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AGON

Name: AGON
Author: Harold Bloom
ISBN: 019503354X

TOWARDS A THEORY OF REVISIONISM (GALAXY BOOKS)

by Harold Bloom ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1981

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Less a contribution to Bloom's esoteric theoretical system (The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, etc.) than an essay in nervous self-classification—fascinating as such, but excruciating, too, in its twists and turns, its fecklessness. Unsurprisingly, Bloom once again stresses "misprision," "troping," the three elements of "strong readings of belated poems": "negation, evasion, extravagance." He jumps across despised Modernism on the back, now, of Emerson—whom Bloom sees as the foremost American Gnostic (his classification for himself, early on). In opting for pneuma (spark) over psyche (adhesive self—to HB), Emerson made everything dependent on a "reader's Sublime." Where do we find this Sublime? In Whitman, in Hart Crane (the one successful critical examination), in Donald Lindsay's Gnostic fantasy A Voyage to Arcturus (on which Bloom's novel The Flight to Lucifer is modeled), in John Ashbery and John Hollander—all of them in quest of "an illusion of identification or possession; something we can call our own or even ourselves." Yet Bloom's attentions are particularly unfocused in this book, perhaps because he is preoccupied with defending himself against antagonists: the deconstructionists, the imaginationists, the Poundians, the lightweights. If anything is distressing here, in fact, it's the scantiness of serious analysis. Gnostics, of course, may not need to analyze: "Loving poetry is a Gnostic passion not because the Abyss itself is loved, but because the lover longs to be yet another Demiurge." Still, the scattershot approach ill suits Bloom's academic formalism—leaving it less defined, rather than more. In the end, one has the nagging suspicion that Bloom is promoting an art so vague, so self-erasing, that only the university critic could have the time and temper to cosset it.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1981

ISBN: 019503354X

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1981

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BRIGHT BOOK OF LIFE
by Harold Bloom

- BOOK REVIEW
TAKE ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES
by Harold Bloom

- BOOK REVIEW
THE AMERICAN CANON
by Harold Bloom ; edited by David Mikics

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.

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A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.

In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.

Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.