Rating: 
Summary: Appreciations
Review: "The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients" -Samuel JohnsonGreat Paterian critic that he is--there aren't many left--Harold Bloom returns with this, arguably his most ambitious effort. As bad as one wants to call Harold bombastic, Genius is a much-needed book in the Age of the Screen. Tendentious Bloom is, but then again, most geniuses are. Bloomian poetics is regretably on the wane while the monomaniacal social engineering machines that call themselves English deparments slowly forge thier empire, for better or worse. My own experience has proven that even bringing up Bloom's name during graduate courses makes professors anxious--his puissance is that spectacular. Bloom's bonafide readers await his full-length studies on Hart Crane and his mentor, Freud. That is, if he ever chooses to write them... Genius is highly recommended, as is his entire oeuvre, if only to serve as an example that books still and will always matter. And yet, Bloom's prognosis remains Nietzchean in its tenor and pessimism: "Another century of readers--and spirit itself will stink" (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 43). It behooves us to carry literature forward after Bloom is gone, for Paul Celan has already warned us that the poem--and by extension,the act of literature itself--always demands and calls on the other. Genius is perhaps Bloom's last attempt to "ring us up," as it were. The question is: Is anyone listening?
Rating:
Summary: Professor Bloom's will to impose system is overdetermined.
Review: A student once asked an Oxford University don, "What is the philosophy of Bertrand Russell?" The professor replied, "Which year?" One might well say the same of Harold Bloom.
A protean writer, Bloom resembles a chameleon whose shade of criticism shifts periodically to blend with his current obsession. Bloom has undergone at least four critical metamorphoses: from arch-Romantic (during his "Blakean period"), to a strict Freudian phase (as shown in his legendary "anxiety of influence" theory), to Postmodernist guru (jumping onto the Francophile bandwagon with such force that he nearly overturned it), to cultural magus (as is his current state, exemplified by Genius, in which he issues edicts that display the fury of a fundamentalist preacher and the stern pronouncements of draconian law. Bloom has changed his mind so many times that those who attempt to plot the course of his views become vertiginous. In Genius, Bloom has written what he calls "A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds." The mosaic is of the geniuses of language, meaning that one will not find chapters on Newton, Einstein, Darwin, da Vinci, Edison, Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach. Bloom confesses that his choice is wholly arbitrary and idiosyncratic. "No two souls," he writes, "ever agree upon what is most relevant to them." To be fair, Bloom's elitist valuations are often on target. What serious book lover would disagree with his celebration of writers such as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Milton, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Goethe, Freud, Nietzsche, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Frost, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Twain, Faulkner, Whitman, Hugo, Dickens, and Dostoevsky? All of Bloom's one hundred literary geniuses are dead, and most of them are male. However, he does include a few female writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and the only Asian in the book, Lady Murasaki. He also includes a dozen Latin American writers, most of whom are unknown to me. Some of my favorite writers, alas, are missing from Bloom's pantheon: Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck. An omnivorous reader and prolific writer, Bloom has enjoyed a publishing career that spans more than four decades. Although his erudition is beyond dispute, his pontifical and pretentious pronouncements often annoy, as if he were delivering the law from Mount Sinai or an oracle from Mount Olympus. The essays in this 814-page tome average eight pages in length. This would be a better book if Bloom had limited his selection to forty or fifty literary geniuses, thus allowing him to devote longer critiques to each writer. "The question we need to put to any writer," says Bloom, must be: does she or he augment our consciousness? I find this a rough but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified? If not, then I have encountered talent, not genius." Bloom's more insightful revelations are the parallels he draws between writers in different centuries and the influence one creative spirit has had on another. The structure of the book is ludicrous. Bloom employs a highly dubious Kabbalistic grid in the arrangement of his selected geniuses. His ambition to impose system is arbitrary and overdetermined. Bloom has talent, but he does not have genius. Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. His more than 25 books include The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Western Canon (1994), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and studies of William Blake, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He lives in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.
Rating:
Summary: Professor Bloom's will to impose system is overdetermined.
Review: A student once asked an Oxford University don, "What is the philosophy of Bertrand Russell?" The professor replied, "Which year?" One might well say the same of Harold Bloom.
A protean writer, Bloom resembles a chameleon whose shade of criticism shifts periodically to blend with his current obsession. Bloom has undergone at least four critical metamorphoses: from arch-Romantic (during his "Blakean period"), to a strict Freudian phase (as shown in his legendary "anxiety of influence" theory), to Postmodernist guru (jumping onto the Francophile bandwagon with such force that he nearly overturned it), to cultural magus (as is his current state, exemplified by Genius, in which he issues edicts that display the fury of a fundamentalist preacher and the stern pronouncements of draconian law. Bloom has changed his mind so many times that those who attempt to plot the course of his views become vertiginous. In Genius, Bloom has written what he calls "A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds." The mosaic is of the geniuses of language, meaning that one will not find chapters on Newton, Einstein, Darwin, da Vinci, Edison, Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach. Bloom confesses that his choice is wholly arbitrary and idiosyncratic. "No two souls," he writes, "ever agree upon what is most relevant to them." To be fair, Bloom's elitist valuations are often on target. What serious book lover would disagree with his celebration of writers such as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Milton, Chaucer, Homer, Virgil, Plato, Goethe, Freud, Nietzsche, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Proust, Joyce, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Frost, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Twain, Faulkner, Whitman, Hugo, Dickens, and Dostoevsky? All of Bloom's one hundred literary geniuses are dead, and most of them are male. However, he does include a few female writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Iris Murdoch, Flannery O'Connor, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and the only Asian in the book, Lady Murasaki. He also includes a dozen Latin American writers, most of whom are unknown to me. Some of my favorite writers, alas, are missing from Bloom's pantheon: Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck. An omnivorous reader and prolific writer, Bloom has enjoyed a publishing career that spans more than four decades. Although his erudition is beyond dispute, his pontifical and pretentious pronouncements often annoy, as if he were delivering the law from Mount Sinai or an oracle from Mount Olympus. The essays in this 814-page tome average eight pages in length. This would be a better book if Bloom had limited his selection to forty or fifty literary geniuses, thus allowing him to devote longer critiques to each writer. "The question we need to put to any writer," says Bloom, must be: does she or he augment our consciousness? I find this a rough but effectual test: however I have been entertained, has my awareness been intensified, my consciousness widened and clarified? If not, then I have encountered talent, not genius." Bloom's more insightful revelations are the parallels he draws between writers in different centuries and the influence one creative spirit has had on another. The structure of the book is ludicrous. Bloom employs a highly dubious Kabbalistic grid in the arrangement of his selected geniuses. His ambition to impose system is arbitrary and overdetermined. Bloom has talent, but he does not have genius. Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. His more than 25 books include The Anxiety of Influence (1973), The Western Canon (1994), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and studies of William Blake, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He lives in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.
Rating: 
Summary: Not much detailed information included
Review: Although numerous authors from various genres and time periods are covered within this book, the information given on each particular author is insufficient. For instance, when discussing why Jane Austen must be considered among the geniuses of literature, he only mentions one of her novels in detail in order to prove his argument. This is basically the same method he utilizes for all of the writers, although Shakespeare does receive extra attention. He only covers those writers who are deceased, yet he ignores many who, in my opinion, deserve to be credited as literary geniuses. This is because his focus is on the Western Canon.
Rating: 
Summary: Reconsidered
Review: At first I hated this book. I mean really hated it. I thought Bloom pretentious and insufferable as well as unbelievably facile and superficial. I would have given this book one star, at best. That's because I was hopscotching around. I started with writers and thinkers I knew and liked. I picked someone at the end of the book, then the middle, then back to the end, and then to the beginning. I found the book unbearable. Then I said, the guy can't be stupid; I must be doing this wrong. So I started at the beginning, and read all the way through. Good grief! What a difference. There's a theme, continuity, sense. Everything became clear. I learned things I never would have come upon on my own. Do yourselves a favor--here is the history of the literate world splayed open for you. Start at the beginning and you will learn things you never would have imagined. There IS genius. It is wonderful to behold. You will love this book and man and his thoughts if you give this book a chance. Of course there are lapses, and of course Bloom is prejudiced, bigoted, pompous and outrageous in his own way. So what! You don't think every great writer and thinker wasn't?
If you don't think Milton, Dante, Tolstoy, plus all the reglious thinks from Paul, Augustine and Mohammed weren't, then you seriously need to read this book. I think I learned more in this book than I did in 10 college courses.
Rating:
Summary: Third times a charm...
Review: At times this book is amusing, entertaining, sometimes even enlightening but most of all exasperating. Harold Bloom has spent half a century digging deep into the best that our literary culture has to offer, but all he has given us, once again, is another 800 pages of unedited notes. Each Genius is regrettably reduced to a few pages of off-hand comments and we have seen many of these comments too many times before in his books on the Western Canon and Shakespeare. There is some humor and insight but for every insight we get thirty pages of unexplained marginalia like the following: "Negation of seeming realities in an ostensibly Christian society is the essence of Kierkegaard's genius, but this was an anxiety for him, since Kierkegaard had to be post-Hegelian, even as we have to be post-Freudian." This might make a great thesis statement for a long article (or even a book) but Bloom tosses it off like it is a self-evident truth that needs no further elaboration. I suspect it meant something interesting to Bloom, but it is lost on those mortals among us who cannot read his mind (and he complains about the obfuscation of the French!) I guess if you are as well-established and respected as Harold Bloom then you no longer need to write books, you can merely publish them.
Rating:
Summary: An indispensable work of serious literary criticism.
Review: For those of us who love literature, this book is a godsend. Harold Bloom is a serious critic, who defends the idea of true genius and the canonical, against the contemporary tide of political correctness and confusion, that he feels has infected the campus. Bloom iis a lover of literature, and his commitment to literary genius, and the classical foundations of the Western tradition is fantastic.
In the book, he chooses one hundred geniuses, who are all dead (he has a rule against living geniuses), and groups them together into ten sections, with two lustres of ten each. He draws on his own Jewish, Gnostic and Kabbalistic roots, to frame the book. The first lustre of masters, is filled by the greatest of all time, with the head of course being Shakespeare. He makes a compelling case for Shakespeare being not only the greatest writer ever (hardly controversial), but the inventor of human nature, as we know it.
He gives us a critical analysis of all the greatest masters, including Milton, Dante, Chaucer, Plato, St. Paul, Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Faulkner, and many others one might not have heard of. His religious outlook can be a bit troublesome, for those of us who are genuine Christians, but he is less concerned with converting us to a Gnostic worldview, then he is with celebrating human genius, and worshipping Shakespeare.
Another beef with this otherwise great book is his glaring omissions. He admits to leaving some geniuses off the list, and argues that his list is in many ways arbritrary. All the geniuses he lists (that I've heard of) are worthy of that title, but where's Arnold? Carlyle? Newman? Poe? Walter Scott? Fielding? You get the idea.
Mr. Bloom is equal parts master critic, old curmudgeon, youthful idealist, and cultural iconoclast, who cuts through the muck of popular fiction, bad criticism, PC foolishness, and much like Dr. Johnson, rises above the outlook of his age. A great read of all who love to read.
Rating: 
Summary: The Critic as Genius
Review: Genius by Harold Bloom. A mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds,Fourth Estate, London,2002 25 pounds. With this book Harold Bloom reaffirms the place he has already staked out for himself, as the most bold and ambitious literary critic of our time. He does this by surveying world literature and selecting from it the one - hundred supreme literary geniuses, and in five or six pages for each discussing what defines the unique genius if each one.Each chapter has a short frontispiece in which he says something more general about the life and work of the individual creator, and a larger section in which he reads and interprets a selected piece of writing of the particular genius. His analysis and his own writing sparkle with aphoristic brilliance,with deep and broad knowledge, and with a rare capacity to make remarkable new connections between literary figures and worlds. Above all, the book is pervaded by his love of reading, his love of great imaginative literature.And the whole work is testament to and evidence of his total enthusiasm about and dedication to this world
Frequently in the work he mentions with a degree of modesty which would make Faustus proud, his knowing by heart vast sections of a particular literary masterpiece. This recalling time and again his own memorizing of particular works, is only one of the many obsessions which play such a large part in the work.Bloom does not remind repeating himself, tells us over and over again that he is seventy - one, that to his regret he has lived to see the university world taken over by the politically correct. He rails against those curricula which select writers on basis of ethnic belonging, gender, race.He does not stop insisting that the great body of the media world, the popular culture, the university world is involved in nonsense and trivia.He presents himself as a kind of romantic hero, defending not only the literary greats he present, but the very idea of literary greatness, of genius of the imagination itself. And thus without declaring it openly, he presents himself as the one hundred and first genius of the work, the one who has come to rescue all the others.He is the the reader as genius who has come to save all the other geniuses from all the postmodern Foucalt - Derrida deriders whose leveling spirit defines the mediocrity of the age.
What is remarkable is how well Bloom does the work he sets out to do. His writing, line by line, writer by writer is truly alive, thought - provoking and inspiring. Bloom organizes his geniuses into groups of ten groups of ten,each representing a Kabbalistic sphere or realm of emnation.They are then subdivided into groups of five each of which is called a ` lustre'. Each lustre a term he takes from Emerson and Plutarch which means shining by reflected light, is meant to hint at the influence the geniuses grouped together have upon each other. This scheme which in one sense seems arbitrary, nonetheless often works to help him make interconnections which are often surprising and rich.For instance his first section in which he takes five of the greatest literary geniuses,Shakespeare,Cervantes,Montaigne,Milton Tolstoy,is called Keter or Crown.It contains those geniuses each of which ` dominates his genre forever'Bloom says Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne and Cervantes,that Milton is ` uneasily ` influenced by Shakespeare,and that Tolstoy who ` hated Shakespeare ` nonethless knew how to in the novel of his old age, Hadji Murad use his influence in his varied characterizations.
Here it is necessary to point out the special role Shakespeare plays in Bloom's literary world.Shakespeare is not as in Borges words, " the one who created the most " he is what for Bloom is most important in literary art,the supreme creator of character. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth,Iago,Falstaff, Rosalind, are fictional characters more memorable more living more immortal, in Bloom's judgment, than most human beings.
The use of the Sefirot while in one sense artificial nonetheless enhances the connections between the various writers and enriches the work.Taken as a whole it gives the suggestion of these literary creators as embodying the whole of G-d `s creation, the ineffable radiance of all Being. And this when there is of course the reservation that such creation is by no means complete, as Bloom includes in his list no living author, and of course, no great authors of the future. As for the religious implication of the scheme it is clear that in making all the world, the world of literature Bloom is speaking for himself as a person who has given all his life to literature, whose religion is the reading of literature, an odd religion of one, and of his own peculiar greatness.
An alternative reading would see all these literary creators not necessarily in heroic rebellion against G-d, but as creators working to complete God's creation. This alternative view that of normative Judaism, would see genius as a ` gift of God . The world each creator makes is one element which is God's, while the characters too, including the authors are also ` creations ` of God, who enrich and fill up God;s world. Each great creator is an especially chosen servant of God. Each creator is connected with but cannot contain or exhaust the Source of creative power whose manifestations will continue to surprise us..In this sense the love of literature, the love of reading is simply one particular expression of God's love for us, and for our capacity to love G-d in return. Literature which enhances life, which gives life meaning and beauty are God's gift to us, which we contribute to through our own creations.
Bloom's work enhances our love for literature and life. Those who read this book will have a deeper appreciation for the place of reading great literature in life, and for the power and greatness of the single individual human being ( in this case, Harold Bloom) the creator of Genius. .
Rating:
Summary: Provides many links between his geniuses
Review: Genius provides an enlightening blend of examples from over a hundred creative minds, illustrating the concept of creativity and genius and considering the elements which comprise the trait. From the Bible through modern times, the author provides many links between his geniuses and the ways they have influenced each other. A fascinating history which crosses genres to expose underlying influences.
Rating:
Summary: not Bloom's best
Review: Harold Bloom loves--LOVES--reading, books, the written word. That comes through in all of his recent books and adds an extra something to them. And this work has that something, which is enough to recommend reading it, despite its flaws and pretensions. Bloom assembles his 100 geniuses according to Kabbalah, the old Jewish form of speculation, which is difficult to penetrate. Still, while I was initially put off by this method, it did occasionally bear fruit in the juxtaposition of not often compared geniuses: John Donne and Lady Murasaki, for example. Bloom's obsessions come through, as well, for better or worse (depending on one's own): the Gnosticism surely familiar to Bloom fans; his Bardolatry; his loathing for T.S. Eliot (although he does include him, justifiably, as a genius). This is a very personal book, in which Bloom offers his own reflections on these writers and on the world. We find out, for example, that Bloom does not accept the legitimacy of George W. Bush and (twice) that he laments the fact that an atheist can't be "elected dogcatcher" in the US (both times with the same phrase). He puts forth interesting thoughts on each writer, but his readings (misreadings?) of Flannery O'Connor and Dostoevsky are particularly grating: he understates the Christian faith of both, and even goes so far as to suggest that Dostoevsky was at his worst when writing about spiritual matters. All that aside, the book still has its merits. These geniuses are lovingly and passionately collected, and their words are frequently excerpted. Many--probably most--of these quotations are absolutely fascinating, riveting; more than a few of which are worth copying down for future reference. A published review somewhere, I now forget where, suggested that this is not a book to read straight through, and it is not, indeed. Rather, it yields the most pleasure when jumping from person to person, from one's favorite writers to those one doesn't know so well--and back again. Despite its flaws and Bloom's obsessions, it is still a book to be savored.
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