"At what historical point did American English become different from British English? Burchfield tackles these and other questions in scholarly essays sure to intrigue anyone who loves words and language." - Publishers Weekly

"One of Australia's most vivid, energetic and stormy poets, a writer who turns to the natural world with a fierce light." Edward Hirsch, Washington Post Highly Recommended Poetry Books of 2003"

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...

Reviews and essays that focus on this great American poet

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 Iliad, 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. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is...

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.
Shedding all...

"If readers are to come to Shakespeare and to Chekhov, to Henry James and to Jane Austen, then they are best prepared if they have read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling," writes Harold Bloom in his introduction to this enchanting and much-needed anthology of exceptional stories and poems selected to inspire a lifelong love of reading. As television, video games, and the Internet threaten to distract young people from the solitary pleasures of reading, Bloom presents a volume that will amuse, challenge, and beguile readers with its myriad voices and...

-- Presents concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work -- Provides multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters -- Digests of critical extracts prefaced by headnotes

Unlike other study guides, Bloom's Notes offers a wide selection of critical analyses by renowned scholars, as well as concise biographical and bibliographical information and a comprehensive thematic discussion of the plot--all in one book.

This guide provides an introduction to a critical analysis of Shakespeare''s poems. It features a few poems, offering a variety of viewpoints by different critics on the important aspects of each work and an analysis of the texts'