(He did the poetry in both Oxford volumes, Trilling the prose. Also he must have had some pull with the editors of the other volumes, since they include such Bloom favorites as Cowper's obscure "On the Ice Islands..." and Yeats' "Cuchulain Comforted. His headnotes to the Romantics and big Victorians are so satisfying he reprints them entire in his recent poetry anthology. I think those gentlemen would be startled that anyone could understand them so well.)
There's a generosity and self-effacement at work there that one would never expect from a theorist of, among other things, narcissism. It makes me think of Borges' remark that all truly intelligent people are kind. There are insights that calm and reconnect, and Bloom lives and conveys them. And I couldn't agree more about the depth: there's a power there now let's get more of it, is his approach, rather than setting up prolegomenae to the possibility of laying the groundwork for defining the parameters of a discourse etc. etc. on the existence of said power.
Kabbalah and Criticism mostly succeeded in confusing me about Kabbalah, at least the didactic section. He primarily summarized Scholem's and other accounts, in that first part, and so tersely I felt he wasn't doing them a favor. Probably I read it too early on. Poetry and Repression has the virtue of running through the whole Bloomantic tradition lucidly, needful after the mind-blowing of Anxiety and unhelpfully scattered Map of Misreading. Very strange how his gnomic and expository styles alternate in those '70s books, even the Yeats and Stevens ones. I think my favorite middle-Blooms at the moment are the essays on Orphism in Figures of Capable Imagination and the Tintern Abbey piece in Repression.
The sefirah scheme in Genius is pretty silly and I was let down by how much of the content was reprinted from Chelsea House intros, but it was still great, and the reprinted material was also top notch. The Swinburne chapter is hilarious and I was touched he wrote on Hofmannsthal, a favorite.
I've had little luck with Empson or de Man but will look up this Cavell.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-01-22 02:50 am (UTC)There's a generosity and self-effacement at work there that one would never expect from a theorist of, among other things, narcissism. It makes me think of Borges' remark that all truly intelligent people are kind. There are insights that calm and reconnect, and Bloom lives and conveys them. And I couldn't agree more about the depth: there's a power there now let's get more of it, is his approach, rather than setting up prolegomenae to the possibility of laying the groundwork for defining the parameters of a discourse etc. etc. on the existence of said power.
Kabbalah and Criticism mostly succeeded in confusing me about Kabbalah, at least the didactic section. He primarily summarized Scholem's and other accounts, in that first part, and so tersely I felt he wasn't doing them a favor. Probably I read it too early on. Poetry and Repression has the virtue of running through the whole Bloomantic tradition lucidly, needful after the mind-blowing of Anxiety and unhelpfully scattered Map of Misreading. Very strange how his gnomic and expository styles alternate in those '70s books, even the Yeats and Stevens ones. I think my favorite middle-Blooms at the moment are the essays on Orphism in Figures of Capable Imagination and the Tintern Abbey piece in Repression.
The sefirah scheme in Genius is pretty silly and I was let down by how much of the content was reprinted from Chelsea House intros, but it was still great, and the reprinted material was also top notch. The Swinburne chapter is hilarious and I was touched he wrote on Hofmannsthal, a favorite.
I've had little luck with Empson or de Man but will look up this Cavell.