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The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | yesterday
... memory was recovered and poems would be assembled." On publication of The Visible Man in 2005, Harold Bloom pronounced Henri Cole "a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended ... Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The...
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The Huffington Post (Free subscription) | yesterday
... Ilyich's agony and final illumination take place. While in his last novella, "Hadji Murat", which Harold Bloom has called "the best story in the world," Tolstoy looks back over his life's work and sums it up in a most unexpected way, achieving at the same time a formal perfection and diversity of voicing that he had never attained before -- all of which calls for the greatest attention...
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Underbelly (Free subscription) | 12/05/2009
... stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact and delight. Quoted by Harold Bloom in his review of Max Weinreich, Hitory of the Yiddish Language , a steal from Yale UP at $300. He's quoting Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (1990). See "The Glories of Yiddish," New York Review of Books , Nov. 6, 2008 (I am gleaning the old newspapers).
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Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
If we can get behind Harold Bloom's assertion that texts engender other texts--and thus that literary criticism, like fiction and poetry, is an artistic response to an earlier work--then Roland Barthes' S/Z is an excellent example of what Bloom had in mind. Rarely have I seen a critical work that so manhandles its source material. It is, after all, a 200-page essay on a 13-page...
