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Possessed by Memory
- The Inward Light of Criticism
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
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Publisher's summary
In arguably his most personal and lasting work, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than 80 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 90 - 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 80 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."
Includes a PDF diagram from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Sappho was a female poet who was well known in ancient Greece and Rome for her lyrical poetry. She was most famous for her poems involving women who loved women, and it is from her name that sapphic, a term referring to sexual relations between women, originated. This is a compendium of her surviving work, a collection of 54 fragments translated by Henry de Vere Stacpoole.
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This book is essentially all poetry.
- By AudioBookRomance on 08-09-17
By: Sappho, and others
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The Scarlet Plague [Classic Tales Edition]
- By: Jack London
- Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
- Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve billionaires rule the United States, while those called freemen are forced to serve the rich. But that was 60 years ago, before the Scarlet Plague. In this post-apocalyptic novella, a ragged and tattered old man tells his progeny of what life was like before The Scarlet Plague appeared - and wiped out civilization as they knew it.
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wonderful listen very relevant today!
- By Johnny on 12-02-17
By: Jack London
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The Inferno of Dante
- A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky
- By: Dante Alighieri, Robert Pinsky - translator
- Narrated by: Seamus Heaney, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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This critically acclaimed translation was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award given by the Academy of American Poets. Well versed, rapid, and various in style, the Inferno is narrated by Pinsky and three other leading poets: Seamus Heaney, Frank Bidart, and Louise Glück.
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A great translation of the epic.
- By craig on 09-14-15
By: Dante Alighieri, and others
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The Complete Collection of Emily Dickinson's Poems
- By: Emily Dickinson
- Narrated by: Elaine Sepani
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a reclusive poet whose only friendships were carried out in correspondence. Despite writing almost 1800 poems in her life, very few were published until after her death. Here, the poems are presented in chronological order in their original form, unaltered by editorial revision, in one volume. It offers a wide-angle view of Dickinson's poetic development, from the clunky rhyme schemes of her youth, through valentines she wrote in the early 1850s, to the gloomy, hell-obsessed writings of her last years.
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It’s not Emily Dickinson’s Fault
- By Mary Beth Hammond on 04-04-21
By: Emily Dickinson
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Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained
- By: John Milton
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 16 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Paradise Lost, along with its companion piece, Paradise Regained, remain the most successful attempts at Greco-Roman style epic poetry in the English language. Remarkably enough, they were written near the end of John Milton's amazing life, a bold testimonial to his mental powers in old age. And, since he had gone completely blind in 1652, 15 years prior to Paradise Lost, he dictated it and all his other works to his daughter.
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SELL YOUR SHIRT FOR THIS AUDIO BOOK!
- By thomas on 04-23-11
By: John Milton
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The Courtship of Miles Standish
- By: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Narrated by: B. J. Harrison
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Complete and unabridged, and read with meticulous care, in this story Miles Standish and John Alden both seek the hand of the fair Priscilla. See the Mayflower abandon the first settlers as it returns to England. Feel the heated vision of the Indians, perpetually keeping their watch in the dark forest. Love and adventure collide in one of Longfellow's most famous works
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Longfellow's poem
- By Jan on 12-04-12
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The Sorrows of Young Werther
- By: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Werther, a sensitive young artist, finds himself in Wahlheim, a quiet, attractive village in Germany where he seeks solace from the turmoils of love. It is a young spring, and he hopes that arcadian solitude will prove a genial balm to his mind. But his romantic tendency rules otherwise, and he falls in love with Charlotte - Lotte - even though he knows she is affianced to another.
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Great performance for a classical story.
- By Brandon Shaw on 09-15-17
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Dante's Divine Comedy
- A Guide for the Spiritual Journey
- By: Mark Vernon
- Narrated by: Mark Vernon
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. His hometown, Florence, was at the epicenter of the move from the medieval world to the modern. The Divine Comedy was born in a time of troubling transition, which is why it still speaks today. In this narrative retelling and guide, from the gates of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, to the empyrean of paradise, Mark Vernon offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives.
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An Inversion of Dante
- By A.B.D. on 09-24-22
By: Mark Vernon
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Faust
- By: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Narrated by: David McCallion
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is a poem, translated by Bayard Taylor, which tells the beautiful and emotional story of a man who has seen and done it all. However, despite all of his learning and education, his life still feels empty and unaccomplished. He believes wholeheartedly that there is something else out there. Faust, having exhausted all other fields of study, turns to magic for fulfillment. He summons the devil and makes a pact - that if the devil can show him something rewarding and fulfilling, he will give the devil his soul.
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Misleading
- By Grant Pajak on 03-29-17
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The Higher Self
- The Magic of Inner and Outer Fulfillment
- By: Deepak Chopra MD
- Narrated by: Deepak Chopra
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Original Recording
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Welcome on a behind-the-scenes tour of creation, an experience that will change forever the way you understand reality.
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It's A Book, Not A Show
- By Krandall/Shivaji on 11-01-15
By: Deepak Chopra MD
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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 48 essential works spanning the Western canon.
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Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or "J") writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Illiad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett.
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Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
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The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry.
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Culmination of Bloom’s Wisdom
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How To Read and Why
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"Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.
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Like a review of my graduate English degree
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The Western Canon
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Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
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A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
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Lear
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King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character.
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Bloom being Bloom
- By C. Yuen on 10-05-23
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Classic Bloom, but a curious reading of him
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Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or "J") writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Illiad, the Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake's Milton, Wordsworth's Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett.
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Not one of Bloom's best
- By Benjamin Myers on 03-31-17
By: Harold Bloom
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Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles
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Like a review of my graduate English degree
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Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
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A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
- By Steffen on 07-23-12
By: Harold Bloom
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Lear
- The Great Image of Authority
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King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare's most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character.
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Bloom being Bloom
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The Modern Scholar
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Shakespeare's seven great tragedies contain unmistakable elements that set them apart from any other plays ever written. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare embodied in the character of Juliet the world's most impressive representation ever of a woman in love. With Julius Caesar, the great playwright produced a drama of astonishing and perpetual relevance.
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Lowest WPM Ever
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Falstaff
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Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare's three Henry plays. 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. Award-winning author and esteemed professor Harold Bloom examines 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.
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Falstaff brooks no rebuttal.
- By Darwin8u on 02-06-20
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Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air
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Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history - and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom delivers exhilarating clarity and invites us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime.
By: Harold Bloom
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The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses
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In The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses, Patrick Hastings provides comprehensive support to readers and listeners of Joyce's magnum opus by illuminating crucial details and reveling in the mischievous genius of this unparalleled novel. Written in a voice that offers encouragement and good humor, this guidebook maintains a closeness to the original text and supports the first-time reader or listener of Ulysses with the information needed to successfully finish and appreciate the novel.
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Enlightening
- By Demoyung on 01-24-24
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The Life of the Mind
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- Unabridged
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Considered by many to be Hannah Arendt's greatest work, published as she neared the end of her life, The Life of the Mind investigates thought itself, as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from her previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this work was planned as three volumes that would explore the activities of the mind considered by Arendt to be fundamental. What emerged is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.
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English only please
- By angela cozea on 11-20-19
By: Hannah Arendt
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The Republic of Plato
- By: Allan Bloom
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 20 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Long regarded as the most accurate rendering of Plato's Republic that has yet been published, this widely acclaimed translation by Allan Bloom was the first to take a strictly literal approach. In addition to the annotated text, there is also a rich and valuable essay—as well as indices—which will enable listeners to better understand the heart of Plato's intention.
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The translation by Alan Bloom
- By Anonymous User on 08-21-24
By: Allan Bloom
What listeners say about Possessed by Memory
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kindle Customer
- 08-27-21
laden with poetry &laced literary insights
laden with poetry &laced literary insights, cannot get enough,will listen to this over and t, like a compelling piece of music.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Norman
- 04-03-21
What an endowment!
This is an incredible inheritance for anyone who delights in a very personal tour of literature. Here, great poetic (broadly speaking) writing is embroidered with the rich expertise of one of the great scholars and public intelligence our time. I was particularly moved by the section on A.R.Ammons, who turns out to have been Bloom’s dear friend. Bloom is not only encyclopedic in his knowledge of poets but actually has spent time and/or corresponded with many of them personally. And his exegesis of Biblical passages is also memorable especially his review of the Book of Job. The familiar—and fair—critique applies that Bloom has noticeably few entries other than “dead white men.” But this is his experience and, fortunately, one can now turn elsewhere to read beyond that canon. Overall, this is a masterpiece.
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5 people found this helpful
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- John Rothermel
- 12-07-21
Subjective but interesting
Bloom recapitulates old positions. Not much digging into "criticism." Good coverage of Milton.
Excellent reader.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Elliott Wolfe, M.D.
- 05-07-19
Too much information
A scholar's book without crystal clear presentation. Too many names, more facts than can be absorbed. Pace of reading too fast. A sad story.
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4 people found this helpful