Bloom on Books! A Lovely Critique on 'Art and the Artist!'

Well, I’m just done with Harold Bloom's Essayists and Prophets. What a wondrous charm it has, on one’s interpretation of art and the artist!

I've always loved the Bloomian touch to a text - the Bloomian critique, or Bloomian interpretations to a text, which have a charisma of their own. He's quite got that unique way with words, and 'charm'd magic casements’ aplenty, that make his reads such grippy unputdownables of sorts!

Giving below the legend’s own words on Books, and on his own criteria for Greatness in Imaginative Literature!

[Psst: Practitioners of all things Theory, excuse this once! J But yesss! With a sheepish grin let me acknowledge the fact that, he’s been such a fierce-o-fierce defender of the Canon, something that is anathema, or taboo, or impermissible, or out of bounds for practitioners of the poststructuralist, postmodernist ways of thinking, and.. and… and… irony of ironies, I’ve been handling this particular text for the II MA English Lit., for quite many years now! This said, I should also sincerely announce that he has utterly renounced what he had once so strongly pronounced! (This he did in a candid tete-a-tete with Vice Magazine in Fall 2008, where he says that, it was only at his publisher’s behest that he had to formulate such a canonical array of books!)

Do take your time to inhale this Bloomian bloom right into your hearts n minds… and yes! These are just a few snippets…

Here’s Bloom speaking, for y’all –

I began editing Anthologies of Literary Criticism in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary of a somewhat Quixotic venture.

A thousand books across a score of years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four, I am a little bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it has leaped between centuries.

Yet the books have to be reasonably reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them provoking my own enthusiasm.

But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully naming myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.”

I accept only three criteria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom.

What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices and inequities.

The fashionable in literature and criticism always ebbs away into Period Pieces. Old, well-made furniture survives as valuable antiques, which is not the destiny of badly constructed imaginings and ideological exhortings.

Time, which decays and then destroys us, is even more merciless in obliterating weak novels, poems, dramas, and stories, however virtuous these may be.

Wander into a library and regard the masterpieces of thirty years ago: a handful of forgotten books have value, but the iniquity of oblivion has rendered most bestsellers instances of time’s revenges.

Nevertheless, I do not seek to affirm the social inutility of literature, though I admire Oscar Wilde’s grand declaration: “All art is perfectly useless.”

Shakespeare may well stand here for the largest benign effect of the highest literature: properly appreciated, it can heal part of the violence that is built into every society whatsoever. In my own judgment, Walt Whitman is the central writer yet brought forth by the Americas—North, Central, South, Caribbean—whether in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Yiddish or other tongues.

Bloom's 'Candid' Confessions on the 'Canon'

And Walt Whitman is a healer, a poetprophet who discovered his pragmatic vocation by serving as a volunteer, unpaid wound-dresser and nurse in the Civil War hospitals of Washington, D.C. To read and properly understand Whitman can be an education in self-reliance and in the cure of your own consciousness.

The function of literary criticism, as I conceive it in my gathering old age, is primarily appreciation, in Walter Pater’s sense, which fuses analysis and evaluation. When Pater spoke of “art for art’s sake’ he included in the undersong of his declaration what D.H. Lawrence meant by “art for life’s sake,” Lawrence, the most provocative of post-Whitmanian vitalists, has now suffered a total eclipse in the higher education of the English-speaking nations. Feminists have outlawed him with their accusations of misogyny, and they describe him as desiring women to renounce sexual pleasure.

On this supposed basis, students lose the experience of reading one of the major authors of the twentieth century, at once an unique novelist, storyteller, poet, critic, and prophet.

An enterprise as vast as Chelsea House Literary Criticism doubtless reflects both the flaws and the virtues of its editor. Comprehensiveness has been a goal throughout, and I have (for the most part) attempted to set aside many of my own literary opinions. I sorrow when the market keeps an important volume out of print, though I am solaced by the example of my idol, Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets.

The booksellers (who were both publishers and retailers) chose the poets, and Johnson was able to say exactly what he thought of each.

Who remembers such worthies as Yalden, Sprat, Roscommon, and Stepney? It would be invidious for me to name the contemporary equivalents, but their name is legion.

I have been more fully educated by this quest for comprehensivness, which taught me how to write for a larger audience. Literary criticism is both an individual and communal mode. It has its titans: Johnson, Coleridge, Lessing, Goethe, Hazlitt, Sainte-Beuve, Pater, Curtius, Valèry, Frye, Empson, Kenneth Burke are among them.

But most of those I reprint cannot be of that eminence: one makes a heap of all that can be found. Over a lifetime in reading and teaching one learns so much from so many that no one can be certain of her or his intellectual debts.

Hundreds of those I have reprinted I never will meet, but they have helped enlighten me, insofar as I have been capable of learning from a host of other minds.