Episode 151 – Harold Bloom

Virtual Memories Show #151: Harold Bloom

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I visited Harold Bloom in New Haven and we recorded a podcast. He recited poetry, and we talked about his new book, The Daemon Knows, the weight of age, the intifada of the young, and the epigraphs of his life. You should give it a listen!

Here’s some of what he said:

“I’m a reader and a teacher. Writing comes out of reading and teaching. Those are all three words for the same thing. I don’t think I’m going to be remembered at all; I don’t think any of us get remembered.”

“Much as I permanently dislike T.S. Eliot’s prose — whether literary criticism (so-called) or his abominable religious writings . . . — or the whole essential nastiness of the man — misogynistic, anti-semitic, proto-fascist, despising Freud, full of a kind of contempt for humankind — at his best as a poet, he’s beyond argument.”

“As you get old you get exhausted. You lose patience, not with your students, but with the nonsense that passes for criticism or passes for scholarship. For a while, I was proud to say I was the pariah of my former profession. Now I don’t even think I’m that. I think they’ve forgotten me, which is good.”

“If in my youth you had asked me, ‘Harold, who is the better, more authentic poet: Alexander Pope or William Blake?’, I would have said Blake, of course. Now I’m not so sure. I read Pope with more pleasure, although I don’t know if Blake wants to be read for pleasure.”

“I’m a Melamed. I don’t teach Tanakh, I don’t teach scripture; I teach the secular canon, but I take the same attitude towards it that Hillel or Akiva said, ‘Build a hedge about the scripture; be resolute in judgement; raise up many disciples.”

“You want to be remembered by whoever’s going to recall you, for as long as they’re alive, with a certain degree of love. That’s about all you can hope for.”

I went full Maron on my intro; the conversation with Bloom starts at the 12-minute mark. Oh, and if you want to find out who he’s reading nowadays and get a list of all the books we talked about, join our Patreon and become a monthly contributor to The Virtual Memories Show!)

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

• Langdon Hammer
• JD McClatchy
• Rachel Hadas
• John Crowley
• Eva Brann
• Peter Kalkavage
• Jonathan Galassi

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About our Guest

Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale university and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than 40 books include The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and The American Religion. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the recipient of many honorary awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy’s Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize of Mexico. He lives in New Haven, CT. His new book is The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Spiegel & Grau).

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at Professor Bloom’s studio on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photos of Prof. Bloom by me.