A literary titan of our time, "looks to poems for clarity about the end of life" ( New York Times Book Review ).In this charming anthology, esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom collects the last poems of history's most important and celebrated poets. As with his immensely popular Best Poems of the English Language, Bloom has carefully curated and annotated the final works of one hundred poets in Till I End M...

An essential new selection of poems from one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.Among A. R. Ammons’ most devout readers—and lifelong friends—was critic Harold Bloom, who declared Ammons’ Collected Poems “the most distinguished book of American verse since the publication of Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems in 1955.” This new compendium of work by a major American poet, selected and with an introduction by one of the most promin...

A selection of the lively letters between one of the world’s greatest literary critics and the poets, novelists, and scholars he most admiredBringing together a collection of Harold Bloom’s letters to and from eight of his favorite contemporary writers, Heather Cass White provides an intimate view of one of the most famous literary critics of the last century. In correspondence with Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, A. R. Ammons, John Hollander, James Merrill, John...

More than 200 years after it was first published, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has stood the test of time as a gothic masterpiece—a classic work of horror that blurs the line between man and monster.“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”For centuries, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created has held readers spellbound. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting dread. On a more profound level, i...

Ralph Waldo Emerson transformed America by writing in an utterly unique, personal, and insistently optimistic voice about matters that concern us to this day: our lives alone and with others, the true sources of identity, and the specifically American promise of freedom and equality for all. A principal voice of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embodies an independent American intellectual tradition rooted in deep moral convictions and the pragmatic ability to adapt to changing circ...

America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition—from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man—in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction.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 ...

“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry."Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last tes...

“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.” So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry."Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom’s most personal work, this is a fitting last tes...

Anyone who has ever said one thing and meant another has spoken in the mode of allegory. The allegorical expression of ideas pervades literature, art, music, religion, politics, business, and advertising. But how does allegory really work and how should we understand it? For more than forty years, Angus Fletcher's classic book has provided an answer that is still unsurpassed for its comprehensiveness, brilliance, and eloquence. With a preface by Harold Bloom and a substantial new afterword...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWSHailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now ...

In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty 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 ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest a...