic muse—in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance.

. As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon.

Falstaff: Give Me Life Shakespeare's Personalities Book 1

In this first of five books about shakespearean personalities, Bloom brings erudition and boundless enthusiasm” Kirkus Reviews, starred review and his exhilarating Falstaff invites us to look at a character as a flawed human who might live in our world. Falstaff can be lewd, a bad creditor, and in the end, careless of others, funny, an unreliable friend, devastatingly reckless in his presumption of loyalty from the new King.

Just as we encounter one type of anna karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are young adults and another when we are middle-aged, Bloom writes about his own shifting understanding of Falstaff over the course of his lifetime. Ultimately we come away with a deeper appreciation of this profoundly complex character, and this “poignant work” Publishers Weekly, starred review as a whole becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

. He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal. From harold bloom, one of the greatest shakespeare scholars of our time comes “a timely reminder of the power and possibility of words and the last love letter to the shaping spirit of Bloom’s imagination” front page, The New York Times Book Review and an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Falstaff—Shakespeare’s greatest enduring and complex comedic characters.

Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare’s three Henry plays: Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and Henry V. Award-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom writes about Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make.

The Western Canon

He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, neoconservatism, Afro-centrism, feminism, Marxism, and the New Historicism. Harold bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon.

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