Jump to content
Guest Larstrup

The Organ

By Guest Larstrup, in The Beer Bar

Recommended Posts

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

Posted
Posted

Excellent.

John Paul Stevens: The Pessimist of the Supreme Court

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/29/john-paul-stevens-the-pessimist-of-the-supreme-court-089590

 

  • Members
RA1 Grand Master

RA1

Posted
  • Members
Posted
14 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

 

I once heard Kemmons Wilson (founder of Holiday Inns) start a speech with this comment.  George Washington was first in war and first in peace but he married Martha who was a widow so he was not the first in everything.

Best regards,

RA1

  • Members
MsAnn Veteran

MsAnn

Posted
  • Members
Posted
On 1/7/2020 at 10:19 PM, AdamSmith said:

 

Our outrage over Iran seems so misplaced...

 

  • Members
RA1 Grand Master

RA1

Posted
  • Members
Posted
On 12/29/2019 at 11:40 PM, AdamSmith said:

Excellent.

John Paul Stevens: The Pessimist of the Supreme Court

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/29/john-paul-stevens-the-pessimist-of-the-supreme-court-089590

 

As with most anyone or thing, there are parts with which I can readily agree and others not so much.  My politics and sensibilities tend to lie with strict construction of the Constitution but I certainly agree that it is not perfect.  I like the idea of amending rather than judicial changes.

Best regards,

RA1

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

Posted
Posted
8 hours ago, RA1 said:

As with most anyone or thing, there are parts with which I can readily agree and others not so much.  My politics and sensibilities tend to lie with strict construction of the Constitution but I certainly agree that it is not perfect.  I like the idea of amending rather than judicial changes.

Best regards,

RA1

Agree judges very often overreach. But OTOH individual citizens very often suffer injustices that an amendment process will leave them dead & buried before any relief.

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

Posted
Posted
On 12/7/2019 at 10:23 PM, AdamSmith said:

Who taught me how to think...

Harold Bloom, Critic Who Championed Western Canon, Dies at 89

Called the most notorious literary critic in America, Professor Bloom argued for the superiority of giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka.

 
 
 

00Bloom3-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&aut

 

Harold Bloom in 1990. He was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. Harold Bloom in 1990. He was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

  • Published Oct. 14, 2019Updated Nov. 1, 2019
    •  
    •  
    •  
    •  
    •  

 

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday.

Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.

“He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century — and the most protean,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review, of which he was the editor at the time, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer.”

At the heart of Professor Bloom’s writing was a passionate love of literature and a relish for its heroic figures.

“Shakespeare is God,” he declared, and Shakespeare’s characters, he said, are as real as people and have shaped Western perceptions of what it is to be human — a view he propounded in the acclaimed “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998).

14bloom7-popup.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&

Image

Professor Bloom saw the Judeo-Christian God as a literary character in this 1990 book.

Professor Bloom saw the Judeo-Christian God as a literary character in this 1990 book.Credit...-

The analogy to divinity worked both ways: In “The Book of J” (1990), Professor Bloom challenged most existing biblical scholarship by suggesting that even the Judeo-Christian God was a literary character — invented by a woman, no less, who may have lived in the court of King Solomon and who wrote sections of the first five books of the Old Testament. “The Book of J” became a best seller.

Professor Bloom was widely regarded as the most popular literary critic in America (an encomium he might have considered faint praise). Among his other best sellers were his magnum opus “The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages,” published in 1994, and “How to Read and Why” (2000).

 

That record of commercial success led many in the academy to dismiss him as a populist. “Mention the name of Harold Bloom to academics in literature departments these days and they will roll their eyes,” the British scholar and author Jonathan Bate wrote in The New Republic in 2011.

The Bronx-born son of a garment worker, Professor Bloom might have been a character out of literature himself. With his untidy gray hair and melancholy eyes encircled by shadows, he was known to hold forth from what his students called The Chair, which he, of ample girth, amply filled, surrounded by stacks of books.

He was fond of endearments, like “little child.” He addressed both male and female students as “dear” and would kiss them on the top of the head.

Gorging on Words

Professor Bloom called himself “a monster” of reading; he said he could read, and absorb, a 400-page book in an hour. His friend Richard Bernstein, a professor of philosophy at the New School, told a reporter that watching Professor Bloom read was “scary.”

Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Faerie Queene.” He relished epigraphs, gnomic remarks and unusual words: kenosis (emptying), tessera (completing), askesis (diminishing) and clinamen (swerving).

He quite enjoyed being likened to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic, essayist, lexicographer and man about London, who, like Professor Bloom (“a Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” was one appellation), was rotund, erudite and often caustic in his opinions. (Professor Bloom even had a vaguely English accent, his Bronx roots notwithstanding.)

Or if not Johnson, then the actor Zero Mostel, whom he resembled.

“I am Zero Mostel!” Professor Bloom once said.

Like Dr. Johnson’s, his output was vast: more than 40 books of his own authorship and hundreds of volumes he edited. And he remained prolific to the end, publishing two books in 2017, two in 2018 and two this year: “Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind” and “Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism.” His final book is to be released on an unspecified date by Yale University Press, his wife said.

Perhaps Professor Bloom’s most influential work was one that discussed literary influence itself. The book, “The Anxiety of Influence,” published in 1973 and eventually in some 45 languages, borrows from Freudian theory in envisioning literary creation as an epochal, and Oedipal, struggle in which the young artist rebels against preceding traditions, seeking that burst of originality that distinguishes greatness.

Professor Bloom argued that a poem was both a response to another poem and a defense against it. Poetry, he wrote, was a dark battleground where poets deliberately “misread” those who came before them and repress their debt to them.

This was a view that ran counter to the New Criticism, the dominant literary theory in midcentury America that put aside matters like historical context and author’s intentions and rather saw literature as a series of texts to be closely analyzed, their meaning to be found in language and structure.

 
 
 

merlin_32601538_83bd7322-4927-4df4-adb8-

Image

Professor Bloom, right, with John Ward of Oxford University Press. Mr. Bloom was prominent on best-seller lists — unusual for a literary critic. Professor Bloom, right, with John Ward of Oxford University Press. Mr. Bloom was prominent on best-seller lists — unusual for a literary critic.Credit...John Sotomayor/The New York Times

Professor Bloom crossed swords with other critical perspectives in “The Western Canon.” The eminent critic Frank Kermode, identifying those whom Professor Bloom saw as his antagonists, wrote in The London Review of Books, “He has in mind all who profess to regard the canon as an instrument of cultural, hence political, hegemony — as a subtle fraud devised by dead white males to reinforce ethnic and sexist oppression.”

Professor Bloom insisted that a literary work is not a social document — is not to be read for its political or historical content — but is to be enjoyed above all for the aesthetic pleasure it brings. “Bloom isn’t asking us to worship the great books,” the writer Adam Begley wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1994. “He asks instead that we prize the astonishing mystery of creative genius.”

Professor Bloom himself said that “the canonical quality comes out of strangeness, comes out of the idiosyncratic, comes out of originality.” Mr. Begley noted further, “The canon, Bloom believes, answers an unavoidable question: What, in the little time we have, shall we read?”

“You must choose,” Professor Bloom himself wrote in “The Western Canon.” “Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and gender.”

His Writing Hall of Fame

Attached to “The Western Canon” is an appendix listing the works of some 850 writers that Professor Bloom thought would endure in posterity. Plato and Shakespeare and Proust are there, of course, but so are lesser-known figures, like Ivo Andric, a Yugoslav who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Taha Hussein, an important Egyptian writer and intellectual.

Many in the literary world delighted in trying to decipher the meanings behind Professor Bloom’s sometimes idiosyncratic choices. Some puzzled over his judgment, for example, that of all John Updike’s considerable body of work, only the novel “The Witches of Eastwick” would last. Professor Bloom’s critics noted that Mr. Updike had once referred to Professor Bloom’s writings as “torturous.” Philip Roth, a friend of Professor Bloom’s, garnered six mentions. Alice Walker was ignored altogether, but the poet J.D. McClatchy and the critics David Bromwich and Barbara Packer, all students of Professor Bloom’s, made the cut.

Later, in “The Anatomy of Influence” — a 2011 book he called, prematurely, his “virtual swan song” — Professor Bloom seemed to soften his canonical stance, conceding that a critic of any heritage is obliged to take seriously other traditions, including non-Western.

The spotlight he commanded as a powerful cultural figure did not always flatter him. In 1990, GQ magazine, in an article titled “Bloom in Love,” portrayed him as having had intimate entanglements with female students. (“A disgusting piece of character assassination,” he was quoted as telling Mr. Begley in The Times Magazine.) And in a 2004 article in New York magazine, the writer Naomi Wolf wrote that he had once put his hand on her inner thigh when she was an undergraduate student. “Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him,” she wrote. “He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.”

Professor Bloom vigorously denied her accusation.

The clarity of his prose was also questioned. “Harold is not a particularly good explainer,” his friend the poet John Hollander once told The Times, adding, “He’ll get hold of a word and allow this to generate a concept for him, but he’s not in a position to say very clearly what he means and what he’s doing.”

Still, Professor Bloom won huge book advances — $1.2 million in the case of “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds” (2002), a popular but erudite work on which great books a person ought to read.

 
 
 

00Bloom4-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&aut

Image
 

“You must choose,” Professor Bloom wrote in “The Western Canon” (1994). “Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and gender.” In “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds” (2002), he discussed which great books a person should read. “You must choose,” Professor Bloom wrote in “The Western Canon” (1994). “Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and gender.” In “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds” (2002), he discussed which great books a person should read.

Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, in the East Bronx, into an Orthodox Jewish household. He was the youngest of five children of William and Paula (Lev) Bloom, struggling immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was a garment worker.

The first book Harold read was an anthology of Yiddish poetry. He soon discovered the New York Public Library’s branch in the Melrose section of the Bronx and worked his way through Hart Crane, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. He graduated from the exclusive Bronx High School of Science — “that ghastly place,” he called it — and went to Cornell on a scholarship, where he dazzled his professors.

When he graduated from Cornell in 1951, his teachers insisted that he go to another institution for graduate school. “We couldn’t teach him anything more,” said M.H. Abrams, the eminent critic and scholar of Romanticism who was Professor Bloom’s adviser.

A Passion for the Romantics

Professor Bloom was accepted at Yale, a stronghold of the New Criticism in the 1950s. The New Critics, among them T.S. Eliot, favored 17th-century metaphysical and religious poets like John Donne and George Herbert, both clergymen. Professor Bloom found that school of thought arid.

It was “no accident,” the young Professor Bloom wrote, “that the poets brought into favor by the New Criticism were Catholics or High Church Anglicans.” He added that the “academic criticism of literature in our time became almost an affair of church wardens.”

“And I am very Jewish,” he told a reporter, “and lower-class Jewish at that.”

His heroes were Emerson and the English Romantics, but Romanticism was in ill repute at Yale. Nevertheless, he wrote his doctoral thesis on Romanticism and adapted and published it as his first book, “Shelley’s Mythmaking” (1959). He published a more comprehensive study of the Romantics, “The Visionary Company,’’ in 1961. In championing the Romantics he was credited with helping to persuade English departments to teach them again in the 1960s.

At Yale, however, he cast himself in direct opposition to the prevailing ethos, particularly with “The Anxiety of Influence,” positing that great literature is an act of rebellion against the writers who came before. Though he briefly aligned himself with the Yale deconstructionists Paul De Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Hartman, Professor Bloom broke with the Yale English department completely in 1977. He was appointed De Vane professor of humanities and eventually Sterling professor of the humanities, the highest academic rank at Yale, in effect becoming a department unto himself.

 
 
 

14Bloom1-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&aut

Image
 

Mr. Bloom in 2011. He remained prolific to the end: His most recent book, “Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism,” was published this year. Mr. Bloom in 2011. He remained prolific to the end: His most recent book, “Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism,” was published this year.Credit...Mark Mahaney for The New York Times

In 1984 Professor Bloom took on a vast project: editing some 600 volumes of criticism for Chelsea House, a publisher of scholarly works. One motive for doing so was to provide for a disabled adult son. The next year he received a so-called genius award grant from the Catherine and John D. MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Bloom took on a greater teaching load in 1988, spending part of each week as the Berg professor of English at New York University.

At his death he lived in the same rambling 19th-century brown-shingled house in New Haven that he and his wife, Jeanne, a retired psychologist in the Branford, Conn., school system, had occupied for more than 50 years and filled with thousands of books, paintings and sculptures. He had married Jeanne Gould in 1958.

In addition to his wife, Professor Bloom is survived by two sons, Daniel and David.

Professor Bloom was ultimately both optimistic, in a narrow sense, and pessimistic, in a much broader one, about the durability of great literature. The books he loved would no doubt always find readers, he wrote, though their numbers might dwindle. But his great concern was that the books would no longer be taught, and thus become irrelevant.

“What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies,’” he wrote in “The Western Canon,” “where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens.

“Major, once-elitist universities and colleges,” he continued, “will still offer a few courses in Shakespeare, Milton and their peers, but these will be taught by departments of three or four scholars, equivalent to teachers of ancient Greek and Latin.”

Daniel E. Slotnik and William McDonald contributed reporting.

Correction: Nov. 1, 2019

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the name of an epic poem by Edmund Spenser. It is "The Faerie Queene," not "The Fairie Queen."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html

Still cannot absorb the vacuum in the world this creates.

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

Posted
Posted

Inimitable

Harold Bloom, 1930-2019

Jan/Feb 2020
Rick Wenner/Redux

Rick Wenner/Redux

Harold Bloom, seen here in a photo taken at his home in 2017, taught at Yale for 64 years. View full image

Bookish

Harold Bloom authored some 40 books in his lifetime, in addition to editing many anthologies. Here is a list of some of his most prominent works, known either for their importance in the field or their popularity. 

The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

The Book of J (1990)

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994)

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998)

How to Read and Why (2000)

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002)

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011)

The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015)

His own words

To see literature for what it is, the dark mirror of our egoism and our fallen condition, is to see ourselves again as perhaps eternity sees us, more like one another than we can bear to believe.

—from Figures of Capable Imagination

 

Poets lie, both to themselves and to everyone else, about their indebtedness to one another, and most critics and literary scholars tend to follow poets by hopelessly idealizing all inter-poetic relations.
—from Figures of Capable Imagination

 

In Shakespeare, thought itself can be considered tragic or comic, or any shade between the two. Or, because of the Shakespearean detachment, so triumphant in the consciousness of Hamlet, we may hear what Wallace Stevens subtly termed “the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.”
—from The Best Poems of the English Language

 

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman remain the two greatest and most original of American poets, surpassing such major figures of the twentieth century as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. Unlike the self-printed Whitman, Dickinson rejected publication, which she called “the auction of the Mind of Man.”
—from The Best Poems of the English Language

 

So original is Don Quixote that nearly four centuries later, it remains the most advanced work of prose fiction that we have. That indeed is an understatement; it is at once the most readable and yet ultimately the most difficult of all novels. This paradox is what Cervantes shares with Shakespeare: Hamlet and Don Quixote, Falstaff and Sancho Panza are universally available, yet finally tease the mind out of thought.
—from Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds



 

How to describe Harold Bloom? Towering literary scholar, curmudgeonly critic, astonishing mnemonist, endlessly welcoming host, oracular speaker, and, yes, a man who addressed nearly everyone as “dear.” But all that doesn’t begin to cover everything he was and did. It’s been said before: Bloom was sui generis. 

He was born on July 11, 1930, in New York City, to a devout Orthodox Jewish family. His first language was Yiddish; at six he began speaking English. After earning a Cornell BA, he came to Yale as a graduate student, took his PhD in 1955, and stayed. He married Jeanne Gould in 1958—she was his mainstay—and they had two children, Daniel and David. Bloom would receive both a MacArthur Fellowship and Yale’s highest academic honor, a Sterling Professorship. Unusually, his professorship wasn’t in English literature, but the Humanities. He hadn’t gotten along with the English department, so he asked for and received a place in a “department” of one.

Given the force of some of his criticisms, one can understand why he might not have fit in everywhere. In a 2011 interview on the radio station KCRW, Bloom said Shakespeare was the greatest writer in English—and then added, “I’ve now reached a point where I’ve totally infuriated . . . the horrible Shakespeare establishment, all these dry-as-dust moldy thick scholars.” In his 1994 book The Western Canon, he roundly denounced “the recent politics of multiculturalism” and its “rhetoric suitable for an occupied country.” (Bloom did admire many writers of color and women writers.) And he was very publicly accused by Naomi Wolf ’84 of putting his hand on her thigh when she was his student and they were alone. He denied it.

But toward his many students, his friends, and the guests who visited his and Jeanne’s home, Bloom dispensed welcome and warmth, in his inimitably chivalric manner. (Someone who holds virtually all great English literature in their head might reasonably lose the ability for chitchat.) To anyone who knew how much he loved teaching, it’s no surprise that he taught his last class just four days before his death on October 14, 2019. 

After Bloom died, Columbia professor Andrew Solomon ’85 wrote in the Washington Post: “He may well have been the greatest American literary critic of the past half-century. He was also the best teacher I ever knew: visionary, generous of spirit, and willing to place his students’ strivings on the same level as his own insights. He saw us with the encompassing vision that had rendered him heroic.”—Kathrin Day Lassila ’81, Editor

_________________________________________

What follow are ten remembrances of Harold Bloom by colleagues, friends, and former students.

Harold Bloom left a lasting impression on three generations of students. He could impart a strong feeling for literature, and especially for English poetry, with a range of mind and a dramatic sense like no one else’s; and he did it by quoting and interpreting. Once you heard him recite and comment on one of his favorite passages, you were bound to think hard (for some time afterward) about the qualities that made it special. From the start of his career, he had shown a prodigious energy for writing and editing; and he became a major contributor to the critical literature on Shelley, Blake, Yeats, Stevens, and Shakespeare. But I think what mattered to him most was teaching, and he kept on teaching right to the end. He was a generous colleague, without a trace of pomp or officious solemnity. He would always rather encourage than mark and measure.
David Bromwich ’73, ’77PhD
Sterling Professor of English


No historian could guess what it was like to have Harold Bloom for a seminar in my junior year—Bloom, whose way of reading fit no paradigm except one he generated, encountered at the exact moment when he stepped beyond the nineteenth-century Romantics to teach the poetry of Yeats and Wallace Stevens. I remember our first class. Bloom’s father had just died. He was the first teacher I had who spoke of personal experience or death.

Bloom was wearing a stretched-out orange sweater, and he had begun reading from the moving Conclusion to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. While continuing to recite (he knew this, like all texts, by heart), Bloom began to remove the sweater. But it got stuck as it passed over his head, so we could hear oracular utterances about life’s irredeemable evanescence continue to come from out of a gyrating mass of wool, until, the garment subdued at last, Bloom pronounced: “That is the most profound thing that was ever written.”

Yeats and Stevens remain among my most treasured writers, and they remain, for me, wisdom writers as much as poets. This is a direct debt I bear to Bloom, but the point is a larger one. It’s hard to feel the power of literary works all by ourselves. We need teachers to show us how to love them, how to invest them with the energies of our experience until the text can speak words for us we could not find on our own.
Richard Brodhead ’68, ’72PhD
Bird White Housum Professor of English at Yale
Dean of Yale College 1993–2004
President of Duke 2004–2017
 

 

John Sotomayor/The New York Times/Redux

John Sotomayor/The New York Times/Redux

Bloom (right), seen here with Oxford University Press editor John Ward at a 1974 event in New York, won widespread academic acclaim for his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence. View full image

It is as a teacher that I have most felt the warmth of Harold’s presence in me, and I have felt it every single time I step into a classroom. The inexpressible power, both serious and joyous, that I’ve experienced when gathering with students, brooding with them over a wondrous stanza, a magnificent text, a momentous thought: this has been a blessing that I’ve traced directly to Harold’s example, ever since my earliest days as a TA for a Yale Shakespeare course in 1979. It is what moved me this year to step down as Haverford College president so that I could return to the classroom, which still resonates with Harold’s sense of sacred purpose, guided by his ear for exceptional feeling conveyed with exquisite precision, by his remarkable blend of fearlessness and receptivity, and by his distinctive commitment to literature as an irreplaceable modality of human consciousness and possibility.
Kim Benston ’74, ’80PhD
Gummere Professor of English
President Emeritus, Haverford College


Harold was as devoted a teacher as I’ve ever known. “I am,” he often said, “a teacher first and last, and they’re going to have to carry me out of the classroom in a coffin.” It came close to that: he taught on Thursday, and died on Monday.

He was hungrier for poetry than anyone I have ever encountered. Once, when my wife and I were over at the house on Linden Street—just after he’d returned from a long stay at rehab following an illness—we were sitting in the living room and talking when Harold’s eyes shifted a little to the right of, and just above, my shoulder while I was midsentence. He’d spotted the mailman coming up the path to the front door, and interrupted me: “Peter, could you get the mail?” as we heard the storm door opening and the bundles hitting the floor. I brought them to him. He began ripping into envelope after envelope with his teeth, clutching his cane, and ignoring us entirely. “Harold, expecting something important?” I asked him. Without looking up, and in total seriousness, he answered: “Maybe someone has sent me a great poem.” Most writers I know run the other way when other people’s poems draw near; there was the great Bloom, at 81 or so, just back from a hospital stay, panting after them like a golden retriever.
Peter Cole
Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies and
Comparative Literature


Homey, heartwarming, hospitable, heaping. This is what comes to my mind when I think of the dining-room table at Jeanne and Harold Bloom’s home on Linden Street. Of course meals are served on occasion at the table, but it is so much more than a table for dining. Once the visitor to their home enters through the welcoming front door—gladly opened to any visitor—and walks through the living room to the dining room, there is always an available chair in which to sit at the long oval wooden table with heaps of books and papers on it, along with multiple vases filled with flowers (usually roses) in varying states of bloom. There is the inevitable offer of a cup of tea or a glass of sherry, and an ever-readiness for conversation, a gracious inclusion in a discussion likely already going on round the table among others who have dropped in to spend some time with Harold and Jeanne. In front of Harold would be a notepad and books and usually a mug of something.

The heart of Jeanne and Harold’s world and home lives at this table. Never have I walked into the dining room when there weren’t seated and talking at the table at least one or two other people, and often many more—in addition to Harold, in
his spot at one end of it, and Jeanne seated a bit further down the length of the worn wood, which is stained from years of libations consumed over conversation. Always there was at least one—and often more than one—lively exchange going on, whether about poetry or Shakespeare or opera or the Yankees or about a recent visit from a former student or . . . the list of topics is as multitudinous as the words and books that Harold has published, never mind uttered or quoted, in his lifetime. I loved sitting at that table, just listening, knowing that there is always an open seat for those who stop by for a visit.
Emily P. Bakemeier
Vice Provost

 

Ted Thai/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

Ted Thai/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

In 1994, when this photo was taken, Bloom’s book The Western Canon—which the New York Times calls his magnum opus—was published. View full image

What sticks in my memory from graduate seminars with Harold are rather plain things. He would usually be at the head of the table when we arrived, sitting and thinking, as if already running thoughts for the session through his head, as if any one seminar were part of a much larger and older conversation. The most vivid memories are simply of his reading to us lines of poetry and asking questions, asking us to listen for curious or hidden things in the words. He would recite something from Hart Crane or Wallace Stevens, and then say about a line, “That is such a strange phrase, what do you make of it?”

I remember him inviting us to hear a stark echo of Hamlet in some lines of Stevens—it was an echo that none of us were ourselves likely to hear, but that he needed us to hear. In the Freud seminar, I remember him reading us two consecutive sentences of a text from Three Essays on Sexuality, and then asking us to note and respond to a strange leap of logic from one sentence to the next, a mysterious gap. It was something larger, more surprising, unknown, even alien that he often listened for, what he might call the daemonic note. The urgency of his listening, his trusting his own ear for unknown things, was one of his gifts to us. It was the slow, patient, unpredictable quality of such conversations that taught me something essential about reading and teaching poetry.
Thinking back to those seminars, I hear Harold’s voice still—with its oddly emphatic, anxious, and incantatory music—when I read many lines of the poems he loved.
Kenneth Gross ’82PhD
Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English
University of Rochester


In graduate school, I took two courses with Harold, Shakespeare and Contemporary Poetry. Those of us lucky enough to attend his classes received an entire education in each session. The plays and poems in front of us became opportunities to brood over, argue about, and simply admire whatever was to hand, in both the delightful and the urgent ways that only Harold could exemplify. He himself objected to labels for this style of teaching (and writing), finding in the Emersonian concept of contradiction a kind of permission to engage with individual texts in multiple ways over the course of many decades. Instead of madness, this method was a form of devotion and responsibility to his, and our, work: as Harold once wrote, “It is better to be a singularity that cares, rather than an individuality indifferent both to the self and to others.”

He dedicated so much of his life to the work of explaining what he cared about and why, but Harold’s ultimate desire was to encourage us, his students, and, finally, his readers, to discover our own literary loves. I cannot imagine life without him, but I can imagine him wanting us to go on reading, and writing, and caring.
Jennifer Lewin ’02PhD
Lecturer in English Language and Literature
University of Haifa


Nobody knew the life of the feelings the way Harold Bloom did. To study poetry with him was to learn to hear, in the fine shadings of poetic language, all of the undertones and resonances of the emotions, how every act or utterance emerges from a tangle of mixed motives and contending passions. But to study poetry with him was also to take the measure of the resources of the human spirit, to see what it made of being cast into life without its will, to see it making its way in a dark and only partly intelligible world, to watch it stake its claim to life in the face of its inevitable defeat by death.

Bloom taught me, and taught all his students, how the stakes of poetry are the stakes of living, that poetry matters because it is where we encounter other people at their least guarded, that poetry is the imagination’s way of helping us through the world.

I should add a word about Harold Bloom personally. He was a larger-than-life figure, always dramatic, but always with a little wink of humor at his own expense. He was passionate, mercurial, and always magnetic and fascinating. He was also very intellectually and emotionally generous, especially to students at the beginning of their intellectual careers, as I was when I studied American Poetry with him. He had an extremely strong personality. But unlike many strong personalities he never used that strength to make other people feel small. He had a self like Whitman’s; like Whitman he was large and contained multitudes, but like Whitman he also was always opening the door to the “you,” always inviting one to a life of inner equality. You did not look at him, but at the things he looked at, at “Night, sleep, death, and the stars.”
John Burt ’77, ’83PhD
Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature
Brandeis University

 

BLOOM_bw_638x772_0_0_315.jpg

 

Bloom wrote and edited more than 40 books in his career. View full image

From the beginning of the first class, it was clear that it would be unlike any other. Nervously, we filed into the brown-shingled house on Cottage Street, trying to squeeze onto the couches without knocking over Harold Bloom’s small menagerie of stuffed animals. He was already ensconced in his vast armchair, with several volumes of poetry, a sippy cup full of a milky liquid, and a protein bar within reach. There were tea and cookies on the coffee table—he insisted we partake. Always in character, Professor Bloom had assigned reading before the class even started, a selection of Yeats. I was sure I had misread the email at first—surely no course entitled Poetic Influence from Shakespeare to Keats would begin with Yeats? But no—as he would shortly explain to us, he planned to undertake the yearlong syllabus backwards, beginning at the end of the spring syllabus.

The class opened with “The Wild Swans at Coole.” The final lines, Bloom revealed, with what we would soon recognize as characteristic dramatic flair, were not included in the first version of this poem, published in 1917. “Why did he add it?” he asked, scanned the room, and then pounced—on me. I stammered something about the specificity of the first person, but the truth is, I had no idea how to answer such a question. I felt like Bloom was asking me to step straight through the surface of the poem and read it from the inside out.

This, I learned, was Bloom’s modus operandi. He gave deep rather than close readings, plunging into the sinews of a text rather than dwelling on its surface, but he could also home in on a choice of word or turn of phrase, tracing its origins through Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, and so forth. His ability to intuit these connections relied upon his prodigious memory. His reflections on the texts at hand frequently veered into the personal—after a particularly thunderous recitation of Sailing to Byzantium, he told his spellbound class that when his many ailments kept him up at night he liked to recite that very poem to himself to stave off loneliness. Needless to say, it’s hard to imagine how a poem beginning “This is no country for old men” could have soothed him at such a time.
Eve Romm ’18
Freelance writer


From the ’70s through the ’90s, anyone driving down Whitney Avenue in morning or later afternoon was likely to spot Harold, sometimes alone, sometimes with a student, trudging down or up the street talking to himself or to his companion as he went—looking neither left nor right, immersed in thought, conversation, argument, or recitation. In the last years, the Bloom House on Linden Street has been a kind of salon, a hub of literary life. In and out of it have come students by the score, critics, professors, journalists, eminences, composers and musicians, editors, publishers, friends, warm personal enemies, and the line of beloved students who helped him with research and electronic devices by taking dictation and driving. (Thankfully, for the safety of others and himself, he never drove.)

At the head of the oval table in the dining room which was the center of the house, with his wife Jeanne sitting across from him, while the phone rang and people came and went, Harold sat, piles of books balanced on one side, medicine bottles on the other, a yellow pad before him, greeting students and friends with Bloomian nicknames. Discussions about politics and literature would rage, parts of poems would be recited from memory, books would be critiqued, literary gossip would be aired, Yale news would be distributed, Cassandra-like cries about the loss of regard for the aesthetic experience would be shared, and there would be joyous arguing, proclaiming, and declaiming.

A colossus of poetry, who bestrode its world with fiery intensity, exuberantly knowledgeable, champion of reading, grand explicator of a canon of which he was the zealous expositor, foe to isms, stubborn guardian of aesthetic and cognitive standards, he stood fast for the sublimity that literature and the act of reading it offer.
Penelope Laurans
Senior Advisor, Yale University
Head of Jonathan Edwards College, 2009–2016 

https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/5024-inimitable

  • Members
MsAnn Veteran

MsAnn

Posted
  • Members
Posted (edited)
7 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Inimitable

Harold Bloom, 1930-2019

Jan/Feb 2020
Rick Wenner/Redux

Rick Wenner/Redux

Harold Bloom, seen here in a photo taken at his home in 2017, taught at Yale for 64 years. View full image

Bookish

Harold Bloom authored some 40 books in his lifetime, in addition to editing many anthologies. Here is a list of some of his most prominent works, known either for their importance in the field or their popularity. 

The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

The Book of J (1990)

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994)

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998)

How to Read and Why (2000)

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002)

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011)

The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015)

His own words

To see literature for what it is, the dark mirror of our egoism and our fallen condition, is to see ourselves again as perhaps eternity sees us, more like one another than we can bear to believe.

—from Figures of Capable Imagination

 

Poets lie, both to themselves and to everyone else, about their indebtedness to one another, and most critics and literary scholars tend to follow poets by hopelessly idealizing all inter-poetic relations.
—from Figures of Capable Imagination

 

In Shakespeare, thought itself can be considered tragic or comic, or any shade between the two. Or, because of the Shakespearean detachment, so triumphant in the consciousness of Hamlet, we may hear what Wallace Stevens subtly termed “the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.”
—from The Best Poems of the English Language

 

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman remain the two greatest and most original of American poets, surpassing such major figures of the twentieth century as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. Unlike the self-printed Whitman, Dickinson rejected publication, which she called “the auction of the Mind of Man.”
—from The Best Poems of the English Language

 

So original is Don Quixote that nearly four centuries later, it remains the most advanced work of prose fiction that we have. That indeed is an understatement; it is at once the most readable and yet ultimately the most difficult of all novels. This paradox is what Cervantes shares with Shakespeare: Hamlet and Don Quixote, Falstaff and Sancho Panza are universally available, yet finally tease the mind out of thought.
—from Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds



 

How to describe Harold Bloom? Towering literary scholar, curmudgeonly critic, astonishing mnemonist, endlessly welcoming host, oracular speaker, and, yes, a man who addressed nearly everyone as “dear.” But all that doesn’t begin to cover everything he was and did. It’s been said before: Bloom was sui generis. 

He was born on July 11, 1930, in New York City, to a devout Orthodox Jewish family. His first language was Yiddish; at six he began speaking English. After earning a Cornell BA, he came to Yale as a graduate student, took his PhD in 1955, and stayed. He married Jeanne Gould in 1958—she was his mainstay—and they had two children, Daniel and David. Bloom would receive both a MacArthur Fellowship and Yale’s highest academic honor, a Sterling Professorship. Unusually, his professorship wasn’t in English literature, but the Humanities. He hadn’t gotten along with the English department, so he asked for and received a place in a “department” of one.

Given the force of some of his criticisms, one can understand why he might not have fit in everywhere. In a 2011 interview on the radio station KCRW, Bloom said Shakespeare was the greatest writer in English—and then added, “I’ve now reached a point where I’ve totally infuriated . . . the horrible Shakespeare establishment, all these dry-as-dust moldy thick scholars.” In his 1994 book The Western Canon, he roundly denounced “the recent politics of multiculturalism” and its “rhetoric suitable for an occupied country.” (Bloom did admire many writers of color and women writers.) And he was very publicly accused by Naomi Wolf ’84 of putting his hand on her thigh when she was his student and they were alone. He denied it.

But toward his many students, his friends, and the guests who visited his and Jeanne’s home, Bloom dispensed welcome and warmth, in his inimitably chivalric manner. (Someone who holds virtually all great English literature in their head might reasonably lose the ability for chitchat.) To anyone who knew how much he loved teaching, it’s no surprise that he taught his last class just four days before his death on October 14, 2019. 

After Bloom died, Columbia professor Andrew Solomon ’85 wrote in the Washington Post: “He may well have been the greatest American literary critic of the past half-century. He was also the best teacher I ever knew: visionary, generous of spirit, and willing to place his students’ strivings on the same level as his own insights. He saw us with the encompassing vision that had rendered him heroic.”—Kathrin Day Lassila ’81, Editor

_________________________________________

What follow are ten remembrances of Harold Bloom by colleagues, friends, and former students.

Harold Bloom left a lasting impression on three generations of students. He could impart a strong feeling for literature, and especially for English poetry, with a range of mind and a dramatic sense like no one else’s; and he did it by quoting and interpreting. Once you heard him recite and comment on one of his favorite passages, you were bound to think hard (for some time afterward) about the qualities that made it special. From the start of his career, he had shown a prodigious energy for writing and editing; and he became a major contributor to the critical literature on Shelley, Blake, Yeats, Stevens, and Shakespeare. But I think what mattered to him most was teaching, and he kept on teaching right to the end. He was a generous colleague, without a trace of pomp or officious solemnity. He would always rather encourage than mark and measure.
David Bromwich ’73, ’77PhD
Sterling Professor of English


No historian could guess what it was like to have Harold Bloom for a seminar in my junior year—Bloom, whose way of reading fit no paradigm except one he generated, encountered at the exact moment when he stepped beyond the nineteenth-century Romantics to teach the poetry of Yeats and Wallace Stevens. I remember our first class. Bloom’s father had just died. He was the first teacher I had who spoke of personal experience or death.

Bloom was wearing a stretched-out orange sweater, and he had begun reading from the moving Conclusion to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. While continuing to recite (he knew this, like all texts, by heart), Bloom began to remove the sweater. But it got stuck as it passed over his head, so we could hear oracular utterances about life’s irredeemable evanescence continue to come from out of a gyrating mass of wool, until, the garment subdued at last, Bloom pronounced: “That is the most profound thing that was ever written.”

Yeats and Stevens remain among my most treasured writers, and they remain, for me, wisdom writers as much as poets. This is a direct debt I bear to Bloom, but the point is a larger one. It’s hard to feel the power of literary works all by ourselves. We need teachers to show us how to love them, how to invest them with the energies of our experience until the text can speak words for us we could not find on our own.
Richard Brodhead ’68, ’72PhD
Bird White Housum Professor of English at Yale
Dean of Yale College 1993–2004
President of Duke 2004–2017
 

 

John Sotomayor/The New York Times/Redux

John Sotomayor/The New York Times/Redux

Bloom (right), seen here with Oxford University Press editor John Ward at a 1974 event in New York, won widespread academic acclaim for his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence. View full image

It is as a teacher that I have most felt the warmth of Harold’s presence in me, and I have felt it every single time I step into a classroom. The inexpressible power, both serious and joyous, that I’ve experienced when gathering with students, brooding with them over a wondrous stanza, a magnificent text, a momentous thought: this has been a blessing that I’ve traced directly to Harold’s example, ever since my earliest days as a TA for a Yale Shakespeare course in 1979. It is what moved me this year to step down as Haverford College president so that I could return to the classroom, which still resonates with Harold’s sense of sacred purpose, guided by his ear for exceptional feeling conveyed with exquisite precision, by his remarkable blend of fearlessness and receptivity, and by his distinctive commitment to literature as an irreplaceable modality of human consciousness and possibility.
Kim Benston ’74, ’80PhD
Gummere Professor of English
President Emeritus, Haverford College


Harold was as devoted a teacher as I’ve ever known. “I am,” he often said, “a teacher first and last, and they’re going to have to carry me out of the classroom in a coffin.” It came close to that: he taught on Thursday, and died on Monday.

He was hungrier for poetry than anyone I have ever encountered. Once, when my wife and I were over at the house on Linden Street—just after he’d returned from a long stay at rehab following an illness—we were sitting in the living room and talking when Harold’s eyes shifted a little to the right of, and just above, my shoulder while I was midsentence. He’d spotted the mailman coming up the path to the front door, and interrupted me: “Peter, could you get the mail?” as we heard the storm door opening and the bundles hitting the floor. I brought them to him. He began ripping into envelope after envelope with his teeth, clutching his cane, and ignoring us entirely. “Harold, expecting something important?” I asked him. Without looking up, and in total seriousness, he answered: “Maybe someone has sent me a great poem.” Most writers I know run the other way when other people’s poems draw near; there was the great Bloom, at 81 or so, just back from a hospital stay, panting after them like a golden retriever.
Peter Cole
Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies and
Comparative Literature


Homey, heartwarming, hospitable, heaping. This is what comes to my mind when I think of the dining-room table at Jeanne and Harold Bloom’s home on Linden Street. Of course meals are served on occasion at the table, but it is so much more than a table for dining. Once the visitor to their home enters through the welcoming front door—gladly opened to any visitor—and walks through the living room to the dining room, there is always an available chair in which to sit at the long oval wooden table with heaps of books and papers on it, along with multiple vases filled with flowers (usually roses) in varying states of bloom. There is the inevitable offer of a cup of tea or a glass of sherry, and an ever-readiness for conversation, a gracious inclusion in a discussion likely already going on round the table among others who have dropped in to spend some time with Harold and Jeanne. In front of Harold would be a notepad and books and usually a mug of something.

The heart of Jeanne and Harold’s world and home lives at this table. Never have I walked into the dining room when there weren’t seated and talking at the table at least one or two other people, and often many more—in addition to Harold, in
his spot at one end of it, and Jeanne seated a bit further down the length of the worn wood, which is stained from years of libations consumed over conversation. Always there was at least one—and often more than one—lively exchange going on, whether about poetry or Shakespeare or opera or the Yankees or about a recent visit from a former student or . . . the list of topics is as multitudinous as the words and books that Harold has published, never mind uttered or quoted, in his lifetime. I loved sitting at that table, just listening, knowing that there is always an open seat for those who stop by for a visit.
Emily P. Bakemeier
Vice Provost

 

Ted Thai/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

Ted Thai/The Life Picture Collection via Getty Images

In 1994, when this photo was taken, Bloom’s book The Western Canon—which the New York Times calls his magnum opus—was published. View full image

What sticks in my memory from graduate seminars with Harold are rather plain things. He would usually be at the head of the table when we arrived, sitting and thinking, as if already running thoughts for the session through his head, as if any one seminar were part of a much larger and older conversation. The most vivid memories are simply of his reading to us lines of poetry and asking questions, asking us to listen for curious or hidden things in the words. He would recite something from Hart Crane or Wallace Stevens, and then say about a line, “That is such a strange phrase, what do you make of it?”

I remember him inviting us to hear a stark echo of Hamlet in some lines of Stevens—it was an echo that none of us were ourselves likely to hear, but that he needed us to hear. In the Freud seminar, I remember him reading us two consecutive sentences of a text from Three Essays on Sexuality, and then asking us to note and respond to a strange leap of logic from one sentence to the next, a mysterious gap. It was something larger, more surprising, unknown, even alien that he often listened for, what he might call the daemonic note. The urgency of his listening, his trusting his own ear for unknown things, was one of his gifts to us. It was the slow, patient, unpredictable quality of such conversations that taught me something essential about reading and teaching poetry.
Thinking back to those seminars, I hear Harold’s voice still—with its oddly emphatic, anxious, and incantatory music—when I read many lines of the poems he loved.
Kenneth Gross ’82PhD
Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English
University of Rochester


In graduate school, I took two courses with Harold, Shakespeare and Contemporary Poetry. Those of us lucky enough to attend his classes received an entire education in each session. The plays and poems in front of us became opportunities to brood over, argue about, and simply admire whatever was to hand, in both the delightful and the urgent ways that only Harold could exemplify. He himself objected to labels for this style of teaching (and writing), finding in the Emersonian concept of contradiction a kind of permission to engage with individual texts in multiple ways over the course of many decades. Instead of madness, this method was a form of devotion and responsibility to his, and our, work: as Harold once wrote, “It is better to be a singularity that cares, rather than an individuality indifferent both to the self and to others.”

He dedicated so much of his life to the work of explaining what he cared about and why, but Harold’s ultimate desire was to encourage us, his students, and, finally, his readers, to discover our own literary loves. I cannot imagine life without him, but I can imagine him wanting us to go on reading, and writing, and caring.
Jennifer Lewin ’02PhD
Lecturer in English Language and Literature
University of Haifa


Nobody knew the life of the feelings the way Harold Bloom did. To study poetry with him was to learn to hear, in the fine shadings of poetic language, all of the undertones and resonances of the emotions, how every act or utterance emerges from a tangle of mixed motives and contending passions. But to study poetry with him was also to take the measure of the resources of the human spirit, to see what it made of being cast into life without its will, to see it making its way in a dark and only partly intelligible world, to watch it stake its claim to life in the face of its inevitable defeat by death.

Bloom taught me, and taught all his students, how the stakes of poetry are the stakes of living, that poetry matters because it is where we encounter other people at their least guarded, that poetry is the imagination’s way of helping us through the world.

I should add a word about Harold Bloom personally. He was a larger-than-life figure, always dramatic, but always with a little wink of humor at his own expense. He was passionate, mercurial, and always magnetic and fascinating. He was also very intellectually and emotionally generous, especially to students at the beginning of their intellectual careers, as I was when I studied American Poetry with him. He had an extremely strong personality. But unlike many strong personalities he never used that strength to make other people feel small. He had a self like Whitman’s; like Whitman he was large and contained multitudes, but like Whitman he also was always opening the door to the “you,” always inviting one to a life of inner equality. You did not look at him, but at the things he looked at, at “Night, sleep, death, and the stars.”
John Burt ’77, ’83PhD
Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature
Brandeis University

 

BLOOM_bw_638x772_0_0_315.jpg

 

Bloom wrote and edited more than 40 books in his career. View full image

From the beginning of the first class, it was clear that it would be unlike any other. Nervously, we filed into the brown-shingled house on Cottage Street, trying to squeeze onto the couches without knocking over Harold Bloom’s small menagerie of stuffed animals. He was already ensconced in his vast armchair, with several volumes of poetry, a sippy cup full of a milky liquid, and a protein bar within reach. There were tea and cookies on the coffee table—he insisted we partake. Always in character, Professor Bloom had assigned reading before the class even started, a selection of Yeats. I was sure I had misread the email at first—surely no course entitled Poetic Influence from Shakespeare to Keats would begin with Yeats? But no—as he would shortly explain to us, he planned to undertake the yearlong syllabus backwards, beginning at the end of the spring syllabus.

The class opened with “The Wild Swans at Coole.” The final lines, Bloom revealed, with what we would soon recognize as characteristic dramatic flair, were not included in the first version of this poem, published in 1917. “Why did he add it?” he asked, scanned the room, and then pounced—on me. I stammered something about the specificity of the first person, but the truth is, I had no idea how to answer such a question. I felt like Bloom was asking me to step straight through the surface of the poem and read it from the inside out.

This, I learned, was Bloom’s modus operandi. He gave deep rather than close readings, plunging into the sinews of a text rather than dwelling on its surface, but he could also home in on a choice of word or turn of phrase, tracing its origins through Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, and so forth. His ability to intuit these connections relied upon his prodigious memory. His reflections on the texts at hand frequently veered into the personal—after a particularly thunderous recitation of Sailing to Byzantium, he told his spellbound class that when his many ailments kept him up at night he liked to recite that very poem to himself to stave off loneliness. Needless to say, it’s hard to imagine how a poem beginning “This is no country for old men” could have soothed him at such a time.
Eve Romm ’18
Freelance writer


From the ’70s through the ’90s, anyone driving down Whitney Avenue in morning or later afternoon was likely to spot Harold, sometimes alone, sometimes with a student, trudging down or up the street talking to himself or to his companion as he went—looking neither left nor right, immersed in thought, conversation, argument, or recitation. In the last years, the Bloom House on Linden Street has been a kind of salon, a hub of literary life. In and out of it have come students by the score, critics, professors, journalists, eminences, composers and musicians, editors, publishers, friends, warm personal enemies, and the line of beloved students who helped him with research and electronic devices by taking dictation and driving. (Thankfully, for the safety of others and himself, he never drove.)

At the head of the oval table in the dining room which was the center of the house, with his wife Jeanne sitting across from him, while the phone rang and people came and went, Harold sat, piles of books balanced on one side, medicine bottles on the other, a yellow pad before him, greeting students and friends with Bloomian nicknames. Discussions about politics and literature would rage, parts of poems would be recited from memory, books would be critiqued, literary gossip would be aired, Yale news would be distributed, Cassandra-like cries about the loss of regard for the aesthetic experience would be shared, and there would be joyous arguing, proclaiming, and declaiming.

A colossus of poetry, who bestrode its world with fiery intensity, exuberantly knowledgeable, champion of reading, grand explicator of a canon of which he was the zealous expositor, foe to isms, stubborn guardian of aesthetic and cognitive standards, he stood fast for the sublimity that literature and the act of reading it offer.
Penelope Laurans
Senior Advisor, Yale University
Head of Jonathan Edwards College, 2009–2016 

https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/5024-inimitable

Fascinating...So much to absorb. "I should have stayed in school longer."

Edited by MsAnn
  • Members
MsAnn Veteran

MsAnn

Posted
  • Members
Posted
7 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

 

Interesting putting this speech into historical context...1991..."We just finished a war in the Middle East". What will we say about this moment in time?

All the best...

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
Go to topic listing

Announcements

×
×
  • Create New...