Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds  5109

  • Preface
  • On This Book’s Arrangement: Genius and Kabbalah
  • The Lustres
  • Gnosticism: The Religion of Literature
  • Introduction: What is Genius?
  • Genius: A Personal Definition
  1. Keter
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 1: William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, John Milton, Leo Tolstoy
    • Lustre 2: Lucretius, Vergil, Saint Augustine, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer
    • [/rtoc]

  2. Hokmah
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 3: The Yahwist, Socrates and Plato, Saint Paul, Muhammad
    • Lustre 4: Dr Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann
    • [/rtoc]

  3. Binah
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 5: Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett
    • Lustre 6: Molière, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, Luigi Pirandello
    • [/rtoc]

  4. Hesed
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 7: John Donne, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Lady Murasaki
    • Lustre 8: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Jane Brontë, Virginia Woolf
    • [/rtoc]

  5. Din
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 9: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot
    • Lustre 10: William Wordsworth; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Giacomo Leopardi; Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    • [/rtoc]

  6. Tiferet
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 11: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Walter Pater, Hugo von Hoffmansthal
    • Lustre 12: Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry
    • [/rtoc]

  7. Nezah
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 13: Homer, Luis Vaz de Camoes, James Joyce, Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz
    • Lustre 14: Stendhal, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor
    • [/rtoc]

  8. Hod
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 15: Walt Whitman, Fernando Pessoa, Hart Crane, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda
    • Lustre 16: George Eliot, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Iris Murdoch
    • [/rtoc]

  9. Yesod
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 17: Gustave Flaubert, José Maria Eça de Queiroz, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino
    • Lustre 18: William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Eugenio Montale
    • [/rtoc]

  10. Malkhut
      [rtoc]

    • Lustre 19: Honoré de Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats
    • Lustre 20: Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, Paul Celan, Ralph Ellison
    • [/rtoc]

  • Coda: The future of Genius
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3 thoughts on “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds”

  1. There is a disclaimer right at the start of the preface, immediately addressing what I noticed straight away while cataloguing this book:

    Since my competence extends only to literary, and to some extent, religious, criticism, there is nothing in this book about Einstein, Delacroix, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, or whom you will. This is a mosaic of geniuses of language …

    Fair enough, but two questions arise from this for me, which should be answered honestly.

    Firstly, subtitle the book “A mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds” — in all honestly, with this disclaimer, the book should be more accurately subtitled “A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Literary Minds” or “Exemplary Users of Language”. Clumsy? Perhaps. Less likely to be a best-seller? Well, I guess that’s a bigger point.

    But that brings us on to the second gripe. One feels, with Bloom, that writing a book on Genius, even taking into account such disclaimers as the one quoted above, is an attempt to stake his own claim to being in, or close to, the area of Genius himself. But it strikes me that, of those Geniuses described in the book who might have been most interested themselves in the subject of Genius (Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Socrates, Johnson, Goethe, Freud, Wilde to name just some in the early chapters) would never have approached the topic of Genius within such narrow bounds. For their genius consists in having a range which encompassed music and visual art as husbands, wives, brothers or sisters in their literary genius and (not just in the case of Freud) often extended to or encompassed the Science of their day.

    It’s interesting that Bloom doesn’t mention Leonardo da Vinci in his list above. Perhaps this is because Leonardo can be approached from the aspect of his Genius which was literary. But to mention him then becomes an admission that Genius can seldom be confined within the narrow bounds simply of “geniuses of language”.

    I realise that I say all of this without even reading beyond the preface, which I will do at some point. But if Bloom had not so emasculated his topic from the outset, the book is one I would read tonight, not consign to 500th place in my list of “must reads”.

  2. The point I meant to place at the centre of my second gripe was this: It’s fine to admit your current limitations. BUT WHY NOT MAKE THE EFFORT TO EXCEED THEM? Why not study harder, to be able to write properly on the much broader subject of Genius? Why not pay tribute to true genius by striving for the unfettered mind and frames of reference which are surely two of Genius’s central characteristics?

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