Sunday, November 15, 2009

The Gaseousness of H. Bloom

From Harold Bloom's review of Peter Aykroyd's new rendering of the Canterbury Tales:


Shakespeare's greatest contemporary, the epic poet Edmund Spenser, derived directly from Chaucer, whom he praised as the "well of English undefiled." That prompted the 18th-century poet-critic John Dryden to term Chaucer "a perpetual fountain of good sense.

Question: Is it possible to do more pretentious name-dropping in such a short space?

1 comment:

Thomas Banks said...

...And while he's at it, to miss the fact that Dryden inhabited the 17th, not the 18th century. I agree Bloom is a gasbag.