By
– November 1, 2011
Like the greatest literary critics of the past — Longinus, Samuel Johnson, Lionel Trilling — Harold Bloom restlessly, proudly (many would say self-importantly), and lovingly breathes fresh life into an astonishingly broad range of literary texts, urging us to pick up, read, and get lost in the labyrinthine ways of writers, ancient and modern. In this “sequel” to his groundbreaking The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Bloom delivers his final statement on the subject of literary influence; he now defines influence simply as “literary love, tempered by defense (his emphasis)… the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.” Bloom admits that this book is a critical self-portrait and a sustained meditation on the writings and readings that have shaped him as a person and a critic. By combining lively reflection of his own reading life with his typically attentive close readings of texts, Bloom demonstrates fascinating connections between a wide range of writers from Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton to Shelley, John Ashbery, and Amy Clampitt. He declares, for example, that “Hamlet centers the literary cosmos, Eastern as well as Western. His only rivals are comic — Don Quixote — or on the border of divinity: the Gospel of Mark’s amazingly enigmatic Jesus, who is unsure who he is and keeps asking his thick-headed disciples, “but who or what do people say I am?” While Bloom often repeats himself many times over — sometimes creating the impression that he’s thrown the book together from earlier writings without careful editing — his deep wisdom about life and literature reveals itself in little gems like this one: “Literature for me is not simply the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.” As with the best literary criticism, Bloom’s stunning new book compels us to lose ourselves in the literature about which he writes so forcefully and gracefully.
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. writes about books for Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, BookPage, and ForeWord. He has written for numerous newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Orlando Sentinel, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post Book World.