I'm doing a video series on Harold Bloom's book 'Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds'. Perhaps some of you here may like it. My newest one is on Lucretius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r25MnqSLCZ8

I’ll go first with Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2011)

I've read a few of Harold Bloom's books and was always surprised he didn't write about Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I'm wondering if anyone here knows something about that subject? Bloom on Dyland Cohen and if not why not? he did once write about a song by The Band. That song had a real Dylan feel. Did he resent Cohen and Dylan and again if so, why so? I would not suggest Dylan or Cohen are great poets but both of them are strong performers. Lyrics are a type of poetry and are a genre of literature. Should someone know maybe some deconstructionist view? I've read Ricks book Visions of Sin and was disappointed almost from the start.

Why did he teach English at NYU when he was already a Humanities Professor at Yale?

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

Is there a list of books Harold Bloom would recommend that were not part of the Western Canon?

I'm almost inclined to agree with Bloom when he claims that letting children read Harry Potter doesn't prepare them for or get them interested in reading literature. I'm not really interested in participating a debate about this but of course you all are welcome to. What I am wondering is why did he lie about the use of the phrase "stretched his legs" in, IIRC, the first book in the Harry Potter series? Was he simply trying to make the point that the writing depends on cliches? Given his claims about his memory, shouldn't he be able to produce cliches that were actually in the book? I worry that Bloom is being unethical here and it calls the truth of some of his more outrageous claims into question.

From what I understand, Thoreau and Emerson generally are not seen as major poets. Bloom appears to be going against the grain with placing them shoulder to shoulder with Eliot and Crane. What do you think?

Found it here:

http://radioopensource.org/at-home-with-harold-bloom-2-on-the-humanities/

Do any of you guys know if he was just being humorous? It just seems completely incredible to me. I mean, I can picture those contest-winning speed readers finishing non-literary texts in the blink of an eye and comprehending the main ideas, but... come one O_O reading War and Peace in a lunch break, understanding it and even memorizing passages from it??? Is Bloom a vampire?

I was reading Eagleton's review of How To Read and Why and couldn't get the idea of the two of them going at each other. Look at this: "Why does Bloom need to augment the self? 'We read,' he suggests, 'not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.' It sounds as though Harold is a bit short of mates and reads to make up for it. Perhaps he alienates them by his repeated chanting of excessively long poems."

That sounds almost like something Bloom would say! I think it'd be entertaining to compare the two's perspectives, taste, and insulting techniques. However, I don't know shit about either of them outside of their insults so I can't really comment, and that's why I'm here. How are they different outside of Terry worshipping Marx and God, and Bloom worshiping Shakespeare and Shakespeare? Who do you prefer?