it depends which HB: at the risk of provoking phil masstransfer, his stuff on W.Canon = rub...

PIE

titus on the other hand roxos - if only shakespeare in skool had've been that much fun.

One of these days, I'll try again. And again. And again.

Kerouac's poetry doesn't work at all on the page. It can work when read aloud in the right mood. Ginsberg definitely belongs in the canon based on his great '50s work: of course it's 'dated', but so what? Shakespeare is also pretty dated, in case you hadn't noticed. It's easy to dismiss Ginsberg for being the patron saint of bad indie poets, but "Howl" and "America" are still amazing works. Though Burroughs was easily the most talented of the lot (funny thing about the Beats is that only the really obvious ones - the Big Three - are any good; another funny thing is that those three writers have next to nothing in common) I'm not really surprised that Bloom stiffed him, since he seems a bit clueless when it comes to modern stuff.

Bloom also thinks Sylvia Plath is crap, which made me hate him when I was an angst-y teenager. Now I'm not so impressed with Sylvia anymore, but I still can't bring myself to like Bloom. Really boring writer, sucks all the life out of the classics. It also bugs me that he gets away with publishing all those pencil-thin books on classic lit for lazy college readers under his own name with some two- paragraph introduction he probably cranked out on his lunch hour. Those books can be useful, but on the other hand the thought of reading an actual book by him fills me with dread.

Come to think of it he never really does anything to PROVE that "thesis" of Shakespeare "inventing the human personality," it's just an excuse for him to talk about his favorite author, which gives the book a strangely informal, rambling quality, like a slightly pompous but endearing old professor. Occasionally he rouses himself to bitch about modern (mis?)interpretations of S., which can be funny if frustratingly curt (Branagh's Much Ado Abt Nothing is bad because the scenery is distracting? What?) Here and there he slips into a weird pseudo-gnostic tone: "Shakespeare can read you better than you can read him," which pretty much kills ANY sort of criticism except Bloom's brand of hyper-Bardolatry (it's like Greil Marcus talking about Sleater-Kinney!). In the end, tho, I did rather enjoy the book.