Possessed by Memory

“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.