if anyone has harold bloom's 'the poems of our climate' about wallace stevens....

Apparently a sequel to David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. Uh.

I think my friend has a copy of voyage to arcturus, for the very reason that bloom wrote a sequel to it

I worry about your friend.

He mentioned it in a Paris Review interview given in '90 or '91. He said it was "dreadful."

The legendary mark s has indicated on Twitter that having learned about it he's just ordered it and will give a full report in a couple of weeks.

haaaa, that cover art is great.

harold bloom is a good example that the best way to critical legitimacy is to be armscrossed.gif about your opinions all the time

i certainly don't worship at his feet, but he can be pretty entertaining -- there's a wallace stevens doc w/ footage of him going off that I thought was both inspiring and crazy in college.

He recited – no, intoned – Tennyson's "Ulysses" in a beautifully melodic baritone when promoting his 2000 book. I asked him to name his favorite Stevens verse when he autographed my copy of The Western Canon. He sighed, closed his heavy-lidded toad eyes, and whispered, "DOWNWARD TO DARKNESS, ON EXTENDED WINGS."

haha, yeah, how can you not love that?

Total goth.

my friend took his class and would just report back on how endearingly and harmlessly sexist he was. like if you were a girl yo got an A-, boy a B+, end story.

i keep reading this as "the penis of our climate"

RIP Harold Bloom. People of my generation don't really like him. Also, he was pretty seriously disliked by all but one of my professors in college, so maybe it's not even a generation thing. Regardless, I want to commemorate him. He is often maligned as a right wing reactionary, but I don't think that was really a fair description. Politically, he aligned himself with "the left," but I never got a sense that he understood politics very well.

Ultimately Harold Bloom was a guy who loved poetry and thought it was important, and reading him, you got the sense that he was someone who thought his work was meaningful, even urgent, and something about that is infectious. Reading him, I wanted to believe that great poetry is as transformative as he found it to be. The big claim he made about Shakespeare--that he "invented consciousness"--is completely absurd, but also kind of charming. He wanted to believe in artistic originality, which for him was synonymous with human freedom.

I don't agree with Bloom that the Western Canon is an objective record of "the best that has been thought." I think things are messier and less inspiring than that. Also, I *strongly* disagree with his notion that Sylvia Plath was a derivative writer. Clearly, his idea that most of the best writers were white and male was preposterous, and probably at some level purposefully designed to irritate people.

However, I agree with him that there is something to be said for the classics, for looking across the centuries to understand how people thought about themselves and their place in the world. I also basically agree with his idea of "influence," that people struggle mightily against the people, places and ideas that formed them, and that this struggle for autonomy--even though it always fails, in one way or another--is where we find meaning. At least in the individualist West.

I agree with him that there is something to be said for the classics

Everything comes from something. The classics have been an important influence on everyone, directly or indirectly, even if you think they have been a negative influence, because so many powerful and influential people were educated upon them and formed their ideas of the world in converse with them. They remain important, even if only in the sense of "know your enemy". But once you start to get acquainted with them, you come to understand how far from monolithic "the classics" are, and what a breadth of ideas and stories they encompass, and eventually you understand that taken as a whole, they represent expressions of much, perhaps most, of what humanity is and can be.

NB: The "classics" should be understood to include texts from every age and every part of the world, created by men and women, high and low, so long as they are highly valued by their readers, who pay them the compliment of incorporating their spirit into themselves.

Also, I *strongly* disagree with his notion that Sylvia Plath was a derivative writer.

Among the critical considerations which may be applied to a writer's work, whether or not they should be labeled as "derivative" is too trivial to matter and nothing a reader ought to give a damn about. Critics can be pretty stupid about stuff like that, but the great majority of lit crit is hopelessly mediocre and often pointless.

Bloom took originality extremely seriously. He thought it was impossible but authentic writers are the ones whofight to achieve it nonetheless.

I think there is something to this—i wouldn’t be this dramatic about it—but every person should aspire to find their own voice

my friend took his class and would just report back on how endearingly and harmlessly sexist he was. like if you were a girl yo got an A-, boy a B+, end story.

― dayo, Friday, January 21, 2011 4:37 PM (eight years ago)

ha, i just saw this exact anecdote related by somebody on twitter, absent the "endearingly and harmlessly" angle

My ambivalent obit.

I choose to remember him as a toad who loved poetry and was instrumental in my loving it.

i enjoyed that. it was ambivalent but not disinterested. i haven't read bloom since college and that reminded me of what it was like to read him.

Well done.