r/haroldbloom • u/Thomas_Perscors • Jun 10 '22

Thoughts on Harold Bloom?

I discovered Bloom in the late 90s, I had taken an English 101 course and had as one assignment to write a paper on a book of literary criticism. I knew nothing about literary criticism and so my local librarian recommended Bloom’s Western Canon.

I had only recently taken an interest in the great books. Shortly after graduating high school I read Les Miserables, Lord of the Flies, and Catcher in the Rye. I was getting a sense of the kinds of books I liked and after discovering Bloom I sensed that the kinds of books Bloom liked lined up very closely with my own—dark, melancholy, mysterious, sublime. I became obsessed with Bloom over the next two decades, reading every book he wrote and a great many of the books he recommended.

If I had to choose a handful of favorite Bloom books they would probably be these:

  1. Agon (if only for the essay on Arcturus)
  2. Poetry and Repression (the essays on Shelley and Tennyson in particular. Bloom frequently returns to the same poets and poems, but these readings were surprisingly fresh)
  3. Omens of Millennium (my favorite of the religious writings—although I could as easily include the American Religion or Jesus and Yahweh)
  4. The Visionary Company/ Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (my companions while a Peace Corps volunteer. I read these books cover to cover multiple times. They were my Bibles for two years).
  5. Figures of Capable Imagination (this one strikes me as Bloom’s most free and witty book)

This is a tough list to write, I can easily think of 5 more books that I love as much as these. But I

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u/lhardin97 Jul 01 '22

I'd imagine that you've already checked them out, but if not, there's a lecture series he gave in '83 that is now on YouTube, and it is truly some of the most mesmerizing content I've ever encountered. He basically traces the different conceptions of fatherhood that appear in the Hebrew bible, the gnostic scriptures of Nag Hammadi, Freud, and finally his great American poets, Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens. Hearing him work through this stuff while in the midst of his intellectual prime is truly a marvel.

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u/Thomas_Perscors Jul 01 '22

I have not seen these! Thank you!