How come Harold Bloom has read the whole canon multiple times,

>>9375990
He's just an academic gate-keeper, his own "criticism" is mostly Freudian bullshit. He never says anything insightful about anything and he never takes the chances to actually judge works in relation to another. A creative artist may not have half the encyclopedic knowledge that Bloom has, but would have a much deeper understanding of what he did read.

>>9375990
literally, no discernible talent lmao

Harold obviously bullshits about his reading speed. I heard that he claimed to read 500 pages per hour. That's 30 words per second, literally impossible.

>>9375990
>what is talent and creativity

If only it were that easy

>>9376013
Not true. Look up kim peak. He was a savant who could read a page in like 2 seconds, with one eye on one page and one eye on the other page. What I question is how someone could comprehend what he's read at that speed.

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>>9375990

The Anxiety of Influence is actually a remarkable prose-poem.

He did write something himself, then he decided he preferred being a critic. Critic is a valid profession, you know. You may as well complain about sports commentators not being active athletes.

>>9375990
Is flight to lucifer irredeemable garbage or is it worth reading (at least as a curiosity)?

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>tfw Bloom has a new interview in the Wall Street Journal but it's subscribers only

I just want to hear if he has anything funny to say that could be memed

>>9376040
If he can't even write a good poem, why should I give a fuck about what he says about poetry? Why should I read him over critics who were actually great poets too?

Harold Bloom's critical writings are romantic in the worst sense of the term. He never writes about the content of a poem itself, but he can wax sentimental about the author, or about Oedipal desires, or about "the imagination" or whatever

>>9376062

Read his book on Wallace Stevens, The Poems of our Climate. It's actually very insightful and informative and not like what you said at all.

>>9375990
He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

>>9376021
He must have photographic memory he can draw on or something. He saves a picture of the page in his head he can draw upon later. That's the only explanation I can fathom

>>9375990
no discernable talent

>>9375990
Good art criticism is art: it requires you to be deep, original, insightful, erudite and have your own craft mastered. I can't see why criticism should not be respected as a art in itself.

>>9376062
You've obviously read little to no Bloom.
>why should I listen to coach when he's only 5'7" and couldn't hope to block half the guys who run at me

>>9375990
Yeah, maybe he understand that his poetry sucks.

>yet hasn't produced any poetry or writing of his own?

Bloom wrote a novel called Flight to Lucifer.

>>9376194
It has some pretty horrible reviews from the looks of it.

>>9375990
Is Crane any good if he bums him so much?

>>9376013
He lies about a ton of stuff. That whole "stretched his legs" about Harry Potter is just plain not true. I have no idea why he even said it.

>>9375990
He has a lack of discernable talent in the area

>>9376288
Agreed. I lost whatever semblance of respect I had for him when I realized he lied about that. It wasn't even a good lie either, it was entirely false. The phrase literally appears once in the first book. Bloom was playing theatrics to an audience he gambled had not read the book, and would therefore believe anything he said about it.

>>9376050
link and I'll post it

>>9376194
Bloom disowned the novel and said that if he could remove it from every library in the world, he'd do it

>>9376313
>Harold Bloom’s Critical Thinking
>The eminent Yale literary scholar discusses why he recites poetry every day, the ‘death of humanistic studies’ and his new book on Falstaff
>https://www.wsj.com/articles/harold-blooms-critical-thinking-1491582477

>>9376050
>>9376334
>>9376349

>>9376092
But who critiques the critics?

>>9376317
And why did he do it? Because it revealed how much of a hack he is. It shattered his "le literary elite gatekeeper" aura for his fanboys to learn how shit his actual work is.

>>9376386
Critics. That's why it is Art.

>>9376386
Other critics.
By the way, since we were talking about Harold Bloom, I was specifically thinking about critics like him who, instead of simply writing short reviews for newspapers, end up writing long, comprehensive ones in form of essays and books.
Would you say that Bloom's monographies are not Art? I'd say that not only they're art, but they're also some of the best art in their genre.

>>9375990
Bloom massively overrates Shakespeare. Makes it hard for me to take him seriously.

>>9376899
literally impossible to overrate shakespeare pleb

>>9376908
Shakespeare is half genius, half forced sex puns. My guess is that not even Shakespeare would have agreed with his worshippers.

>>9376916
doesnt actually matter

influence is not about "merit" or "quality," nor is it about what shakespeare wanted/didnt want

however it happened, it happened that shakespeare is the titanic, overwhelming influence on all english literature taht came after him, and a good chunk of non-english literature.

you can argue that his influence is waning (which is something bloom might agree with and why he is so mad about resentment and shit), but you cant deny that shakes permeates every pore of english literature for the last 400 years.

>>9376899
Shakespeare possessed immense genius, but the amount of bardolatry coming from Bloom is frustrating for anyone who's actually looking for profound insights into his or other writers' craft.

>can't stop write a single criticism without referencing Shakespeare
>Shakespeare invented the human, Shakespeare did this, did that
>don't bother with aspirations, Shakespeare is unsurpassable

>>9376930
That's not true, though. There has been lots of good writing done by authors who, at most, gave Shakespeare a cursory one-over in their school days.

Don't get me wrong, I do think Shakespeare is a genius. Hamlet is one of greatest things ever written. But Bloom thinks that most of what Shakespeare wrote is genius-level, and I just don't see it. Nothing else that Shakespeare wrote is even as good as Hamlet. Most of his stuff lacks focus and indulges in too much cheap humor.

>>9375990
He has produced a novel but he disowned it. Just because you can write well and reference a bazillion things doesn't mean you could write an intriguing literary work.

Because literary theory is snake oil

>>9376070
I just read a book that had an interview with him actually, it was quite interesting. The author found Peek's savantism somewhat dubious and suggested that he may have trained himself to use advanced mnemonic techniques.