From Publishers Weekly
With The Western Canon, Yale-based critical eminence Bloom tapped into a strain of the cultural zeitgeist looking for authoritative takes on what to read. Bloom here follows up with 6-10 pages each on 100 "geniuses" of literature (all deceased) pointing to the major works, outlining the major achievements therein, showing us how to recognize them for ourselves. Despite the book's length, Bloom's mostly male geniuses are, as he notes "certainly not `the top one hundred' in anyone's judgement, my own included. I wanted to write about these." Bloom backs up his choices with such effortless and engaging erudition that their idiosyncrasy and casualness become strengths. While organized under the rubric of the 10 Kabalistic Sefirot, "attributes at once of God and of Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's Image," Bloom's chosen figures are associated by his own brilliant (and sometimes jabbingly provocative) forms of attention, from a linkage of Dr. Johnson, Goethe and Freud to one of Dickens, Celan and Ellison (with a few others in between them). A pleasant surprise is the plethora of lesser-known Latin American authors, from Luz Vaz de Camoes to Jos‚ Maria E‡a de Queiroz and Alejo Carpentier. Many familiar greats are here, too, as is a definition of genius. "This book is not a work of analysis or of close reading, but of surmise and juxtaposition," Bloom writes, and as such readers will find it appropriately enthusiastic and wild.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Bloom, a distinguished and often controversial literary critic and best-selling author of numerous books about literature (e.g., How To Read and Why), explores the concept of literary genius through the ages by examining 100 writers. Aside from such "must includes" as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, and Plato, Bloom offers some perhaps less well known to American readers, such as Lady Murasaki and Octavio Paz, acknowledging that his selections are idiosyncratic and were chosen because he wanted to write about certain authors, not because they were necessarily in "the top one hundred." In the introduction, Bloom posits a definition of genius that is fleshed out in his discussion of each writer. Authors are clustered into Lustres, or groups of five, while a brief introduction to each section explains why the writers in the section are associated with one another. (Each of the Lustres is based on one of the common names for the Kabbalistic Sefirot, which Bloom describes as representing God's creativity or genius.) Although the book is a delight to read, its real value lies in the author's ability to provoke the reader into thinking about literature, genius, and related topics. No similar work discusses literary genius in this way or covers this many writers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. Lib., ZanesvilleCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Bloom's great distinction and power as a literary critic, and a best-selling one at that, is the union of his extraordinary erudition and his profound love for literature. A gifted reader, teacher, and writer, he has celebrated literature's munificence in such influential books as The Western Canon (1994) and How to Read and Why (2000), and now conducts a magnificent inquiry into that elusive quality called genius. Bloom strictly profiles "geniuses of language"--poets, dramatists, novelists, philosophers, and religious writers--and, except for a core group that includes Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, Milton, and Tolstoy, has selected his 100 (all deceased, including the most contemporary: Octavio Paz, Ralph Ellison, Iris Murdoch) not because they're the top geniuses, but because their quests were in some measure cosmic, their language transcendent, and their lives intriguing. Literature is a spiritual calling for Bloom and his geniuses, so he has organized this bountiful volume according to the Kabbalah's 10 divine attributes or emanations, the Sefirot, which chart "the process of creation." This makes for some wonderfully fresh and provocative juxtapositions, and for an elevating concentration on how each writer extends the path toward wisdom. Personal heroes such as Dr. Samuel Johnson and Ralph Waldo Emerson receive particularly incisive readings, as do Victor Hugo, Isaac Babel, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens--well, one could go on. Bloom's mission in this stupendous yet intimate compendium of succinct yet sophisticated essays is "to activate the genius of appreciation" in his readers for one of humanity's finest callings, and that he does with ardor, art, wit, and deep knowledge. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
America's most prominent and bestselling literary critic takes an enlightening look at the concept of genius through the ages in a celebration of the greatest creative writers of all time.A monumental achievement of scholarship, GENIUS examines 100 of the most creative and literary minds in history. From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent achievements of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Bloom discusses the numerous influences of his chosen geniuses and the kinships among them over the centuries. He also offers revealing excerpts from their works that continue to surprise, enchant, and move the reader time after time. Bloom's insightful analyses of the poetry of Milton, Shelley, and Whitman; the drama of Ibsen and Tennessee Williams; and the narratives of Melville and Tolstoy, among many others, will illuminate and expand readers' understanding and appreciation of these great works of art. A wide-ranging study that enriches as it informs, GENIUS is a book to treasure.


About the Author
Harold Bloom lives in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Harold Bloom, whose provocative The Western Canon changed the way we look at the classics, now seeks to define the particular genius of 100 great minds, ranging from Socrates and St. Paul to Hart Crane and Federico García Lorca. Clustering these literary thinkers in groups of five (e.g., Dickens, Dostoevsky, Babel, Celan, Ellison), Bloom illuminates his subjects without historicizing them. His insights into writers and individual works reveal Bloom's own critical genius at work. The essay on Franz Kafka, for example, evidences Bloom's half-century-long encounter with the Czech author's oeuvre. Bloom enthusiasts will be pleased, too, by his spirited digressions on the blight of academic Groupthink and the distortions of postmodern cultural studies.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America's preeminent literary critic presents an unprecedented celebration of one hundred of the most creative literary minds in history.

From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent masterpieces of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Harold Bloom explores the many parallels among his chosen geniuses and the surprising ways in which they have influenced one another over the centuries. Accompanied by revealing excerpts from their works that continue to astonish, enchant, and move readers, Bloom's insightful and spirited analyses illuminate and enlarge our common understanding of Western literary and spiritual culture...and offer us a grand yet intimate tour of it in one magnificent volume.

SYNOPSIS

Bloom (humanities, Yale U. and English, New York University) offers critiques profiling 100 of the most creative literary minds in history based on his selections after a half-century of teaching literature. The critiques average several pages in length, beginning with illuminating excerpts from Bloom's chosen geniuses ranging from Milton to Melville, and Dickinson to Socrates. Through his critiques Bloom explores parallels between his chosen geniuses and ways in which they have influenced one another. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

"All genius, in my judgment, is idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary," Harold Bloom writes in this book, which offers critical vignettes of 100 literary figures. The trouble is, of course, that those qualities, which Bloom possesses in abundance, are mere side effects of genius. Genius, to borrow Delmore Schwartz's brilliant definition of poetry, is gay and exact￯﾿ﾽa matter of exuberant life force and exquisite technical control, and neither of those things is arbitrary.

Bloom devotes a few pages to each of the writers he selects, from William Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison, grouping them according to a structure of his own invention based on the mystical Jewish system of codes known as the Kabbalah. He sidesteps the labor of formulating criteria for inclusion by observing, "These are certainly not 'the top one hundred,' in anyone's judgment, my own included. I wanted to write about these." The lack of focus contributes to a more serious deficiency: the absence of a point to be made.

Consider, for example, the introductory chapter, subtitled "What Is Genius?" Bloom first declares that the Kabbalah provides "an anatomy of genius." Without explaining this notion, he observes that the Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem found that Franz Kafka's writing possesses "something of the strong light of the canonical, of that perfection which destroys." This is not an idea easily apprehended, but Bloom does not explain this, either. Instead he adds that Scholem's successor, Moshe Idel, believed that the canonical is "the perfection which absorbs." If there is disagreement even among the Kabbalistic scholars Bloom cites, the reader can hardly be blamed for feeling at a loss after only half a page.

Supposedly the Sefirot , or symbols of the Kabbalah, provide a structure for grouping authors together by fives, but these divisions are like the rules of a made-up game. They reflect not an underlying truth about these authors' works but rather Bloom's past scholarship and predilections. He confesses before he begins that any of the writers studied could almost as easily belong to any of the groupings he has constructed. Consequently, there is no deep and systematic exploration of the nature of genius, but rather a string of largely separate pronouncements on one author after the next. The ambitious and largely ineffective framework is almost entirely dispensable. The book has value only when Bloom engages directly with an author and allows us to participate in his elation. Endearingly, he compares reading to falling in love: It's better, he claims, because the emotional cost is so much less.

As a reader of a particular beloved text, Bloom can be invaluable, in part simply because he has read so much. He has a genius for quotation￯﾿ﾽboth from secondary material, such as letters and conversations that reveal an author's nature, and from the literary passages that embody an author's merits. Bloom quotes a defining observation by English essayist Walter Pater: "For [Plato] all knowledge is like knowing a person." He then adds, with striking succinctness, "Walter Pater summed up Romantic tradition in what he knew had become Charles Darwin's world." This ability to place an author in context in a single sentence could well serve the common reader, if so much else were not pretentious or obscure.

Bloom also shares the remarkable gleanings of his biographical research. He gives us, for example, Leo Tolstoy's affectionate comment on Anton Chekhov: "Ah, what a beautiful, magnificent man; modest and quiet like a girl." He recalls Robert Louis Stevenson's remark that he was "not surprised that [Henry David] Thoreau got along best with fish." And he tells us that Walt Whitman referred to Alfred, Lord Tennyson as "the boss."

Although he does not rank his geniuses, there are a quintet of authors described by Bloom as those who "dominate their genre," consisting of Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton and Tolstoy. Bloom hedges by referring to Milton as the master of "the secondary or postclassical epic," but this qualification amounts to an admission. Would not Homer, who crops up elsewhere, be a better choice? Perhaps the vagaries of Bloom's selections￯﾿ﾽhe includes Hart Crane, Eugenio Montale and Iris Murdoch in the book, but not Petrarch, Nikolai Gogol or Vladimir Nabokov￯﾿ﾽare in a way inevitable.

The chief problem with these groupings is that authors are bound together like contestants in a three-legged race. What end, for example, is served by herding together Honor￯﾿ﾽ de Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, Robert Browning and William Butler Yeats? The heading of the section is " Malkhut ," which means "kingdom," but this seems to boil down to the pedestrian idea that each of these authors creates a world. What author of genius does not?

No list could please everyone. Indeed, a worse fate than exclusion befalls authors whom Bloom includes but dislikes, chief among them Edith Wharton and Charlotte Bront￯﾿ﾽ. Recoiling from what he calls "the phallic cudgel" of Bront￯﾿ﾽ's style, Bloom feels the author is "bashing me over the head," an observation he never makes when an author of genius, however domineering, is in actual possession of a phallus. Wharton, whose "unpleasant genius" penetrates "the war between men and women," in Bloom's skittish view, is ultimately dismissed: "Perhaps Wharton was only a near-genius.... If her literary achievement needs to be bolstered, in our current fashion, by gender concerns and sociological contexts, then it would fall short of the qualities of innovation and continual freshness that genius ought to encompass."

Arguably this debate should have preceded her selection, but it does hint at a possible, almost incredible, purpose of this book. Apparently Bloom, who concludes the volume by calling the present "a bad time that deprecates genius," is trying to defend the whole idea of genius from what he regards as the destructive incursions of political correctness and the inflated value of works by women and people of color. "Without genius, literary language stales quickly, and resists revival, even upon the sacred grounds of gender, ethnicity, skin pigmentation, sexual orientation, and all the other criteria that dominate our media, including their sub-branch, our campuses." This is Bloom's parting shot, but he needn't have bothered. Genius always manages to earn its keep. Readers don't hang on to Shakespeare and Charles Dickens because critics tell us those authors are geniuses, but because they meet a living need. Bloom's joy in what he reads reminds us of this. His fulminations and Kabbalistic systems only get in the way. ￯﾿ﾽPenelope Mesic

Book Magazine - Penelope Mesic

"All genius, in my judgment, is idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary," Harold Bloom writes in this book, which offers critical vignettes of 100 literary figures. The trouble is, of course, that those qualities, which Bloom possesses in abundance, are mere side effects of genius. Genius, to borrow Delmore Schwartz's brilliant definition of poetry, is gay and exact—a matter of exuberant life force and exquisite technical control, and neither of those things is arbitrary. Bloom devotes a few pages to each of the writers he selects, from William Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison, grouping them according to a structure of his own invention based on the mystical Jewish system of codes known as the Kabbalah. He sidesteps the labor of formulating criteria for inclusion by observing, "These are certainly not 'the top one hundred,' in anyone's judgment, my own included. I wanted to write about these." The lack of focus contributes to a more serious deficiency: the absence of a point to be made. Consider, for example, the introductory chapter, subtitled "What Is Genius?" Bloom first declares that the Kabbalah provides "an anatomy of genius." Without explaining this notion, he observes that the Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem found that Franz Kafka's writing possesses "something of the strong light of the canonical, of that perfection which destroys." This is not an idea easily apprehended, but Bloom does not explain this, either. Instead he adds that Scholem's successor, Moshe Idel, believed that the canonical is "the perfection which absorbs." If there is disagreement even among the Kabbalistic scholars Bloom cites, the reader can hardly be blamed for feeling at a lossafter only half a page. Supposedly the Sefirot, or symbols of the Kabbalah, provide a structure for grouping authors together by fives, but these divisions are like the rules of a made-up game. They reflect not an underlying truth about these authors' works but rather Bloom's past scholarship and predilections. He confesses before he begins that any of the writers studied could almost as easily belong to any of the groupings he has constructed. Consequently, there is no deep and systematic exploration of the nature of genius, but rather a string of largely separate pronouncements on one author after the next. The ambitious and largely ineffective framework is almost entirely dispensable. The book has value only when Bloom engages directly with an author and allows us to participate in his elation. Endearingly, he compares reading to falling in love: It's better, he claims, because the emotional cost is so much less. As a reader of a particular beloved text, Bloom can be invaluable, in part simply because he has read so much. He has a genius for quotation—both from secondary material, such as letters and conversations that reveal an author's nature, and from the literary passages that embody an author's merits. Bloom quotes a defining observation by English essayist Walter Pater: "For [Plato] all knowledge is like knowing a person." He then adds, with striking succinctness, "Walter Pater summed up Romantic tradition in what he knew had become Charles Darwin's world." This ability to place an author in context in a single sentence could well serve the common reader, if so much else were not pretentious or obscure. Bloom also shares the remarkable gleanings of his biographical research. He gives us, for example, Leo Tolstoy's affectionate comment on Anton Chekhov: "Ah, what a beautiful, magnificent man; modest and quiet like a girl." He recalls Robert Louis Stevenson's remark that he was "not surprised that [Henry David] Thoreau got along best with fish." And he tells us that Walt Whitman referred to Alfred, Lord Tennyson as "the boss." Although he does not rank his geniuses, there are a quintet of authors described by Bloom as those who "dominate their genre," consisting of Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton and Tolstoy. Bloom hedges by referring to Milton as the master of "the secondary or postclassical epic," but this qualification amounts to an admission. Would not Homer, who crops up elsewhere, be a better choice? Perhaps the vagaries of Bloom's selections—he includes Hart Crane, Eugenio Montale and Iris Murdoch in the book, but not Petrarch, Nikolai Gogol or Vladimir Nabokov—are in a way inevitable. The chief problem with these groupings is that authors are bound together like contestants in a three-legged race. What end, for example, is served by herding together Honoré de Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, Robert Browning and William Butler Yeats? The heading of the section is "Malkhut," which means "kingdom," but this seems to boil down to the pedestrian idea that each of these authors creates a world. What author of genius does not? No list could please everyone. Indeed, a worse fate than exclusion befalls authors whom Bloom includes but dislikes, chief among them Edith Wharton and Charlotte Brontë. Recoiling from what he calls "the phallic cudgel" of Brontë's style, Bloom feels the author is "bashing me over the head," an observation he never makes when an author of genius, however domineering, is in actual possession of a phallus. Wharton, whose "unpleasant genius" penetrates "the war between men and women," in Bloom's skittish view, is ultimately dismissed: "Perhaps Wharton was only a near-genius.... If her literary achievement needs to be bolstered, in our current fashion, by gender concerns and sociological contexts, then it would fall short of the qualities of innovation and continual freshness that genius ought to encompass." Arguably this debate should have preceded her selection, but it does hint at a possible, almost incredible, purpose of this book. Apparently Bloom, who concludes the volume by calling the present "a bad time that deprecates genius," is trying to defend the whole idea of genius from what he regards as the destructive incursions of political correctness and the inflated value of works by women and people of color. "Without genius, literary language stales quickly, and resists revival, even upon the sacred grounds of gender, ethnicity, skin pigmentation, sexual orientation, and all the other criteria that dominate our media, including their sub-branch, our campuses." This is Bloom's parting shot, but he needn't have bothered. Genius always manages to earn its keep. Readers don't hang on to Shakespeare and Charles Dickens because critics tell us those authors are geniuses, but because they meet a living need. Bloom's joy in what he reads reminds us of this. His fulminations and Kabbalistic systems only get in the way.

Publishers Weekly

With The Western Canon, Yale-based critical eminence Bloom tapped into a strain of the cultural zeitgeist looking for authoritative takes on what to read. Bloom here follows up with 6-10 pages each on 100 "geniuses" of literature (all deceased) pointing to the major works, outlining the major achievements therein, showing us how to recognize them for ourselves. Despite the book's length, Bloom's mostly male geniuses are, as he notes "certainly not `the top one hundred' in anyone's judgement, my own included. I wanted to write about these." Bloom backs up his choices with such effortless and engaging erudition that their idiosyncrasy and casualness become strengths. While organized under the rubric of the 10 Kabalistic Sefirot, "attributes at once of God and of Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God's Image," Bloom's chosen figures are associated by his own brilliant (and sometimes jabbingly provocative) forms of attention, from a linkage of Dr. Johnson, Goethe and Freud to one of Dickens, Celan and Ellison (with a few others in between them). A pleasant surprise is the plethora of lesser-known Latin American authors, from Luz Vaz de Camoes to Jos Maria E a de Queiroz and Alejo Carpentier. Many familiar greats are here, too, as is a definition of genius. "This book is not a work of analysis or of close reading, but of surmise and juxtaposition," Bloom writes, and as such readers will find it appropriately enthusiastic and wild. (Oct. 22) Forecast: With the dismantling of Oprah's Book Club, and none of the contenders stepping up convincingly, look for this book to fill the void, particularly as a gift book. A five-city East Coast tour will add some awareness, and national reviews will build on it, but getting the voluble Bloom on morning television and letting him riff would be the clincher. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Bloom, a distinguished and often controversial literary critic and best-selling author of numerous books about literature (e.g., How To Read and Why), explores the concept of literary genius through the ages by examining 100 writers. Aside from such "must includes" as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, and Plato, Bloom offers some perhaps less well known to American readers, such as Lady Murasaki and Octavio Paz, acknowledging that his selections are idiosyncratic and were chosen because he wanted to write about certain authors, not because they were necessarily in "the top one hundred." In the introduction, Bloom posits a definition of genius that is fleshed out in his discussion of each writer. Authors are clustered into Lustres, or groups of five, while a brief introduction to each section explains why the writers in the section are associated with one another. (Each of the Lustres is based on one of the common names for the Kabbalistic Sefirot, which Bloom describes as representing God's creativity or genius.) Although the book is a delight to read, its real value lies in the author's ability to provoke the reader into thinking about literature, genius, and related topics. No similar work discusses literary genius in this way or covers this many writers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Shana C. Fair, Ohio Univ. Lib., Zanesville Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews