The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Love him or hate him (I love him), Harold Bloom is one of the great readers of all time. He has personally read more widely and more deeply than some entire towns. It is certainly not necessary to agree with him to benefit from his insights and analyses. This book examines the notion that there was a body of writing that was central to Western Culture. Each generation read these works and was taught about these works as an essential part of the transmission of that cultural to each rising generation to keep it alive. It not only enriched the lives of those so educated, it benefited the world because of the great values and life giving force of the rich ideas they contained. He notes how this notion has not only been rejected by recent generations of academics, but is now almost unknown in the living generations of people who would constitute Western Culture if they knew what it actually was. He opens with an elegy to the Canon. The book is worth reading just for this essay. The next section examines authors of the Aristocratic Age. All Bloom readers know he is a worshipper of Shakespeare (he calls himself a Bardolater). He opens with an essay titled "Shakespeare: Center of the Canon". This section also includes essays on Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes (another Bloom favorite), Montaigne & Molière, Milton, Samuel Johnson, and Goethe. An impressive list, no? The next section is the Democratic Age and includes essay son Wordsworth & Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Ibsen. The Chaotic age follows and includes Freud vis à vis Shakespeare, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Borges, and Beckett. Obviously, none of these sections is comprehensive. These are only representative writers of the periods Bloom is discussing with us. The final section is Cataloging the Canon and begins with an Elegiac Conclusion. This essay urges that he is not offering us a lifetime reading plan. Rather, he offers us a way to read. He offers advice on how to immerse yourself in certain kinds of reading. He urges us to seek better writing and to develop a taste that will lead us away that which is not worth reading because it takes you away from that which is. He talks about how to develop the taste of a good Critic rather than spewing the politics of resentment or being numb to the great and good. Bloom then provides extensive lists of works from each of the three periods. You may like to read some things on the list and not others. As I said, agreeing with Bloom is really not the point. It is being exposed to what is worthwhile in our cultural tradition and getting good grounding in why it is important that is critical. Our emphasis on practical education and vocational training has left most of us with insufficient time in school to indulge our cultural education. We have to do the work more or less on our own. This book can be a real help in making headway in that part of our personal education. Thanks, Professor Bloom!

The Divine Harold Bloom (as he uses the term for Oscar Wilde) here defends the Western Canon, and while so doing became the recipient of much undeserved criticism, from the likes of so-called New Historicists, gender theorists, Marxist interpreters, and devotees of the School of Resentment. Battle worn and unyielding in his belief in literature that matters, Bloom here is indefatigable. In this, a pillar of western literary criticism, Bloom lucidly lays out his argument for the Canon. I wont defend the Canon here in this review, Bloom does that way better than I ever could, but I will say I appreciate his heroism. I will relate to you that during my undergraduate and graduate pursuits in the field of English Literature at an esteemed University, I can honestly say that the Canon does indeed need a champion. A reader of classical literature since I was a child, I experienced shock and dismay when much of my coursework was taken up with studying literature that was focused on due to "cultural significance" without regard to aesthetic beauty or literary quality. Without naming names, when one goes into a course of study that one hopes will incorporate Shakespeare, Milton, Dante and Cervantes, or the gods of the field, I ended up enmeshed in courses that focused on cultural/socio-political fetishes, with topical, and therefor irrelevant, importance, to call it that. Twenty years later, I'm still reeling from classes focused on comic books and political pamphlets. So, as always, I stuck to what I deem important-literature that has universal significance-Joyce, Becket, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Lawrence and Crane for the moderns; Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Dickens, Austen, Goethe, Mann, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne and James. Bloom, here as elsewhere, is a great guide for those of us who, due to the disintegration of the Academy, are forced into autodidactism. For those of us increasingly rare beings who search for where "wisdom might be found" in those authors where the muse speaks most evidently, this book is a great and treasured resource. Of the many accomplishments of this gem, Bloom allows us to become acquainted with these great writers and why they matter. One of the great regrets of my life is not having had the opportunity of surveying a course taught by Mr. Bloom at Yale or NYU, or better yet, sitting down and having a beer with the man and discussing poetry. I solace myself by reading his works incessantly and watching lectures and interviews on youtube (forgive me Mr. Bloom, I am as technologically adverse as you are, but I have to do what I have to do). This book, along with the Invention of the Human and The Daemon Knows, along with his other works, are my bibles in life as I unwaveringly search for wisdom in books, plays and poetry that have enriched my life and inner being immeasurably. Harold Bloom has had an incalculable impact on me as a living room scholar and on me as a person. Harold Bloom is, and will always be, a treasure great to behold.

I have no issue with the author or topic, after all, it’s Harold Bloom. The small issue I have is that the physical book was described as in ‘very good’ condition. It actually came in what I would call ‘good’ condition. The reason is that there were quite a few bent corners on pages with multiple tears in the dust jacket. Small defects maybe but important when deciding which copy to purchase and at what a price. BTW, I am keeping the book and will enjoy reading it.

Superb - learned, well written, plenty of food for thought on literature and the great books of the western canon.

He leído tres capítulos, pero es evidnete que va con todo. Bloom es claro y preciso para describir las obras máximas de Occidente, acuerdo con su estilo para definir qué es un clásico. Sin embargo, la prevalencia de Shakespeare sobre Dante y Cervantes, no me ha copnvencido. Quizá me convenza al termianr el libro.

Un testo fondamentale di letteratura comparata, un riferimento per comprendere le relazioni tra i grandi classici della letteratura. Da leggere e consultare, una guida vera.

The book is a great overview of western developments.

Harold Bloom, a paragon among readers. He literally means what he writes and in the same way, this book is highly influential in learning the past of all literary emotions in a single pile. As a reader I relished his intelligence and scholarship and it sparkling on my mind. I really appreciate his effort of dragging all ages and literary sages into one well. I highly recommend this book for every literary aficionados.