Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism

Wonderful. . . . Spectacular. . . . You feel the pulse of life, what poetry can bring to us if we let it. The Philadelphia InquirerThis audacious personal odyssey offers readers a cosmos of possibilities when contemplating what happens once we shuffle off this mortal coil. The Christian Science MonitorAn elegiac meditation on a life lived through books. O, The Oprah MagazineThe great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him. The New York Times Book ReviewHere is the daringly original literary critics most personal book: a fourpart spiritual autobiography in the form of brief, luminous readings of poetry, drama, and prosemuch of which he has known by heart since childhood. As one of his own mentors, M. H. Abrams, has said, to read Blooms 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 twentiethcentury American poetry, from Wallace Stevens to Amy Clampitt. Possessed by Memory, in short, is essential Bloom.