Professor Bloom's Memory

 

   It has been too nice outside to stay inside blogging, so I imagine that my imaginary readers are growing restless. Some of them may remember that the subject of "memory" is one of the few themes found in this blog, which is produced by someone with a poor one, and they may yearn for another profile of someone who has one that was very good. Well, here it is.

   Harold Bloom is a well-known literary critic and professor who died in 2019. Apparently he will not be bored, wherever he is, since he took with him to the coffin an entire canon which was stored in his memory. In the obituary it is noted that "Bloom claimed he could recite "the whole of Shakespeare, Milton's Paradise Lost, all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser's The Fairie Queen." He apparently could read four hundred pages in an hour and remember what he read.
 
   With some irony it should be noted that attempts are being made to erase Bloom so he will not be remembered by those who study literature in the future. He was, after all, the Dean of the DWEMs, who thought that those included in his The Western Canon, were the ones who really counted. Additional support for his cancellation is offered by those who learned that he also courted some of the coeds he taught at Yale and NYU. 

   I know about Bloom's memory because I read this recent piece: "Poetry and the Art of Memory," by Stephen Miller, The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2021.  It was Mr. Miller who read the Bloom obituary and thought if Bloom could remember that much, he could attempt, at age 79, to improve his own memory by memorizing 30 poems in five languages. "I made my task relatively easy by choosing to memorize poems with no more than four stanzas. So far I've learned poems in English, French, Spanish and German. I'm working on a poem in Italian." In passing, he mentions that he recently recited, while waiting at a red light, Wallace Steven's "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand-Man."

Sources:
I did look at the obituary, but it is difficult to quickly learn more about Bloom's memory since most search results lead to another book he wrote, Possessed by Memory, which I have not read and would not remember. Mr. Miller does mention "The Book of Memory: A Study Of Memory in Medieval Culture," by Mary Carruthers, but I haven't read that either. 

The Bonus:

If, like me, you don't think you are up to the task of remembering 30 poems in five languages, you could start with the short one in English that Mr. Miller already remembers.

"The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man," 
One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly
Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays
Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.
The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.
To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine
And pines that are cornets, so it occurs,
And a little island full of geese and stars:
It may be the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spuse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

For other guys with good memories, see the following. I promise I will continue to search for some  women with big memories.  In alphabetical order:
Chimen Abramsky.
Professor Chomsky
William Empson (includes C.S. Lewis)
Professor Porson