Harold Bloom’s home library, photographed in June. Credit Tanya Marcuse.
Scholar and literary critic Harold Bloom has died at the age of 89. Dwight Garner hits memorable notes in his tribute to Bloom, who in one of over 40 books launched an attack “from a crenelated embankment” on critics and scholars whom Bloom termed “a rabblement of lemmings.”
It was impossible to read deeply in Bloom without him flooring you with feeling. “Walt Whitman,” he wrote, “overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others — Dante, Shakespeare, Milton — consistently flood my entire being.” In today’s world, there is competition to be more concerned than anyone else. In Bloom’s, there was competition to be the most exactingly delighted.
(Dwight Garner, “Harold Bloom, A Prolific Giant and Perhaps the Last of a Kind,” NYTimes, 10-15-19)
(c) 2019 JMN
“In today’s world, there is competition to be more concerned than anyone else. In Bloom’s, there was competition to be the most exactingly delighted.”
Not everything that comes after what went before is progress. Sometimes we need to retrace our steps, see what has worked well in the past, and abandon experfiments that fail.
Book shelves! I like book shelves, full of books. So did Harold, so does Warner. So do you!