Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism
Language: English
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.World of Books (was SecondSale)
AbeBooks seller since December 20, 2007
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Add to basketItem description from seller
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.…
Seller Inventory # 00088949867
- Title
- Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism
- Author
- Harold Bloom
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Publication year
- 2019
- Condition
- Good
- Binding
- Hardback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0525520880
- ISBN 13
- 9780525520887
Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things."
As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."
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World of Books (was SecondSale)
Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since December 20, 2007
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