Download or read book Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles written by Harold Bloom and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly “An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable”—Seamus Perry, Literary Review "Reading, this stirring collection testifies, ‘helps in staying alive.’“—Kirkus Reviews, starred review This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear‑eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.
Download or read book Hamlet written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Poets and Poems written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a compilation of Bloom's introductions to the Modern critical views and Modern critical interpretations series of books, focusing on poets and poems.
Download or read book Othello Thrift Study Edition written by William Shakespeare and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the unabridged text of Shakespeare's classic play plus a complete study guide that features scene-by-scene summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, historical background, and more.
Download or read book The Bright Book of Life written by Harold Bloom and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition—from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man—in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction. In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom—who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic—gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience, remarkable scholarship, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works spanning the Western canon, from Don Quixote to Book of Numbers; from Wuthering Heights to Absalom, Absalom!; from Les Misérables to Blood Meridian; from Vanity Fair to Invisible Man. Here are trenchant appreciations of fiction by, among many others, Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Le Guin, and Sebald. Whether you have already read these books, plan to, or simply care about the importance and power of fiction, Harold Bloom is your unparalleled guide to understanding literature with new intimacy.
Download or read book Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles written by Harold Bloom and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book; one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America’s leading twentieth-century literary minds."—Publishers Weekly This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death—completed weeks before Harold Bloom died—shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called “a universe of death.” Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life’s troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. “High literature,” he writes, “is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death.” In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself “edged by nothingness,” uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear‑eyed, this is among Harold Bloom’s most ambitious and most moving books.
Download or read book Julius Caesar written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Anatomy of Influence written by Harold Bloom and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads readers through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years.
Download or read book William Shakespeare s Jedi the Last written by Ian Doescher and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the Star Wars saga reimagined as an Elizabethan drama penned by William Shakespeare himself, complete with authentic meter and verse, and theatrical monologues and dialog by everyone from Luke Skywalker to Rose Tico. The Star Wars saga continues, with Bard of Avon providing some of the biggest shocks yet! Alack, the valiant Resistance must flee from the scoundrels of the First Order, and it falls to Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, and BB-8 to take up arms against a sea of troubles. Can they bring Snoke’s schemes to woe, destruction, ruin, and decay? Will Luke Skywalker take the stage once more, and aid General Leia in the winter of her discontent? Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy.
Download or read book The Octopus Museum written by Brenda Shaughnessy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, this collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics. Informed as much by Brenda Shaughnessy's worst fears as a mother as they are by her superb craft as a poet, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.
Download or read book Possessed by Memory written by Harold Bloom and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood. Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things." As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."
Download or read book Beowulf written by and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finest heroic poem in Old English celebrates the exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman of southern Sweden. Combines myth, Christian and pagan elements, and history into a powerful narrative. Genealogies.
Download or read book The Royal Physician s Visit written by Per Olov Enquist and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2001-10-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A handsome doctor stirs up scandal in the eighteenth-century Danish royal court in this “extraordinarily elegant and gorgeous novel” (Los Angeles Times). The Royal Physician's Visit magnificently recasts the dramatic era of Danish history when Johann Friedrich Struensee—court physician to mad young King Christian—stepped through an aperture in history and became the holder of absolute power in Denmark. His is a gripping tale of power, sex, love, and the life of the mind, and it is superbly rendered here by Sweden’s most acclaimed writer. A charismatic German doctor and brilliant intellectual, Struensee used his influence to introduce hundreds of reforms in Denmark in the 1760s and had a tender and erotic affair with Queen Caroline Mathilde, who was unsatisfied by her unstable, childlike husband. And yet, his ambitions ultimately led to tragedy. This novel, perfect for book clubs, is a compelling look into the intrigues of an Enlightenment court and the life of a singular man. “An enthralling fable of the temptations of power—and a surprisingly poignant love story,” —Time “Realized with a vividness and subtlety that place the book in the front ranks of contemporary literary fiction,” —The New York Times Book Review “The Swedish novelist’s method is to begin 10 years after Struensee’s fall, then retrace the “Struensee era,” as it came to be called, by probing the characters of four principal players—Christian, Guldberg, Struensee, and Queen Caroline Mathilde—each of whose perspectives, even the king’s, he makes intelligible and occasionally even sympathetic. A towering achievement,” —Booklist
Download or read book Hart Crane s Poetry written by John T. Irwin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-11-17 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, "Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio," comparing—misspelling and all—the great French poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s work in decades. Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, The Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work—from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy—revealing The Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended. Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of The Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White Buildings and his last poem, "The Broken Tower," through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in The Bridge. Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.
Download or read book Venus and Adonis written by William Shakespeare and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Falstaff written by Harold Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time comes “a timely reminder of the power and possibility of words [and] the last love letter to the shaping spirit of Bloom’s imagination” (front page, The New York Times Book Review) and an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Falstaff—Shakespeare’s greatest enduring and complex comedic characters. Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare’s three Henry plays: Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and Henry V. He is companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V), who loves him, goads, him, teases him, indulges his vast appetites, and commits all sorts of mischief with him—some innocent, some cruel. Falstaff can be lewd, funny, careless of others, a bad creditor, an unreliable friend, and in the end, devastatingly reckless in his presumption of loyalty from the new King. Award-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom writes about Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal. Just as we encounter one type of Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are young adults and another when we are middle-aged, Bloom writes about his own shifting understanding of Falstaff over the course of his lifetime. Ultimately we come away with a deeper appreciation of this profoundly complex character, and this “poignant work” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) as a whole becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. “In this first of five books about Shakespearean personalities, Bloom brings erudition and boundless enthusiasm” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) and his exhilarating Falstaff invites us to look at a character as a flawed human who might live in our world.
Download or read book Secret Will written by Paul Chapman and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than four centuries have passed since Shakespeare wrote his glorious plays, and it is little wonder that the meaning of many of the references in them escapes modern audiences. That's a shame, because they are packed with cryptic allusions to the fascinating people, dramatic events, juicy gossip, lurid scandals, gripping court battles, treacherous conspiracies and outrageous acts of insolence he encountered during his lifetime. To know these background stories is to understand and enjoy his works so much more. In Secret Will, Paul Chapman peels back the curtain to reveal the real Shakespeare and the world that lies hidden behind those quill-scratched pages. He does so by examining key passages from the plays and then asking searching questions about how they relate to the tempestuous times in which he lived. Why, for instance, does A Midsummer Night's Dream contain clear references to the illicit love affair between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley? How might one of the biggest earthquakes in the history of the British Isles have inspired intriguing lines in Romeo and Juliet? Has Shakespeare immortalised as Ophelia a young woman named Katherine Hamlett, who drowned when he was young? How is a speech in Hamlet connected to the brazen abduction of an Elizabethan schoolboy?Does Shakespeare pour out the raw grief he feels over the death of his young son in heartbreaking lines in King John? Should his most famous stage direction - 'Exit, pursued by a bear' - actually read 'Exit, pursued by a polar bear'? Is he teasing us with a veiled clue to the identity of the mysterious 'Dark Lady' of his desires in Twelfth Night? What do his plays tell us about London's sleazy sex industry, with its legions of prostitutes known as Winchester Geese? Why was the famous Globe theatre threatened by a courtroom drama alleging it was built using stolen timbers, and what led to it burning down? Did a rancorous legal battle between three feuding sisters over their senile father's estate inspire the towering tragedy that is King Lear? And what in the world was the dancing horse?These, and many more such questions, are answered in Secret Will. As well as being a fascinating work of biography, Secret Will has the flavour of a detective saga with all its hints and clues. Links to quotes from Shakespeare's works make the book a gripping page turner for both the aficionado and casual reader alike. 'All the world's a stage, ' Shakespeare once wrote. Secret Will reveals the astonishing story of how he really did put his world on the stage. Readers of this book may never watch a play by the Bard in same way again.
