Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) Possessed by Memory: the Inward Light of Criticism is the latest of Harold Bloom innumerable volumes of authored and edited criticism and theory. His first book appeared in 1959, Shelley's Mythmaking, and he has more books scheduled to be published later this year and next. As I began graduate school in 1970, it was his book Yeats that preoccupied my mind, as Yeats was my poet, having written a senior thesis on The Tower in college, and I would go on to write a dissertation on his Autobiographies, which became my first book Tragic Knowledge (1981). Because Bloom was so critical of Yeats, I was defensive with respect to his book, even as I went back to read everything by him he had written before it, and would go on to follow him closely over the years, modifying my critique to grudging respect, to more understanding, till in the last decade or so, to affection and marvel. I like to think he had slowed down enough for even I could catch up to him, and learn something. However that may be, I organized this forum for the purpose of demonstrating that his work still possesses our memories, whether we emphasize and understand him, or not. Given that with The Anxiety of Influence (1973) he added, as Kenneth Burke, one of his favorite theorists might say, a new motive to the critical grammar of motives literary critics use to comprehend what we espouse, that Harold Bloom continues to write books means the discipline of literary study, however shrunken, still lives on, and with ever more imaginative life. [End Page 309] Daniel T. O'Hara Temple University Daniel T. O'Hara DANIEL T. O'HARA, Emeritus Professor of English and the Humanities at Temple University, is the author and editor or coeditor of fifteen books, including Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: The Invisible Tribunal (2015). Currently, he is completing a book entitled Thomas Mann and the Travesty of Innocence: the Role of the Narrator in Modernism (forthcoming). Copyright © 2019 Symplokē