OPEN SOURCE: Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler - What We Read

The first 2/3 of the hour are with Harold Bloom, the great pole star of our literary-critical firmament who has taught courses at Yale for more than 50 years on Shakespeare, or on “how to read a poem.”  In his late seventies, Bloom’s mode of reading fast, writing fast, and memorizing almost everything still verges on the freakish, and his zest for the text is undimmed, as are his combativeness, his mockery, self-mockery, and his delight in seeing himself as both king and bad-boy of his literary profession. In our long conversation this past Fall, Professor Bloom gave us a short course in memorization, in effect: “How to Memorize… and What,” starting with Tennyson’s Ulysses He reviewed what he calls the “ghastly condition,” the “sellout” and “suicide” of the “Humanities” in American universities before “the School of Resentment.”

Bloom digresses… to the marks of Shakespeare, Shelley and the King James Bible on Whitman, and Whitman’s mark on “the American religion,” neither Judaic nor Christian, but something indigenous and very new in the world. Would that Whitman’s Democratic Vistas had left as deep a mark on American politics, which Professor Bloom segments today as follows: “one-third plutocracy, one-third oligarchy, one-third theocracy… There’s not much Whitmania left in the public sphere.”

In the final third of the hour, Helen Vendler, the eminent “close reader,” gifts us here in her Harvard office with a short course on her “closest” poet, Wallace Stevens. Her cool sage of Hartford was a Harvard-educated lawyer and vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was an aloof patrician and sometimes pugnacious martini drinker. In private life he was a discreetly, resolutely unhappy husband; he was a post-religious modernist who seems to have reversed field and chosen a Catholic baptism on his deathbed.

Stevens was himself a “cubist” inventor of his own forms in poetry, as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” He was a fine jeweler in immortal phrases: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” “Death is the mother of beauty.” “We say God and the imagination are one.”

The first 2/3 of the hour are with Harold Bloom, the great pole star of our literary-critical firmament who has taught courses at Yale for more than 50 years on Shakespeare, or on “how to read a poem.”  In his late seventies, Bloom’s mode of reading fast, writing fast, and memorizing almost everything still verges on the freakish, and his zest for the text is undimmed, as are his combativeness, his mockery, self-mockery, and his delight in seeing himself as both king and bad-boy of his literary profession. In our long conversation this past Fall, Professor Bloom gave us a short course in memorization, in effect: “How to Memorize… and What,” starting with Tennyson’s Ulysses He reviewed what he calls the “ghastly condition,” the “sellout” and “suicide” of the “Humanities” in American universities before “the School of Resentment.”

Bloom digresses… to the marks of Shakespeare, Shelley and the King James Bible on Whitman, and Whitman’s mark on “the American religion,” neither Judaic nor Christian, but something indigenous and very new in the world. Would that Whitman’s Democratic Vistas had left as deep a mark on American politics, which Professor Bloom segments today as follows: “one-third plutocracy, one-third oligarchy, one-third theocracy… There’s not much Whitmania left in the public sphere.”

In the final third of the hour, Helen Vendler, the eminent “close reader,” gifts us here in her Harvard office with a short course on her “closest” poet, Wallace Stevens. Her cool sage of Hartford was a Harvard-educated lawyer and vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was an aloof patrician and sometimes pugnacious martini drinker. In private life he was a discreetly, resolutely unhappy husband; he was a post-religious modernist who seems to have reversed field and chosen a Catholic baptism on his deathbed.

Stevens was himself a “cubist” inventor of his own forms in poetry, as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” He was a fine jeweler in immortal phrases: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” “Death is the mother of beauty.” “We say God and the imagination are one.”