Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

(Paperback)

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The great critic now departs from polemics to give us a moving, elegaic four-part spiritual autobiography- made up of brief, luminous readings of poetry, drama, and prose, Possessed by Memory finds Bloom sharing with us the works that he knows by heart "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.

Reviews

"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 eras Samuel Johnson...Possessed by Memoryreally is a kind of valediction...Bloom has loved literature deeplyand 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

Author Bio

Harold Bloom was 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 Knows- Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. He was a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and Mexico's Alfonso Reyes International Prize.