Dead Criticism

Harold Bloom is one of the most influential and prolific literary critics of his generation. A member of the Yale University English department since 1955, Bloom has taught legions of undergraduate and graduate students to appreciate literary greatness. In the process, he has published more than fifty books of literary criticism and appreciation since his first book, Shelly's Mythmaking, came out in 1959, and has edited hundreds of anthologies for Chelsea House publishing relating to literary and philosophical works and figures. He is a teacher, critic, and industry.

His latest book, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, which it took him six years to write (471) and was published a few months before he turns eighty-nine, is at once a condensation of many of his positions on literary greatness and influence, and a memorial to the many poets and critics that he considers his friends. His declining health in recent years is well-chronicled in the volume as are the challenges it has presented to his teaching and writing. It is not uncommon in the volume to find lines from Bloom like "I dread falling every time I get up to walk" (479) set next to long passages from Shakespeare or in this case, Proust.

It also not uncommon in the volume to find chapters that begin with a highly personal statement of where or when Bloom met a writer, and close with the personal impact of their death on Bloom. "I began to read John Ashbery's poetry in 1956, when I purchased Some Trees in a New Haven bookstore" (431) opens a chapter that closes with

I loved them both [Archie Randolph Ammons and John Ashbery] as poets and persons, yet I was closer to Archie and more in awe of John. Both were major poets and central to American tradition. Now, in early January 2018, I realize that the Age of Ashbery has just ended, even as the [Wallace] Stevens era reached conclusion in early August 1955, a month before I started my ongoing teaching career at Yale.

(442)

The body of these chapters devoted to his friends and acquaintances is generally a close reading of a poem or two that Bloom has memorized and now finds himself chanting or reciting during his late-life bouts with insomnia. Most also include some type of reference to their position in Bloom's taxonomy of literary greatness.

It is hard not to read this volume and feel the pain of loss both in the often profoundly poignant poetry and prose Bloom cites as well as in occasional comments like

At seventy-two I had experienced many losses, but at eighty-seven I feel abandoned by virtually everyone I loved in my own generation. They are all gone, perhaps into a world of light, or a final darkness. In the last month, a great poet and a magnificent critic have departed, both of them friends for more than sixty years.

(478)

Bloom comments in his "Preface" that the book "is not intended to be a lamentation for my own generation of critics and poets," but rather "a living tribute to their afterlife in their writings" (xi). The "friends" include "John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Mark Strand, Alvin Feinman, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Angus Fletcher, and John Hollander"; the "mentors" include M. H. Abrams, Frederick Pottle, Gershom Scholem, Hans Joas, and Kenneth Burke; and the acquaintances include "Frank Kermode, Anthony Burgess, A. D. Nuttall, Northrop Frye" (xx). There are of course many others who receive "living tribute" in the volume including former students, and many other contemporary poets and critics who were either friends or acquaintances such as Richard Eberhart, Weldon Kees, May Swenson, and John Wheelwright.

I agree with Bloom that the book is not a "lamentation" to his friends and mentors, and also agree that it is a form of "living tribute." However, it is difficult not to conclude after reading five-hundred pages of reflection on writers and writing ranging from the poetry of Kabbalah...