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Category: Harold Bloom

  • Bloom recalls Auden: ‘a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems’

    In The Anatomy of Influence (2011), Harold Bloom reminisces about W.H. Auden: I treasure ruefully some memories of W.H. Auden that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haevn to give a reading of his poems at Ezra…

  • Bloom on Bloom

    From Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 249: “Naming” (as in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin) is closer to the real concerns of literature. I am moved here by my own splendid name of “Bloom,” particularly since my personal…

  • When you say ‘I am just playing (with him/her/you)!’, are you sure you are really ‘playing’?

    “The Swing” (1767) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard  Harold Bloom (1994) sums up Johan Huizinga’s summary of the properties of play: 1) freedom2) disinterestedness3) excludedness or limitedness4) orderJohan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1944), p. 13: Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity…

  • Which is more preferable: Innocence or Experience?

    ––In a discussion of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Harold Bloom (2004) answers: Since Innocence and Experience are states of the soul through which we pass, neither is a finality, both are necessary, and neither is wholly preferable…

  • Adam and Eve

    Parts of this post were first written on 28th January and 1st May, 2010. Updated and expanded on 18th November, 2010.Adam and Eve This is an image from the wonderful Ebstorf Mappamundi, a Medieval European map of the world created in…