The Anatomy of Influence - Literature as a Way of Life (Harold Bloom, 2011)

This is a very recent book that has received great reviews and is appearing on a number of "best of" lists for 2011.  The author has taught at Yale for decades while also being a very well-known (though not to me) literary critic. 

I found the book very interesting - but I still don't know why, because I simply don't understand what he's talking about most of the time.  This is an entirely different level of engagement with literature.

The basic premise here - and in other of his works - is the role of "influence" - how writers were influenced by others.  But I can't follow the influence threads very well; perhaps because much of the book is focused on poetry, which is a foreign land to me.

And he keeps talking about things that are inscrutable to me (and, I suspect, unhelpful):  gnosticism, Lucretianism, etc.

Something I liked: he's 80 and recently experienced very poor health - this comes through - he suspects this is his last hurrah, probably isn't filtering opinions, etc.

Something that was clear to me:  I need to take another run at Shakespeare.  This author just loves Shakespeare - he ranks him way above all others (giving Walt Whitman somewhat similar acclaim in the American market).  And he quotes plenty of others who share his views of Shakespeare.  Emerson said, "He [Shakespeare] wrote the text of modern life."  Bloom:  "I can think of no one except Shakespeare and Montaigne who has such wisdom beyond tendentiousness." Bloom:  "The miracle of Shakespearean representation is its contaminating power:  one hundred major characters and a thousand adjacent figures throng our streets and sidle into our lives." Now that's influence.

Bloom:  "I keep returning to Shakespeare in the chapters that follow not because I am a Bardolator (I am) but because he is inescapable for all who came after, in all nations of the world except France, where Stendhal and Victor Hugo went against their country's neoclassical rejection of what was regarded as dramatic 'barbarism'."  That quote sounds cool but I need to think more about what the last part means.

Bloom thinks "Nostromo" is Conrad's best book:  good choice.  He admires Proust, Milton, quite a few others.

So I will start spending some time with Shakespeare.  Not sure I care about exploring Whitman's stuff, maybe later. 

And maybe I'll read this book again in a decade or so and see if it makes some sense to me.