{"product_id":"possessed-by-memoryisbn-9780525562474","title":"Possessed by Memory","description":"\u003cb\u003e\"Wonderful. . . . Spectacular. . . . You feel the pulse of life, what poetry can bring to us if we let it.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This audacious personal odyssey offers readers a cosmos of possibilities when contemplating what happens once we 'shuffle off this mortal coil.'\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Christian Science Monitor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"An elegiac meditation on a life lived through books.\" —\u003ci\u003eO, The Oprah Magazine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"The great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him.\"\u003ci\u003e —The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is the daringly original literary critic's most personal book: a four-part spiritual autobiography in the form of brief, luminous readings of poetry, drama, and prose—much of which he has known by heart since childhood. As one of his own mentors, M. H. Abrams, has said, to read Bloom's commentaries is like \"reading classic authors by flashes of lightning.\" Gone are the polemics; here Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but himself. In \"A Voice she Heard Before the World Was Made,\" he offers startling meditations on foundational concerns of Biblical study. \"In the Elegy Season\" finds him coming to terms movingly, from a new vantage, with writers on whom he has brooded for much of his life. And with brio and bravura in \"The Imperfect Is Our Paradise,\" Bloom ranges dazzlingly through twentieth-century American poetry, from Wallace Stevens to Amy Clampitt. \u003ci\u003ePossessed by Memory\u003c\/i\u003e, in short, is essential Bloom.\"Describe is what he does, perhaps more brilliantly than anyone else alive.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eEsquire \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"The great critic revisits the literature that has meant most to him. \"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e--The New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Our era’s Samuel Johnson...\u003ci\u003ePossessed by Memory\u003c\/i\u003e really is a kind of valediction... Bloom has loved literature deeply—and that love is, even in the face of death, a life-giving force.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Commonweal Magazine \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"These essays reveal a deeply personal attachment and fresh perspective. An eloquent and erudite rereading of the author's beloved works.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Kirkus Reviews \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"A rich lifetime of readership and scholarship can be found within the covers of this equally rich book.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Publishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eHarold Bloom was a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include \u003ci\u003eThe Anxiety of Influence\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eShakespeare: The Invention of the Human\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Western Canon\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe American Religion\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime\u003c\/i\u003e.  He was a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and  honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and Mexico's Alfonso Reyes International Prize.\u003cb\u003ePart One: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Voice She Heard Before the World Was Made\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThresholds to Voice: Augmenting a God in Ruins\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As I near the end of my eighties, I am aware of being in the elegy season. The majority of my close friends from my own generation have departed. I am haunted by many passages in Wallace Stevens, and one that I keep hearing centers his extraordinary poem, “The Course of a Particular”:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And though one says that one is part of everything,\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;\u003cbr\u003e And being part is an exertion that declines:\u003cbr\u003e One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Throughout his final poems, Stevens listens for the voice he heard before the world was made. Though he is not preoccupied with occult and Hermetic modes of speculation, in the manner either of William Butler Yeats or of D. H. Lawrence, he hears voices. Falling leaves cry out, houses laugh, syllables are spoken without speech, the wind breathes a motion, thoughts howl in the mind, the colossal sun sounds a scrawny cry, and the phoenix, mounted on a visionary palm tree, sings a foreign song. Sleepless like many other old men and women, I too dream what Stevens calls a heavy difference:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A little while of Terra Paradise\u003cbr\u003e I dreamed, of autumn rivers, silvas green,\u003cbr\u003e Of sanctimonious mountains high in snow,\u003cbr\u003e But in that dream a heavy difference\u003cbr\u003e Kept waking and a mournful sense sought out,\u003cbr\u003e In vain, life’s season or death’s element.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e                                        \u003ci\u003eMontrachet-le-Jardin\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When that saddens me too much, something in my spirit turns to a more intimate Stevens:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The cry is part. My solitaria\u003cbr\u003e Are the meditations of a central mind.\u003cbr\u003e I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound\u003cbr\u003e Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice\u003cbr\u003e That is my own voice speaking in my ear.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e                                         \u003ci\u003eChocorua to Its Neighbor\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Frequently at dawn, when I am very chilly and sit on the side of my bed, knowing it is not safe for me to go downstairs by myself in order to have some morning tea, I find deep peace in Stevens at his strongest:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e To say more than human things with human voice,\u003cbr\u003e That cannot be; to say human things with more\u003cbr\u003e Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;\u003cbr\u003e To speak humanly from the height or from the depth\u003cbr\u003e Of human things, that is acutest speech.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Can human things be said with more than human voice? Stevens was a kind of Lucretian skeptic, as Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Walter Pater had been before him. Yet, of those three, only Pater would have agreed with Stevens as to whether we could hear a primordial utter­ance. Even Stevens had his openings to a transcendental freedom:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e     Upon my top he breathed the pointed dark.\u003cbr\u003e     He was not man yet he was nothing else.\u003cbr\u003e     If in the mind, he vanished, taking there\u003cbr\u003e     The mind’s own limits, like a tragic thing\u003cbr\u003e     Without existence, existing everywhere.\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and, rather more skeptically, Hart Crane all were informed by the ancient tradition of Hermetism, the Greco-Egyptian speculation from which the Renaissance Hermeti­cism developed. In that original speculation, which was inaugurated by a small group of pagan intellectuals in Hellenistic Alexandria during the first century of the Common Era, a story is told of how the first Adam, called Anthropos, is exalted as a divine being. Here is a crucial passage from the Hermetic discourse called “The Key”:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For the human is a godlike living thing, not comparable to the other living things of the  earth  but to those in heaven above, who are called gods. Or better—if one dare tell the  truth—the  one who is really human is above these gods as well, or at least they are  wholly equal in  power to one another.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e For none of the heavenly gods will go down to earth, leaving behind the bounds of heaven,  yet the human rises up to heaven and takes its measure and knows what is in its heights  and its depths, and he understands all else exactly and—greater than all of this—he comes  to be on high without leaving earth behind, so enormous is his range. Therefore, we must  dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal god but that god in heaven is an immortal  human. Through these two, then, cosmos and human, all things exist, but they all exist by  action of the one.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e That is Hermetism at its most exalted. Darker is the account that brings together the Fall and the Creation as one event. I turn here to the most famous text of Hermetism, “Poimandres,” where our primal catastrophe is elegantly chronicled:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Having all authority over the cosmos of mortals and unreasoning animals, the man broke  through the vault and stooped to look through the cosmic framework, thus displaying to  lower nature the fair form of god. Nature smiled for love when she saw him whose fairness  brings no surfeit (and) who holds in himself all the energy of the governors and the form of  god, for in the water she saw the shape of the man’s fairest form and upon the earth its  shadow. When the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it  and wished to inhabit it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the  unreason­ing form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged him all about and embraced  him, for they were lovers.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Because of this, unlike any other living thing on earth, mankind is twofold—in the body  mortal but immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has authority  over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he is subject to fate; thus, although  man is above the cosmic framework, he became a slave within it. He is androgyne because  he comes from an androgyne father, and he never sleeps because he comes from one who is  sleepless. Yet love and sleep are his masters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e Translated by Brian P. Copenhaver\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In Hart Crane’s “Voyages II” there is a paean to “sleep, death, desire,” a celebration of the great erotic relationship of the poet’s life. Nevertheless, “Voyages V” admits that the truth of this love is a matter of instants and must end in separation:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But now\u003cbr\u003e Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.\u003cbr\u003e Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;\u003cbr\u003e Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:\u003cbr\u003e Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e There is a kind of gentle resignation in Hart Crane as he confronts erotic loss. Ultimately I think that stems from the Hermetist version of the Fall as a narcissistic reverie that concludes in a catastrophe. Many of us, remembering the now remote erotic attachments of our youth, scores of years back in time, find that involuntarily we remain haunted by a voice we heard emanating from the beloved that seemed timeless and therefore permanent. There is some link that binds together the making of a poem, the illusions of recall, and the tenuous expectation that somehow we will hear again the voice that preceded the instauration of a cosmos forlorn and vagrant, through which we blankly wander, unable to distinguish what was and what we strain to find again.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Our experience of a lost voice may come to us in solitude or in the presence of others, whether or not they are related to our past sorrows. When I was very young, I read poems incessantly because I was lonely and somehow must have believed they could become people for me. \u003cbr\u003e That vagary could not survive maturation, yet the quest persisted for a voice I had heard before I knew my own alienation. Over the decades I learned to listen closely to my students for some murmurs of those evanescent voices. Since these young men and women are two-thirds of a century younger than I am, I do not seek in their tonalities my own nostalgias. Yet I believe that the teaching of Shakespeare or of \u003ci\u003eMoby-Dick \u003c\/i\u003ecan be an awakening to the ancient Gnostic call that proclaims a resurrection preceding our deaths.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003eIn my experience, there are a few visions or surging voices that break through the rock of the self and free something that is both spark and breath, in a momentary knowing that seems to be known even as it knows. When I ask myself who is the knower, I have intimations that a primal sound, cast out of our cosmos and wandering in exile through the interstellar spaces, may be calling to me. There is nothing unique in my experience, as was particularly clear to me in the years 1990–92, when I seemed all but endlessly in motion, lecturing at American uni­versities and colleges in the South and Southwest. I accepted speaking engagements only there, when I could get away from Yale, so as to do amateur research listening to people of many sects and persuasions, who I learned to call American Religionists. I recall vividly how many told me they had already been resurrected, and knew they had walked and talked with the Jesus scarcely mentioned in the New Testament, who passed forty days with his faithful after the Ascension.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e At sixty, I both respected and was baffled by so many urgent confes­sions of women and of men that they had touched the flesh of a living Jesus, who walked with them and spoke of everyday matters. Now, in my high eighties, I understand better what was so dark to me a quarter-century ago. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I listen for a primordial silence as well as voices coming down from a sphere within and beyond the rock of the self. When Hamlet concludes by murmuring, “The rest is silence,” he intends both an acceptance of oblivion and a longing for what Hermetists call the Pleroma or Full­ness. Valentinus the Gnostic sage concluded his “Gospel of Truth” by telling his congregation that it did not suit him, having been in the place of rest, to say anything more. For him too the rest was silence.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303027101925,"sku":"NP9780525562474","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525562474.jpg?v=1730752788","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/possessed-by-memoryisbn-9780525562474","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}