Literay critics

>>8605677
Bloom
Adam Gopnik
William Empson
T S Eliot
Northrop Frye
Walter Pater
Samuel Johnson
William Hazlitt
Thomas De Quincey

F.R. Leavis
A.C. Bradley
Aristotle (I wouldn't underestimate the relevance of what he said in Poetics)

>>8605677
I think the author of the biblical Book of Hebrews must have been a sublime literary critic.

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>>8605698
>Adam Gopnik

>>8605677
Good grief! Look how old and decrepit he is.
Just kill me when I get to that age; I won't have half the legacy or cognizance.

You know, to me there are two main species of literary critics: a) those who try to interpret what the author meant with his text and b) those who analyze the literary techniques used by the author (metaphors and similes creation, versification , metrification , the structuring of dialogue, punctuation, uses and transformation of source material, descriptions, creation of stream of consciousness: style in general).

In my opinion the critics of category (a) (which are by far the most abundant and the most famous - Harold Bloom, for example, is one of them) are generally useless and, in some cases, quite pretentious and arcane in language. You have every reason to want to make your own understanding: who are these people to have the authority to say what the author wanted to convey through his text? If they can discover the meaning of an author’s text, we also can.

As for the critics of category (b), I must say that they are special people: they spend their whole lives doing a strenuous job than earns them no money and no fame, just for the sake of the love they have for the artists who they are analyzing. The reading of such critics should be constant for young writers: there is nothing that favors more the formation of the young author than the analysis of the bowels of the works of the masters (that and also reading and writing a lot and constantly, of course). Unfortunately, critics of category (b) are few and little known (even among serious readers). That is not a surprise when you realize that their kind of criticism is much more demanding and slowly-built than that of the category (a) critics.

About Shakespeare, my favorite writer, I advise (for those who really want to delve into the work of the author, and not so much for the casual reader) to read the following books:
>Shakespeare’s Imagery, by Caroline Spurgeon;
>Shakespeare’s Language, by Frank Kermode;
>Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, by George T. Wright;
>The Development of Shakespeare’s imagery, by Wolfgang Clemen;
>The Poetry of Shakespeare’s Plays, by F.E. halliday;
>Shakespeare’s Uses of The Arts of Language, by Sister Mirian Joseph;
>The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays, by B. Ifor Evans

>>8607862
I haven't seen this in a long time.

>>8605677
James Wood
FR Leavis
FO Matthiessen
Edmund Wilson
Lionel Trilling
Mikhail Bakhtin
Barthes