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112-667: The imprint was resurrected in 2012 for a new series of titles. The present English Library no longer seeks to provide critical editions; the focus is now 'on the beauty and elegance of the book'. The Penguin English Library aimed to publish 'a comprehensive range of the literary masterpieces which have appeared in the English language since the 15th century'. All texts in the Library were published with an introduction and explanatory notes written and compiled by an editor; some with

224-512: A God , who could be all-powerful and all-knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia ." Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggle to create their individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the poets who inspired them to write. The first of these books, Yeats , challenged the conventional critical view of William Butler Yeats 's poetic career. In

336-489: A 1998 New York Times article called him "one of the most gifted of contemporary critics". James Wood wrote: "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own – a kind of campiness, in fact – Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant." Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in

448-568: A 2005 interview, Jeanne said that she and Harold were both atheists , which he denied: "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist." Bloom was the subject of a 1990 article in GQ titled "Bloom in Love", which accused him of having affairs with female graduate students. He called the article a "disgusting piece of character assassination". Bloom's friend and colleague the biographer R. W. B. Lewis said in 1994 that Bloom's "wandering, I gather

560-455: A Jewish Hospital in New York was a Rimbaud in embryo ... Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back." Morris Greenberg, Samuel's brother, had given five of Samuel's notebooks to Fisher so that he could get them published. Crane copied forty-two poems from the notebooks, which he borrowed from Fisher for a period of less than

672-611: A Poem (WW Norton, 2012), Bloom indicated the influence Abrams had upon him in his years at Cornell. Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating them, but must make their own work different from their precursors'. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors to make room for fresh imaginings. Observers often identified Bloom with deconstruction , but he never admitted to sharing more than

784-541: A bibliography as well. Editors were also required to provide 'authoritative texts', using their own judgement in printing one, or in some cases creating their own. The series was recognisable chiefly by its distinctive orange spine. Most, if not all, titles were reprinted as Penguin Classics following the merger of the two imprints in the mid 1980s. Some of these editions were superseded in the 1990s or later, while some continue to be reprinted today as Classics. Additionally,

896-500: A book under the working title Living Labyrinth , centering on Shakespeare and Walt Whitman , which was published as The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011). In July 2011, after the publication of The Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock , Bloom was working on three further projects: In 1986, Bloom credited Northrop Frye as his nearest precursor. He told Imre Salusinszky in 1986: "In terms of my own theorizations ...

1008-437: A divorce, she joined Crane. The two began a romantic relationship on December 25, 1931. As far as is known, she was his only heterosexual partner. " The Broken Tower ", one of his last published poems, emerged from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, in part because he recommenced his homosexual activities despite his relationship with Cowley. He claimed he would commit suicide multiple times. "The Broken Tower"

1120-534: A draft of the "Cape Hatteras" section, a key part of his panegyric poem. In late June that year, Crane returned from the south of France to Paris. Crosby noted in his journal, "Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark ." Crane got drunk at the Cafe Select and fought with waiters over his tab. When the Paris police were called, he fought with them and

1232-419: A few ideas with deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology  ... There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do." Bloom's association with

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1344-411: A foreword to it; and many critics since have used Crane's difficulty as an excuse for a quick dismissal. O'Neill did, however, write a draft for such a foreword. The text said of Crane that "the great difficulty which his poetry presents the reader, is naturally, the style. The theme never appears in explicit statement". The publisher Harcourt rejected White Buildings , with Harrison Smith writing Crane

1456-406: A handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets ... only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level". Bloom called Crowley's Little, Big "a neglected masterpiece" and "the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know". He wrote the afterword to a 40th-anniversary edition of the novel. Shortly before his death, Bloom expressed admiration for

1568-432: A kind of privacy that is comprehensible in terms of the cultural construction of homosexuality and its attendant institutions of privacy." Thomas Yingling objects to the traditional, New Critical and Eliotic readings of Crane, arguing that the "American myth criticism and formalist readings" have "depolarized and normalized our reading of American poetry, making any homosexual readings seem perverse ." Even more than

1680-504: A list – noted by the general public with widespread interest – of the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or candidates for that status. Bloom said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he did not stand by it. Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare , considering him

1792-665: A loan of $ 1,000. After parting with the Opffers, Crane left for Paris in early 1929, but continued to struggle with his mental health. His drinking became notably worse during the late 1920s, while he was finishing The Bridge . He visited his father, who had started an inn in the vicinity of Chagrin Falls, Ohio , in 1931. Crane visited Mexico in 1931–32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship , and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. When Peggy Cowley , wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley , agreed to

1904-585: A month. Many of Crane's poems consisted of lines and phrases taken from Greenberg's poems, always unattributed. Crane's poem "Emblems of Conduct", the third in White Buildings , consisted solely of rearranged lines from Greenberg's poems. The plagiarism went unnoticed for decades until Marc Simon published Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane and the Lost Manuscripts in 1978, detailing how Crane copied from Greenberg. Scholarly interpretation over

2016-630: A new light shed From penitence, must needs bring pain, And with it song of minor, broken strain. But you who hear the lamp whisper thru night Can trace paths tear-wet, and forget all blight. Hart Crane's "C33" as published in Bruno's Weekly in 1917. Crane's first published work was the poem "C33", which was published in the Greenwich journal Bruno's Weekly in 1917 in a feature entitled "Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise". The poem

2128-424: A personal or political problem, though, Yingling argues that such "biases" obscure much of what the poems make clear; he cites, for instance, the last lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" from White Buildings as a haunting description of estrangement from the norms of ( heterosexual ) family life: Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And

2240-533: A secretary for a stockbroker visiting California. Crane's mother, following her second marriage breakup, was living in the Los Angeles area . He revealed his homosexuality to her, causing a confrontation and Crane sneaking out on May 15, 1928, never to see her again. He later found out about the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Hart, but his mother refused to pay him the $ 5,000 inheritance until he returned to live with her. He managed to convince her to give him

2352-518: A sense of failure. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge , intended to be an uplifting counter to Eliot's The Waste Land . The Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem's central symbol and its poetic starting point. Crane found a place to start his synthesis in Brooklyn. Arts patron Otto H. Kahn gifted him $ 2,000 to begin work on the panegyric poem, though he requested

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2464-422: A sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner, whom "Voyages" is generally considered to be about. "Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land , he also said it

2576-451: A social purpose in their work. Bloom asserted that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal of improving one's society held by "forces of resentment". He cast the latter as absurd, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position

2688-522: A survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focuses on 26 works Bloom considers sublime and representative of their nations and of the Western canon . Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, Bloom's major concern in the volume was to reclaim literature from what he called the " School of Resentment ", the mostly academic critics who espoused

2800-670: A thing as a great style which was ... not ... applied to any subject at all." Crane returned to New York in 1928 following a hurricane which left the Cuban residence damaged, and began living with friends and taking temporary jobs as a copywriter, or living off unemployment and the charity of friends and his father. For a time he lived in Brooklyn at 77 Willow Street until his lover, Opffer, invited him to live in Opffer's father's home at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights . Crane

2912-550: A very young age: I was preadolescent, ten or eleven years old. I still remember the extraordinary delight, the extraordinary force that Crane and Blake brought to me—in particular Blake's rhetoric in the longer poems—though I had no notion what they were about. I picked up a copy of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane in the Bronx Library. I still remember when I lit upon the page with the extraordinary trope, "O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of

3024-439: A worker in his father's factory. In 1925, he briefly lived with Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate . The two had a dispute with Crane due to the mess his belongings made throughout the house. Additionally, Crane and Tate had a disagreement over the negative outlook of T. S. Eliot 's work. This prompted them to leave two letters under his door requesting that he move out, which he complied with. He wrote his mother and grandmother in

3136-578: Is "a genuine poet ... [but White Buildings ] is really the most perplexing kind of poetry." A young Tennessee Williams , then falling in love with Crane's poetry, could "hardly understand a single line—of course the individual lines aren't supposed to be intelligible. The message, if there actually is one, comes from the total effect." Crane was aware that his poetry was difficult. Some of his essays originated as encouraging epistles, explications and stylistic apologies to editors, updates to his patron, and both well-considered or impulsive letters to friends. It

3248-581: Is a detail from J. H. Fuseli 's 1781 oil painting The Nightmare , and the detail was retained when the book was first reprinted as a Penguin Classic in 1986. However, reprints from 2003 onwards feature the detail of a photograph by Sir Simon Marsden instead. Harold Bloom Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale University . In 2017, Bloom

3360-440: Is a thing of the past. I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn't very secret for a number of years." In a 2004 article for New York magazine, Naomi Wolf wrote that while she was an undergraduate student at Yale University in 1983, Bloom attended a dinner with her, saying he would discuss her writing. Instead, she claims that he came on to her, placing his hand on her inner thigh. Bloom "vigorously denied"

3472-605: Is an amendment to Shakespeare: Invention of the Human written after Bloom decided the chapter on Hamlet in the earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of the Ur-Hamlet to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself. Some elements of religious criticism were combined with his secular criticism in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (2004), and a more complete return to religious criticism

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3584-516: Is generally undisputed. Written early in the year and finished two months prior to his death, the poem was rejected by Poetry Magazine , and only appeared in print (in the June 1932 edition of The New Republic ) after Crane's death by water. Crane and Peggy both decided to return to New York on the steamship Orizaba , in April 1932 because Crane's stepmother had invited him back to settle

3696-649: Is mostly to be found in his letters: he corresponded regularly with Allen Tate , Yvor Winters , and Gorham Munson , and shared critical dialogues with Eugene O'Neill , William Carlos Williams , E. E. Cummings , Sherwood Anderson , Kenneth Burke , Waldo Frank , Harriet Monroe , Marianne Moore , and Gertrude Stein . He was also an acquaintance of H. P. Lovecraft , who would eventually voice concern over Crane's premature aging due to alcohol abuse. Selections of Crane's letters are available in many editions of his poetry. His two most famous stylistic defenses emerged from correspondences: his "General Aims and Theories" (1925)

3808-599: Is named after Oscar Wilde's cell in The Ballad of Reading Gaol and his name appeared misspelled in print as "Harold H Crone". The style he would use in his later books is apparent in poems written at the time. Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year in December 1916 and left for New York City , promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University . His parents, in

3920-564: Is the death of art." When Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature , he bemoaned the "pure political correctness" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction", while conceding his appreciation of Lessing's earlier work. MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research , included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for saying, "The current head of

4032-519: Is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension." There is also some mention of it, though it is not so much presented as a critical neologism , in his letter to Harriet Monroe: "The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." L. S. Dembo's influential study of The Bridge , Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (1960), reads this 'logic' well within

4144-440: Is the last poem meant to be published by poet Hart Crane in 1932. He intended it to be "an epic of the modern consciousness." In keeping with the varieties and difficulties of Crane criticism, the poem has been interpreted widely—as a death ode, life ode, process poem, visionary poem, and a poem on failed vision—but its biographical impetus out of Crane's first heterosexual affair (with Peggy Cowley, estranged wife of Malcolm Cowley)

4256-489: Is today Belarus . Harold had three older sisters and an older brother. He was the last living sibling. As a boy, Bloom read Hart Crane 's Collected Poems , a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry. Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science , where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high. In 1951 he received a B.A. degree in classics from Cornell, where he

4368-603: The Brooklyn Bridge . Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. He dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City , promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University . Crane took various jobs, including in copywriting and advertising. Throughout the early 1920s, various small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among

4480-702: The Poetry Foundation website, analyzing the poem based strictly on the content of the text itself and not on outside political or cultural matters. In mid-December 1926, Crane visited William Murrell Fisher in Woodstock, a literary critic whom he first met via their mutual friend Gorham Munson . There, Fisher shared with Crane multiple manuscripts of poems by Samuel Greenberg ,a little-known poet who had died in 1917. Writing to Gorham Munson on December 20, Crane wrote "This poet, Grünberg, [ sic ] which Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at

4592-549: The Shelley of my age, / must lay his heart out for my bed and board." Lowell thought that Crane was the most important American poet of the generation to come of age in the 1920s, stating that "[Crane] got out more than anybody else ... he somehow got New York City ; he was at the center of things in the way that no other poet was." Lowell also described Crane as being "less limited than any other poet of his generation." Tennessee Williams said that he wanted to be "given back to

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4704-509: The Western canon provoked a substantial interest in his opinion of the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett . He's certainly the most authentic." Of British writers, Bloom said: " Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active" and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Iris Murdoch 's eminence". After Murdoch died, Bloom expressed admiration for

4816-573: The "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner sees Bloom as an important influence on his work. Bloom's work has drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars. Bloom was called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States" and "America's best-known man of letters". A 1994 New York Times article said that many younger critics see Bloom as an "outdated oddity", whereas

4928-562: The High Romantics against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot , who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making , charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet. After a personal crisis during the late 1960s, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson , Sigmund Freud , and

5040-963: The Human (1998), Bloom provided an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces". Written as a companion to the general reader and theater-goer, Bloom declared that bardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is". He also contended in the work that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our changes. The two paragons of his theory were Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and Hamlet , whom Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. These two characters, Iago , and Cleopatra Bloom believed (citing A. C. Bradley ) are "the four Shakespearean characters most inexhaustible to meditation". Throughout Shakespeare , characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other. Contemporary academics and critics decried this as harking back to

5152-472: The Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson , known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator', is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy." This was despite Bloom's sympathy for Joseph Smith , the founding prophet of Mormonism , whom he called a "religious genius". Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932)

5264-561: The Style of our Age" and that "each has composed canonical works", he identified them as Thomas Pynchon , Philip Roth , Cormac McCarthy , and Don DeLillo . He named their respective masterpieces as The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon ; Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral ; Blood Meridian ; and Underworld . He added to this estimate the work of John Crowley , with special interest in his Aegypt Sequence and novel Little, Big , saying, "only

5376-693: The Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of Ralston College , a new institution in Savannah, Georgia , that focuses on primary texts. Fond of endearments , Bloom addressed both male and female students and friends as "my dear". Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958. They had two children. In

5488-472: The age away." Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. His father was a successful Ohio restaurateur and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent , but sold it for $ 2,900 before the brand became popular. He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the business with chocolate bars. Clarence Crane's sister, Alice Crane Williams ,

5600-786: The allegation. Bloom never retired from teaching, swearing that he would need to be removed from the classroom "in a great big body bag". He had open heart surgery in 2002 and broke his back after a fall in 2008. He died at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut , on October 14, 2019. He was 89 years old. Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on Percy Bysshe Shelley ( Shelley's Myth-making , Yale University Press , originally Bloom's doctoral dissertation), William Blake ( Blake's Apocalypse , Doubleday ), W. B. Yeats ( Yeats , Oxford University Press ), and Wallace Stevens ( Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate , Cornell University Press ). In these, he defended

5712-435: The alphabet every breath or two? In the minds of people who have sensitively read, seen, and experienced a great deal, isn't there a terminology something like short-hand as compared to usual description and dialectics, which the artist ought to be right in trusting as a reasonable connective agent toward fresh concepts, more inclusive evaluations? Monroe was not impressed, though she acknowledged that others were, and printed

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5824-403: The ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism , Kabbalah , and Hermeticism . In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham , the book editor for The Baltimore Sun , noted that Bloom had long called himself a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom responded: "I am using 'Gnostic' in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand a Yahweh , or

5936-399: The avant-garde a respect that White Buildings ratified and strengthened. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge , intended to be an uplifting counter to T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land (1922). Initial critical reaction to it was mixed, with many praising the scope but criticizing the quality of the poems. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off

6048-538: The avant-garde respect which was later cemented by the 1926 publication of White Buildings . On May 1, 1926, he went to Isla de la Juventud to reside in his mother's family residence there. He received a contract from Liveright Publishing to publish White Buildings in July. White Buildings contains many of Crane's most well-received and popular poems, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen", and "Voyages",

6160-669: The beginning of "East Coker", which is reminiscent of the final section of "The River", from The Bridge . Yvor Winters and Allen Tate both praised White Buildings but considered The Bridge to be a failure. Mid-century American poets, such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell , cited Crane as a significant influence. Both poets also wrote about Crane in their poetry. Berryman wrote him one of his famous elegies in The Dream Songs , and Lowell published his "Words for Hart Crane" in Life Studies (1959): "Who asks for me,

6272-466: The biblical Bathsheba . In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he revisits some of the territory covered in The Book of J in discussing the significance of Yahweh and Jesus of Nazareth as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism . In The American Religion (1992), Bloom surveyed

6384-527: The course of their careers. A Map of Misreading picks up where The Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism attempts to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the Lurianic Kabbalah , as explicated by scholar Gershom Scholem , as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in

6496-605: The essays of Harold Bloom , V. S. Pritchett and John Sutherland have been featured. A portrait or photograph of the author remains printed on the inside of the front cover. The focus is now on cover art, with each title designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith . This is an incomplete list of the titles in the Penguin English Library: All titles listed below are assumed to have lists of further reading appended and/or are no longer in print having been superseded by new editions, unless stated. The cover art

6608-663: The estate of his father, who had died the month prior. This was the same ship aboard which he had gone to Cuba in 1926. The Orizaba departed from Vera Cruz, Mexico on April 23 and stopped at Havana, Cuba on April 26. While aboard, Crane was assaulted after making sexual advances to a male crew member. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico . Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before jumping overboard. The ship

6720-449: The exchange alongside the poem: You find me testing metaphors, and poetic concept in general, too much by logic, whereas I find you pushing logic to the limit in a painfully intellectual search for emotion, for poetic motive. Crane had a relatively well-developed rhetoric for the defense of his poems; here is an excerpt from "General Aims and Theories": New conditions of life germinate new forms of spiritual articulation. ...the voice of

6832-526: The familiar rhetoric of the Romantics : "The Logic of metaphor was simply the written form of the 'bright logic' of the imagination, the crucial sign stated, the Word made words.... As practiced, the logic of metaphor theory is reducible to a fairly simple linguistic principle: the symbolized meaning of an image takes precedence over its literal meaning; regardless of whether the vehicle of an image makes sense,

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6944-532: The generation following those three. He expressed great admiration for the Canadian poets Anne Carson , particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red , and A. F. Moritz , whom Bloom called "a true poet". Bloom also listed Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets and the best living American poet after Ashbery's death. Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1986) features his canon of

7056-690: The intent and morality of Hart Crane's actions varies. Writer and critic Samuel R. Delany argues Crane merely tried to draw attention to an unknown poet and wanted readers to experience for themselves the delight of realizing one of his influences without him telling them. Crane was admired by artists including Eugene O'Neill , Kenneth Burke , Edmund Wilson , E. E. Cummings , Tennessee Williams and William Carlos Williams . Although Crane had his sharp critics, among them Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound , Moore did publish his work, as did T. S. Eliot, who, moving even further out of Pound's sphere, may have borrowed some of Crane's imagery for Four Quartets , in

7168-494: The introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." New poets become inspired to write because they have read and admired previous poets, but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poets discover that the poets they idolized have already said everything they wish to say. The poets become disappointed because they "cannot be Adam early in

7280-404: The introductions to some titles survive in present-day Penguin Classics as appendices – for example, Tony Tanner's introduction to Mansfield Park . The imprint was resurrected in name, though not so much in spirit, in 2012. Texts published in the series no longer include critical apparatus; they instead feature an essay by a notable literary figure, usually excerpted from prior work - for example,

7392-503: The lark's return." I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric . I still have the flavor of that book in me. Indeed it's the first book I ever owned. I begged my oldest sister to give it to me, and I still have the old black and gold edition she gave me for my birthday back in 1942 . . . I suppose the only poet of the twentieth century that I could secretly set above Yeats and Stevens would be Hart Crane. Bloom also authored

7504-604: The major varieties of Protestant and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most had more in common with gnosticism than with historical Christianity. The exception was the Jehovah's Witnesses , whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that the Mormon and Pentecostal strains of American Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in

7616-572: The middle of their divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and moved between friends' apartments in Manhattan. Crane's mother and father were constantly fighting, and they divorced on April 14, 1917. The same year, he attempted to enlist in the military, but was rejected due to being a minor. He worked in a munitions plant until the end of World War I . Between 1917 and 1924, he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and

7728-649: The money and left for Europe towards late November and intended to live in Majorca , but instead went first to London then to Paris. In Paris in February 1929, Harry Crosby , who with his wife Caresse Crosby owned the fine arts press Black Sun Press , offered Crane the use of their country retreat, Le Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville . They hoped he could use the time to concentrate on completing The Bridge . Crane spent several weeks at their estate where he wrote

7840-411: The morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything." In order to evade this psychological obstacle, according to Bloom, poets must be convinced that earlier poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that they have something to add to the tradition. Poets' love for their heroes turns into antagonism toward them: "Initial love for

7952-445: The motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which

8064-531: The next few decades. In Omens of Millennium (1996), Bloom identifies these American religious elements as on the periphery of an old – and not inherently Christian – gnostic, religious tradition that invokes a complex of ideas and experiences concerning angelology , interpretation of dreams as prophecy , near-death experiences , and millennialism . In his essay in The Gospel of Thomas , Bloom writes that none of Thomas's Aramaic sayings have survived in

8176-429: The novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away... There's nothing to the man... I don't want to talk about him". In the early 21st century, Bloom often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich , Maya Angelou , and David Foster Wallace . In the pages of The Paris Review , he criticized the populist -leaning poetry slam , saying: "It

8288-545: The novelists Peter Ackroyd , Will Self , John Banville , and A. S. Byatt . In Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003), he called the Portuguese writer José Saramago "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre". Of American novelists, Bloom said in 2003, "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise". Saying that "they write

8400-625: The original language. Marvin Meyer generally agreed and further confirmed that the earlier versions of that text were likely written in either Aramaic or Greek. Meyer ends his introduction with an endorsement of much of Bloom's essay. Bloom notes the otherworldliness of the Jesus in Thomas's sayings by making reference to "the paradox also of the American Jesus". The Western Canon (1994),

8512-483: The out-of-fashion character criticism of Bradley (and others), who are explicitly praised in the book. As in The Western Canon , Bloom criticizes what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and for balkanizing the study of literature through multicultural and historicist departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout

8624-694: The patience to read anything by Frye" and nominated Angus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his "critical guide and conscience". Elsewhere that year, he recommended Fletcher's Colors of the Mind and M. H. Abrams 's The Mirror and the Lamp . In this late phase, Bloom also emphasized the tradition of earlier critics such as William Hazlitt , Ralph Waldo Emerson , Walter Pater , A. C. Bradley , and Samuel Johnson , describing Johnson in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him". In his 2012 foreword to The Fourth Dimension of

8736-594: The precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. Kenneth Burke , who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye." But in Anatomy of Influence (2011), Bloom wrote, "I no longer have

8848-567: The precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." The book that followed Yeats , The Anxiety of Influence , which Bloom started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of Walter Jackson Bate 's The Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair 17th- and 18th-century poets felt about their inability to equal their predecessors. Bloom attempted to trace

8960-423: The present, if it is to be known, must be caught at the risk of speaking in idioms and circumlocutions sometimes shocking to the scholar and historians of logic. As a child, he had a sexual relationship with a man. Criticism since the late 20th century has suggested reading Crane's poems—" The Broken Tower ", "My Grandmother's Love Letters", the " Voyages " series, and others—with an eye to homosexual meanings in

9072-399: The process of composing his "influence" books. Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the 1970s and '80s, and penned little thereafter that did not invoke his ideas about influence. Bloom's fascination with David Lindsay 's fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus led him to take a brief break from criticism to compose a sequel to it. This novel, The Flight to Lucifer ,

9184-425: The psychological process by which poets broke free from their precursors to achieve their own poetic visions. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets", who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets", who merely repeat their precursors' ideas as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios", through which strong poets pass in

9296-480: The rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter. Brian Reed has contributed to a project of critical reintegration of queer criticism with other critical methods, suggesting that an overemphasis on the sexual biography of Crane's poetry can skew a broader appreciation of his overall work. In one example of Reed's approach, he published a close reading of Crane's lyric poem, "Voyages", (a love poem that Crane wrote for his lover Emil Opffer) on

9408-438: The reader is expected to grasp its tenor." The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea. From "Repose of Rivers" from White Buildings (1926) The publication of White Buildings was delayed by Eugene O'Neill 's struggle (and eventual failure) to articulate his appreciation in

9520-472: The residence opposite the Hart's. Hart Crane began attending East High School around 1913–1914. He has woven rose-vines About the empty heart of night, And vented his long mellowed wines Of dreaming on the desert white With searing sophistry. And he tented with far truths he would form The transient bosoms from the thorny tree. O Materna! to enrich thy gold head And wavering shoulders with

9632-430: The river! It's really a magnificent place to live. This section of Brooklyn is very old, but all the houses are in splendid condition and have not been invaded by foreigners... Based on Crane's letters, New York was where he felt most at home. Additionally, much of his poetry takes place there. Throughout the early 1920s, many small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane's poems, gaining him among

9744-426: The sea" at the "point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself back". One of Williams's last plays, a "ghost play" titled Steps Must Be Gentle , explores Crane's relationship with his mother. In a 1991 interview with Antonio Weiss of The Paris Review , the literary critic Harold Bloom talked about how Crane, along with William Blake , initially sparked his interest in literature at

9856-547: The spring of 1924: Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc in procession before you on

9968-412: The steamship USS Orizaba and into the Gulf of Mexico while the ship was en route to New York. He left no suicide note, but witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described by, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley , around a year before his death. Contemporary opinion

10080-520: The supreme center of the Western canon. The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom then considered barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and Chaucer , and his agon with Christopher Marlowe , who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones. In his later survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of

10192-405: The text. Queer theorist Tim Dean argues that the obscurity of Crane's style owes partially to the necessities of being a semi-public homosexual—not quite closeted , but also, as legally and culturally necessary, not open: "The intensity responsible for Crane's particular form of difficulty involves not only linguistic considerations but also culturally subjective concerns. This intensity produces

10304-482: The work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work (see Jahwist ). They envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon  – a piece of speculation that drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations did not go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with

10416-401: The works of Joshua Cohen , William Giraldi , and Nell Freudenberger . In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren , James Merrill , John Ashbery , and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A. R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he later identified Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of

10528-483: The world, Bloom proclaims him the only truly multicultural author. Repudiating the "social energies" to which historicists ascribed Shakespeare's authorship, Bloom pronounced his modern academic foes – and all of society – to be but "a parody of Shakespearean energies". Bloom consolidated his work on the Western canon with the publication of How to Read and Why (2000) and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003). Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (also 2003)

10640-401: Was "so damned dead", an impasse, and characterized by a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities". Crane's self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America". Edmund Wilson said Crane had "a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such

10752-609: Was Bloom's only work of fiction. Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989). In The Book of J (1990), he and David Rosenberg (who translated the biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the Bible (see documentary hypothesis ) as

10864-498: Was a composer and literary editor. In 1894, the family moved to Warren, Ohio where his father opened a maple syrup company, which he sold in 1908 to Corn Products Refining Company . In April 1911, his father opened a chocolate manufacturing and retailing company, the Crane Chocolate Company. The family moved to Cleveland in 1911, into a house at 1709 East 115th Street. In 1913, Clarence Crane's parents purchased

10976-403: Was a student of English literary critic M. H. Abrams , and in 1955 a Ph.D. from Yale. In 1954–55 Bloom was a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge . Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty of New Critics , including William K. Wimsatt . Several years later Bloom dedicated his book The Anxiety of Influence to Wimsatt . Bloom was a member of

11088-488: Was about 300 miles (500 km) from Cuba. An article the following day from the New York Times linked his death to his father's. His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone at Park Cemetery outside Garrettsville, Portage County, Ohio includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899–1932 lost at sea". Crane was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot , in particular The Waste Land . The Bridge

11200-407: Was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists , Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection White Buildings (1926), featuring "Chaplinesque", "At Melville's Tomb", "Repose of Rivers" and "Voyages", helped to cement his place in the avant-garde literary scene of the time. The long poem The Bridge (1930) is an epic inspired by

11312-445: Was beaten. They arrested and jailed him, fining him 800 francs. After Hart had spent six days in prison at La Santé , Crosby paid Crane's fine and advanced him money for the passage back to the United States, where he finished The Bridge . In January 1930, the work was published by Black Sun Press in Paris and subsequently by Boni & Liveright in the United States in April. The work received poor reviews, and Crane struggled with

11424-579: Was born in New York City on July 11, 1930, to Paula (née Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse . He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish -speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew ; he learned English at the age of six. Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in Odesa and his Lithuanian Jewish mother, a homemaker, near Brest Litovsk in what

11536-586: Was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world". After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism , several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He

11648-551: Was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the " School of Resentment " (which included multiculturalism , feminism , Marxism , and other ideologies). He was educated at Yale University , the University of Cambridge , and Cornell University . Bloom

11760-460: Was intended to be a more optimistic view of society than that of The Waste Land . He first read The Waste Land in the November 1922 edition of The Dial . Walt Whitman , William Blake , Ralph Waldo Emerson , and Emily Dickinson were also particularly influential to Crane. As a teenager, Crane also read Plato , Honoré de Balzac , and Percy Bysshe Shelley . Crane's critical effort

11872-537: Was marked by the publication of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). Throughout the decade he also compiled, edited and introduced several major anthologies of poetry. Bloom took part in Paul Festa 's 2006 documentary Apparition of the Eternal Church . It centers on people's reactions to hearing for the first time Olivier Messiaen 's organ piece Apparition de l'église éternelle . Bloom began

11984-434: Was mixed, with poets including Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens criticizing his work and others, including William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings , praising it. William Rose Benét wrote that, with The Bridge , Crane "failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem" but that it "reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable." His last work, " The Broken Tower " (1932),

12096-452: Was only his exchange with Harriet Monroe at Poetry , when she initially refused to print "At Melville's Tomb", that urged Crane to describe his "logic of metaphor" in print: If the poet is to be held completely to the already evolved and exploited sequences of imagery and logic—what field of added consciousness and increased perceptions (the actual province of poetry, if not lullabies) can be expected when one has to relatively return to

12208-476: Was overjoyed at the views the location afforded him. The first known mention of The Bridge was in a 1923 letter to Gorham Munson in which he wrote: I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in 'F and H.' It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it. Crane moved to Paterson, New Jersey , in 1927. In 1928, he worked as

12320-424: Was that politics had no place in literary criticism: that a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about Hamlet . In addition to considering how much influence a writer had had on later writers, Bloom proposed the concept of "canonical strangeness" (cf. uncanny ) as a benchmark of a literary work's merit. The Western Canon also included

12432-402: Was unfinished and published posthumously. Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell , Derek Walcott , Tennessee Williams , and Harold Bloom ; the latter called him "a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism". Allen Tate called Crane "one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give

12544-471: Was written to urge Eugene O'Neill's critical foreword to White Buildings , then passed around among friends, yet unpublished during Crane's life; and the famous "Letter to Harriet Monroe" (1926) was part of an exchange for the publication of "At Melville's Tomb" in Poetry . Crane's most quoted criticism is in the circulated, if long and unpublished, "General Aims and Theories": "As to technical considerations:

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