I could honestly listen to Bloom talk all day.

I love the way that Bloom keeps giggling at the interviewer's inanities -- and the audience laughs along with him.

I haven't laughed out loud so much in years! He is as hilarious in person as he is consoling in writing. And yet somehow more moving. I love and and admire this man.

Harold's mind is so wonderful that it is almost superfluous. I am so thankful that I managed to find his work and words, primarily through the internet (which he would probably be astonished by) whereby I have purchased and read most of his books. To put it mildly, he has changed the way that I perceive literature like few else. Thankfully his spirit and majesty has been recorded for all to witness, whether or not they should agree with his views. Thank you Harold, for your unwavering sublimity.

old age is shipwreck but what a tower of intellect and cerebrality!charming old man.

Harold, Professor Bloom, is TRULY, one of a kind. Also, found the conversations with Charlie Rose, priceless, as the chemistry was incredible, the effect the two had on each other.

This man has had a profound and indelible impact on the face of Western art, education, and culture at large. A life well lived has brought him blessed and eternal sleep.

Love the bit here where Harold Bloom talks of Burton, the "fear of over-reading" and the dangers of drowning out life 45:30

How lovely this exists.

I love how jovial Bloom is in this interview, perhaps because of his age.

Paul Holdengraber is amazing. Bloom is obviously in pain, doesn't want to be there for the conversation and insists on having the conversation on his terms. Yet Paul wrings out of 'the old man' juices of the genius near the end of life. The crotchety Bloom is masterfully and persuasively led by a master interviewer in his own right. Wonderful and inspiring.

Harold bloom may be the most well read literary critic who ever lives. I feel fortunate to be alive in his time.

What an absolute delight to find this Harold Bloom conversation here on KZfaq. Thank you so much the PEN American Center for uploading it. You have made my day, my year! Harold Bloom is an incredible inspiration.

This man was a real Mensch! I miss learning from him.

After an age, every man starts looking like my grandfather who passed away 12 years ago this day at the solid age of 88. He carried a walking stick and had those same soft drooping wrinkled cheeks which I used to tweak from time to time. He always looked tired but once he started talking he would go on and on, from literature to football to politics to freedom movements to swimming in abandoned ponds in winter to climbing the ancestral mango tree in his village, he would go on. He had a panoramic knowledge of his times. He told me with enough conviction that old age is the great unfurling of the wings of wisdom, you get the eyes of an eagle! Damn, I miss my grandfather's generation. Madly missing my old man today. Hope to meet him someday in the alternate dimension of fiction where I will be his grandfather, and he, my grandson!

Kudos to Paul Holdengraber! Interviewer as mediator, facilitator, and artlessly artful provocateur!

Wonderful! thanks for posting. Bloom is now a veritable sage, and talks like one. Highlights for me: the Edmund Wilson and CS Lewis anecdotes - priceless! as well as the statement that he got into Poetry in the first place because of his "hatred for TS Eliot". And I love that in the end he came to accept the greatness of Eliot as a poet, but thinks that he was "a strange amalgam of Tennyson and Whitman."

I envy his students. they had the chance to ask him questions and learn from his wisdom

Wow l am so desperate translating his "anxiety of influence" into Farsi , in Iran. His death was such a great loss to the literature world, world over

My Respect to the Interviewer - not an easy role

"Old age is a shipwreck". Beautiful!

Harold Bloom was a great Yale professor.

Love the bit at the end where Harold Bloom talks of Kafka.

Bloom is fabulous; the interlocutor was awfully long-winded. But it's not easy interviewing Harold Bloom, as someone says below, but rather like interviewing Hamlet... I had an email exchange with Bloom in his final year over Hamlet. I asked him how Hamlet's declaration of love for Ophelia at her grave squared with Bloom's contention that Hamlet was incapable of love. And he answered: "I think it is the last moment of Hamlet’s theatricality. After that he turns inward." Interesting take on one of the least discussed but most important scenes in the play.

Thank you for this and all the other offerings on this great channel.

43:40 “You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

bloom's contempt for the interviewer is hilarious!

When you interview people like Bloom, you'd better get prepared in advance.

50:00 “ Don’t bother to learn how to die... “ Michel de Montaigne. 1533-1592 Brilliant! Actually the hard part is living without those untimely gone.

Marvelous ending

The person interviewing him is very outclassed, when approaching someone of that wisdom and intelligence maybe show a bit of a student's humility next time.

It's a consolation that even this great mind is (in his nightly thoughts) not free from minor slips: Kafka's hunter Gracchus talks to the Mayor of Riva, a port of Lago di Garda in Italy, not Riga of the Baltic Sea (15:30 on).

We meet again ,and again I keep and continue to learn from the questions the answers and comments..a rich and fertile soils for the seeds of my nourichments..Thanks again..

he is so analysing him

Thanks a ton for sharing this! :)

What don't we want to listen to our venerable HB just go on about. I want the religious crit; I want the early lit crit; I want the later opinions since Mosaic; WE need it all. If there's a student in Dr.Blooms class, you are doing a service to society by passing it on!

32:14 I am listening to this not so recent interview in my Ipad where I read for free the classics. I look up every word I don’t know; I look up new words, names, dates, etc. Google eases it, enhances my experience. Google it! we heard. Is that retrieval? I love it.

There's nothing the interviewer could've done. Bloom doesn't let him finish a single question or thought. And there's no telling what word he'll latch onto before delivering an outburst. The interviewer extracts some fascinating anecdotes like the psychoanalytic stuff and his relationship with C.S. Lewis.

I love this man.

Harold sounds a lot friendlier than he sounds in writing, and his new york accent really surprised me too. He sounds just slightly like christopher walken.

1:18:00 How much poetry did he keep in his memory? “... I heard an old religious man / But yesternight declare/ That he had found a text to prove/ That only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.” -- For Anne Gregory. William Butler Yeats

23:00 “...there is nothing better for you to be doing than solitary reading.”

"A series of way stations and we shall never reach the destination "

23:30 Funny! This morning I read Lori Gottlieb popular article in The Atlantic about parenting. She mentions Donald Winnicott’s idea that a “good enough mother” will do to raise a healthy child. Today I run into the same name, Donald Winnicott, in a talk about books with no other than Harold Bloom!

I'm glad for this interview, there is only one full interview available online, all the rests they took down.

It would have been better just to do an audience q and a with Harold Bloom. Would have spared us the ramblings of the host

Thank you.

Love his reaction to "America", the pinnacle of Levi's commercials. It's abominable.

Also: Bloom's burn on The New York Times re: syntax, etc. The fact that they don't use the Oxford comma. Are they worried they're wasting ink on their online articles?

Paul Holdengräber... Is there a better example of a complete bore? Bloom shows immense patients here. He's remarkable.

@thafons I agree with you. Harold Bloom is wonderful here, despite his failing health. But Bloom deserved a patient and respectful interviewer. This interviewer irritates me with his contstant interruptions and rude behaviour.

World-renowned? Perhaps. But imagine the precise percentage of people who have actually heard of Bloom, or any Humanities academic for that matter, relative to the entire world population.

@ 16:43 Oh mercy, this is just riotous.

Why the fuck do you people hate the interviewer?

I enjoyed the snippets of Bloom between the inane and boring anecdotes of the german

@clockworkscott Yes I think the speaker is actually quite good. He had a plan for the evening that Bloom deviates from, which is always difficult. But he's very agreeable and kind.

Is that "stirling silver"? That recording is a space alien caught in low earth orbit.

I want the transcript

I'm quite surprised Bloom didn't recognize the famous Whitman recording. The reading is indeed terrible, but I imagine the halting, seemingly didactic tone is simply Whitman's attempt to ensure that his voice can be clearly heard on the wax cylinder.

The french guy, Mr. X, is most probably Derrida.

Pretty sure it's Derrida.

1:05:00 “You are most amiable. Most amiable.”

@Strattonus I think just perhaps his phenomenal memory is starting to go a bit. @ 15:30 The correct quote from Johnson is "No man but a blockhead ever writ, except for money."

The interviewer is so anxious man, he should’ve meditated before this.

What is the status of the student's that could be every day close to the mind of H.Bloom? I am envious.

@stoogefest16 *guffaw* Christopher Walken indeed! I can't believe I never noticed before. Fucking hilarious. "And now, young man, I give the watch to you." XD

LoL he almost threw hands with C.S. Lewis

@Forehead2Brick I second your advice to the rude interviewer of Harold Bloom. This conversation is a small miracle, spoilt by a big error by the organisers to have that nobody interviewing Dr Johnson's heir.

44:26 more oops by paul

Paul's bio: "Has heard of __ book, has re-shelved __ book, will name-drop __ book, has never read __ book

Bronx public library how cool

34:00 , 1:06:30

What does he say between 1:03:35 - 1:03:43 "quite certainly as the best French literary critics since ______ ______ and Paul Valéry, whose spirit..."?

1:11:11 H *starts answering boring question.* Paul *redundant intejection* wHAt dO yOU MeaAN?

The applause at 1:16:30 was actually quite insulting. Bloom (rightfully) looked pretty offended and confused

31:44... that face.

52:40 - Why Shakespeare above everybody?

Harold Bloom: gone. The Dantist Robert Hollander, gone as well. Very soon, the lights shall have all gone out. Only the books shall remain. And you, and I.

love kafkas letter from 1904

somebody please put paul out of his misery while hb is losing it 1:17:21

Put the Whitman recording thru a decent filter!

32:32

Who is the French theorist they were talking about at ~1:03?

Not too good at quoting Jewish sources (that final maxim was not from Hillel, but rather he have a botched version of the maxim of the "Men of Great Assembly"}

he is so cute! is he still alive?

Holdengräber has an austrian accent, not a lisp.

14 19 30

PH is not a great interviewer--talks more than he should and is too reverential. With his passion for background and deep detail, he'd make a better biographer. This particular interview was like watching paint dry at times. Doesn't help that I never liked Bloom much as a critic. Prefer reading Axel's Castle on a rainy day...now HE was a critic. But some good nuggets here, if one can sit through all of it.

I will avoid Holdengraber interviews. I tuned in to listen to Harold not to Holdengraber's interjections and I disliked his unwillingness to wait for Harold to finish his thoughts/comments.

He was born the same year as the Apollo 11 astronauts.

That Interviewer is terrible, yet oddly enough he sounds like a bond villian.

A little advice to Paul: never act smug when you're interviewing a man orders of magnitude more intelligent than yourself.

bad audio.

I feel like the interviewer is too concerned with reminding the audience he's wearing horn-rimmed glasses and can use them like an intellectual

This is perhaps the worst chemistry I have ever seen or heard in an interview. Paul, Just doesn't 'gel' with Bloom. The interviewer should watch more of Charlie Rose, and how he handles Harold. I respect Bloom so much, I had to watch this, but, very disappointed I did. RIP HB

Solar Anus

I am going into journalism for the sole purpose of asking the right questions. This interviewer has no idea what that means. He also has zero sense of humor.

As much as I admire Bloom for his effort to lead so many generations back to the classics, I think he is over-rated as a critic. The more I read his critical writings, the more I think that he is just someone who is addicted to reading. Poetry-wise, he has read much but never had an ambition to write his own, despite claiming to be a lover of poetry. To understand poetry, you need to study many poetical traditions. Greek, Latin as well as Sanskrit and Pali poetry is qualitative. English is stressed. If you just read English poetry, you aesthetic judgment is probably not very profound. Bloom's understanding of poetry is probably less that Ezra Pound who could read poetry in 6-7 languages, including Greek. Bloom is extremely well-read and has an amazing memory. But I start to doubt his aesthetic judgment. You don't learn much about how to evaluate poetry by reading Bloom. He just idolizes and routinely performs usual adoration on some of the poets. His criticism sometimes read like a religious text. It keeps repeating on certain points like catechism and confirmation of faith -- without providing accessible analysis or improving the reader's knowledge of the beautiful.

yo i dont think paul can read