Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

by Harold Bloom
Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

by Harold Bloom

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Overview

"Wonderful. . . . Spectacular. . . . You feel the pulse of life, what poetry can bring to us if we let it." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This audacious personal odyssey offers readers a cosmos of possibilities when contemplating what happens once we 'shuffle off this mortal coil.'" —The Christian Science Monitor

"An elegiac meditation on a life lived through books." —O, The Oprah Magazine

"The great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him." —The New York Times Book Review


Here is the daringly original literary critic's most personal book: a four-part spiritual autobiography in the form of brief, luminous readings of poetry, drama, and prose—much of which he has known by heart since childhood. As one of his own mentors, M. H. Abrams, has said, to read Bloom's commentaries is like "reading classic authors by flashes of lightning." Gone are the polemics; here Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but himself. In "A Voice she Heard Before the World Was Made," he offers startling meditations on foundational concerns of Biblical study. "In the Elegy Season" finds him coming to terms movingly, from a new vantage, with writers on whom he has brooded for much of his life. And with brio and bravura in "The Imperfect Is Our Paradise," Bloom ranges dazzlingly through twentieth-century American poetry, from Wallace Stevens to Amy Clampitt. Possessed by Memory, in short, is essential Bloom.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780525562474
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/17/2020
Pages: 544
Sales rank: 656,922
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Harold Bloom was a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. He was a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and Mexico's Alfonso Reyes International Prize.

Hometown:

New York, New York and New Haven, Connecticut

Date of Birth:

July 11, 1930

Date of Death:

October 14, 2019

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955

Read an Excerpt

Part One:

A Voice She Heard Before the World Was Made

 
Thresholds to Voice: Augmenting a God in Ruins


As I near the end of my eighties, I am aware of being in the elegy season. The majority of my close friends from my own generation have departed. I am haunted by many passages in Wallace Stevens, and one that I keep hearing centers his extraordinary poem, “The Course of a Particular”:

And though one says that one is part of everything,
 
There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;
And being part is an exertion that declines:
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.
 
Throughout his final poems, Stevens listens for the voice he heard before the world was made. Though he is not preoccupied with occult and Hermetic modes of speculation, in the manner either of William Butler Yeats or of D. H. Lawrence, he hears voices. Falling leaves cry out, houses laugh, syllables are spoken without speech, the wind breathes a motion, thoughts howl in the mind, the colossal sun sounds a scrawny cry, and the phoenix, mounted on a visionary palm tree, sings a foreign song. Sleepless like many other old men and women, I too dream what Stevens calls a heavy difference:

A little while of Terra Paradise
I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,
Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,
But in that dream a heavy difference
Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,
In vain, life’s season or death’s element.
 
                                        Montrachet-le-Jardin
 
When that saddens me too much, something in my spirit turns to a more intimate Stevens:
 
The cry is part. My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.
I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound
Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice
That is my own voice speaking in my ear.
 
                                         Chocorua to Its Neighbor
 
Frequently at dawn, when I am very chilly and sit on the side of my bed, knowing it is not safe for me to go downstairs by myself in order to have some morning tea, I find deep peace in Stevens at his strongest:
 
To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanly from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.
 
Can human things be said with more than human voice? Stevens was a kind of Lucretian skeptic, as Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Walter Pater had been before him. Yet, of those three, only Pater would have agreed with Stevens as to whether we could hear a primordial utter­ance. Even Stevens had his openings to a transcendental freedom:
 
     Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.
     He was not man yet he was nothing else.
     If in the mind, he vanished, taking there
     The mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing
     Without existence, existing everywhere.
    
William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and, rather more skeptically, Hart Crane all were informed by the ancient tradition of Hermetism, the Greco-Egyptian speculation from which the Renaissance Hermeti­cism developed. In that original speculation, which was inaugurated by a small group of pagan intellectuals in Hellenistic Alexandria during the first century of the Common Era, a story is told of how the first Adam, called Anthropos, is exalted as a divine being. Here is a crucial passage from the Hermetic discourse called “The Key”:
 
For the human is a godlike living thing, not comparable to the other living things of the earth but to those in heaven above, who are called gods. Or better—if one dare tell the truth—the one who is really human is above these gods as well, or at least they are wholly equal in power to one another.

For none of the heavenly gods will go down to earth, leaving behind the bounds of heaven, yet the human rises up to heaven and takes its measure and knows what is in its heights and its depths, and he understands all else exactly and—greater than all of this—he comes to be on high without leaving earth behind, so enormous is his range. Therefore, we must dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal god but that god in heaven is an immortal human. Through these two, then, cosmos and human, all things exist, but they all exist by action of the one.
Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver
 
That is Hermetism at its most exalted. Darker is the account that brings together the Fall and the Creation as one event. I turn here to the most famous text of Hermetism, “Poimandres,” where our primal catastrophe is elegantly chronicled:
 
Having all authority over the cosmos of mortals and unreasoning animals, the man broke through the vault and stooped to look through the cosmic framework, thus displaying to lower nature the fair form of god. Nature smiled for love when she saw him whose fairness brings no surfeit (and) who holds in himself all the energy of the governors and the form of god, for in the water she saw the shape of the man’s fairest form and upon the earth its shadow. When the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the unreason­ing form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced him, for they were lovers.
 
Because of this, unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold—in the body mortal but immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has authority over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he is subject to fate; thus, although man is above the cosmic framework, he became a slave within it. He is androgyne because he comes from an androgyne father, and he never sleeps because he comes from one who is sleepless. Yet love and sleep are his masters.
Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver
 
In Hart Crane’s “Voyages II” there is a paean to “sleep, death, desire,” a celebration of the great erotic relationship of the poet’s life. Nevertheless, “Voyages V” admits that the truth of this love is a matter of instants and must end in separation:
 
But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.
 
There is a kind of gentle resignation in Hart Crane as he confronts erotic loss. Ultimately I think that stems from the Hermetist version of the Fall as a narcissistic reverie that concludes in a catastrophe. Many of us, remembering the now remote erotic attachments of our youth, scores of years back in time, find that involuntarily we remain haunted by a voice we heard emanating from the beloved that seemed timeless and therefore permanent. There is some link that binds together the making of a poem, the illusions of recall, and the tenuous expectation that somehow we will hear again the voice that preceded the instauration of a cosmos forlorn and vagrant, through which we blankly wander, unable to distinguish what was and what we strain to find again.
 
Our experience of a lost voice may come to us in solitude or in the presence of others, whether or not they are related to our past sorrows. When I was very young, I read poems incessantly because I was lonely and somehow must have believed they could become people for me.
That vagary could not survive maturation, yet the quest persisted for a voice I had heard before I knew my own alienation. Over the decades I learned to listen closely to my students for some murmurs of those evanescent voices. Since these young men and women are two-thirds of a century younger than I am, I do not seek in their tonalities my own nostalgias. Yet I believe that the teaching of Shakespeare or of Moby-Dick can be an awakening to the ancient Gnostic call that proclaims a resurrection preceding our deaths.
 
In my experience, there are a few visions or surging voices that break through the rock of the self and free something that is both spark and breath, in a momentary knowing that seems to be known even as it knows. When I ask myself who is the knower, I have intimations that a primal sound, cast out of our cosmos and wandering in exile through the interstellar spaces, may be calling to me. There is nothing unique in my experience, as was particularly clear to me in the years 1990–92, when I seemed all but endlessly in motion, lecturing at American uni­versities and colleges in the South and Southwest. I accepted speaking engagements only there, when I could get away from Yale, so as to do amateur research listening to people of many sects and persuasions, who I learned to call American Religionists. I recall vividly how many told me they had already been resurrected, and knew they had walked and talked with the Jesus scarcely mentioned in the New Testament, who passed forty days with his faithful after the Ascension.

At sixty, I both respected and was baffled by so many urgent confes­sions of women and of men that they had touched the flesh of a living Jesus, who walked with them and spoke of everyday matters. Now, in my high eighties, I understand better what was so dark to me a quarter-century ago.

I listen for a primordial silence as well as voices coming down from a sphere within and beyond the rock of the self. When Hamlet concludes by murmuring, “The rest is silence,” he intends both an acceptance of oblivion and a longing for what Hermetists call the Pleroma or Full­ness. Valentinus the Gnostic sage concluded his “Gospel of Truth” by telling his congregation that it did not suit him, having been in the place of rest, to say anything more. For him too the rest was silence.

Table of Contents

Preface xix

Part 1 A Voice She Heard Before the World Was Made

Thresholds to Voice: Augmenting a God in Ruins 3

The Poetry of Kabbalah 13

More Life: The Blessing Given by Literature 26

Moses: The Sublime of Silence 30

Judges 13-16: Samson 34

Daughter of a Voice: The Song of Deborah 38

David: "Thou Art the Man" 42

The Hebrew Prophets 49

Isaiah of Jerusalem: "Arise, Shine; For Thy Light Is Come" 54

Psalms or Praises 56

Job: Holding His Ground 61

The Song of Songs: "Set Me as a Seal upon Thine Heart" 66

Ruth: "Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go" 70

Ecclesiastes: "And Desire Shall Fail" 73

Part 2 Self-Otherseeing and the Shakespearean Sublime

The Concept of Self-Otherseeing and the Arch-Jew Shylock 79

The Bastard Faulconbridge 85

The Falstaffiad: Glory and Darkening of Sir John Falstaff 89

Hamlet's Questioning of Shakespeare 104

Iago and Othello: Point-Counterpoint 113

Edgar and Edmund: Agonistic Dramatists 128

The Fool and Cordelia: Love's Martyrdom 135

King Lear: Authority and Cosmological Disorder 139

Macbeth: Triumph at Limning a Night-Piece 142

Part 3 In the Elegy Season: John Milton, the Visionary Company, and Victorian Poetry

Ben Jonson on Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell on Milton 147

Paradise Lost: The Realm of Newness 153

Comus: The Shadow of Shakespeare 165

Dr. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton 170

William Collins, "Ode on the Poetical Character" 181

Thomas Gray: The Poet as Outsider 185

Wisdom and Unwisdom of the Body 189

William Blake's Milton 194

William Wordsworth:

"The Solitary Reaper" 198

"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" 201

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 212

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

"Ode to the West Wind" 216

"To a Skylark" 220

Prometheus Unbound 226

Lord Byron, Don Juan 230

John Keats:

"Ode to a Nightingale" 238

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" 243

"To Autumn" 246

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest Book 250

Alfred Tennyson:

"Ulysses" 255

"Tithonus" 259

Idylls of the King 263

"Morte d'Arthur" 268

Robert Browning:

"A Toccata of Galuppi's" 272

Pauline 277

The Condition of Fire at the Dark Tower 280

"Thamuris Marching" 284

George Meredith, "A Ballad of Past Meridian" 289

Algernon Charles Swinburne:

"August" 291

"Hertha" 294

Part 4 The Imperfect Is Our Paradise: Walt Whitman and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

The Psalms and Walt Whitman 305

Fletcher, Whitman, and The American Sublime 342

The Freshness OF Last Things: Wallace Stevens, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" 346

Wallace Stevens:

"The Snow Man" 348

"Montrachet-le-Jardin" 351

Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Luke Havergal" 355

William Carlos Williams, "A Unison" 359

Archie Randolph Ammons, Sphere 364

Hart Crane:

"Possessions" 385

"To Brooklyn Bridge" 387

Conrad Aiken, "Tetélestai" 389

Richard Eberhart, "If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That Is Near Madness" 402

Weldon Kees, "Aspects of Robinson" 407

May Swenson, "Big-Hipped Nature" 413

Delmore Schwartz, "The First Night of Fall and Falling Rain" 416

Alvin Feinman, "Pilgrim Heights" 419

John Ashbery, "At North Farm" 431

John Wheelwright, "Fish Food" 443

James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim 449

Jay Macpherson, "Ark Parting" 457

Amy Clampitt, "A Hermit Thrush" 463

Coda: In Search of Lost Time

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