Volume 23, Number 2 · February 19, 1976
Summoning Up the Kabbalah
By Leon Wieseltier
Kabbalah and Criticism
by Harold Bloom
Seabury, 127 pp., $6.95
It is Bloomsday for the study of literature. The stale air of academic literary criticism now bristles with the heated language of the works of Professor Harold Bloom of Yale. Seminars and symposia hunt for 'precursors' and 'ephebes,' instate or banish poets from Bloom's canon of modern English poetry. His favorite contemporary poets are called 'new laureates.' His many admirers greet his books rhapsodically, and adulatory reviewers speak of his genius. It brings to mind Roethke's holy prayer: '…and may I never use the word 'brilliant.''
Review, 4975 words
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