Portrait of Harold Bloom
Reading List
Harold Bloom
Literary Critic and Yale Professor · Yale University
Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was an American literary critic who taught at Yale for more than sixty years and wrote over forty books on poetry, Shakespeare and the reading life.
The Anxiety of Influence (1973) proposed that strong poets write in a struggle against their predecessors, a theory he developed across A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism. The Western Canon (1994) defended a canon of twenty-six writers with Shakespeare at its centre, and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) argued that Shakespeare’s characters taught us how to hear ourselves think.
His later books include How to Read and Why (2000), Genius (2002) and The Daemon Knows (2015).
Colors of the Mind
Conjectures on Thinking in Literature
by Angus Fletcher
“It’s the question of how Shakespeare thinks in his plays and sonnets, of how Henry James thinks in his late, intricate work, or of how Emily Dickinson thinks in her extraordinary poems. I’ve tried to extend Angus Fletcher’s way of looking at the mind as represented in art to the greatest American poet, Walt Whitman, who thinks through metaphors.” — via Interview, August 2011
The Rhetoric of Religion
Studies in Logology
by Kenneth Burke
“His finest and last book, it is a study of Saint Augustine, but even more importantly a study of how the metaphors of the books of Genesis, and the Hebrew bible, individuate themselves. Kenneth Burke was the most remarkable student of rhetoric – that is to say of persuasive argument conducted through tropes and metaphors – of the 20th century. I miss him a great deal.” — via Interview, August 2011
The Mirror and the Lamp
Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition
by M. H. Abrams
“I was a Cornell freshman of 17 when I met Meyer Howard Abrams, MH Abrams, who to this day is my dear friend Mike. I’ve just turned 81, Mike has just turned 99, but he’s alive and well in Ithaca, New York, and still reads and writes with real power. The Mirror and the Lamp, his great book, is a study of the relation between romantic critical theory and a classic of literary scholarship.” — via Interview, August 2011
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
by Ernst Robert Curtius
“This is, I think, the finest work of literary scholarship in my time, by the great German philologist Ernst Robert Curtius. It is an extraordinary study of the continuity of European literature, from Homer and the other Greeks, on through Virgil and the great Latin writers, to a culmination in Dante, and moving beyond to a consideration of a long tradition that concludes with Goethe.” — via Interview, August 2011
The Greeks and the Irrational
by E. R. Dodds
“The Greeks and the Irrational is an exploration of the daemon, which is Christianised and reduced to demons or devils. But the daemon was a concept, as Dodds makes beautifully clear, having to do with the creative forces in the individual, which are deeper and more pervasive than what you might want to call the mere conscious. Though it’s not the unconscious in the Freudian sense, the daemon is the creative spirit.” — via Interview, August 2011