Like the great­est lit­er­ary crit­ics of the past — Long­i­nus, Samuel John­son, Lionel Trilling — Harold Bloom rest­less­ly, proud­ly (many would say self-impor­tant­ly), and lov­ing­ly breathes fresh life into an aston­ish­ing­ly broad range of lit­er­ary texts, urg­ing us to pick up, read, and get lost in the labyrinthine ways of writ­ers, ancient and mod­ern. In this ​“sequel” to his ground­break­ing The Anx­i­ety of Influ­ence (1973), Bloom deliv­ers his final state­ment on the sub­ject of lit­er­ary influ­ence; he now defines influ­ence sim­ply as ​“lit­er­ary love, tem­pered by defense (his empha­sis)… the over­whelm­ing pres­ence of love is vital to under­stand­ing how great lit­er­a­ture works.” Bloom admits that this book is a crit­i­cal self-por­trait and a sus­tained med­i­ta­tion on the writ­ings and read­ings that have shaped him as a per­son and a crit­ic. By com­bin­ing live­ly reflec­tion of his own read­ing life with his typ­i­cal­ly atten­tive close read­ings of texts, Bloom demon­strates fas­ci­nat­ing con­nec­tions between a wide range of writ­ers from Shake­speare, Dante, and Mil­ton to Shel­ley, John Ash­bery, and Amy Clampitt. He declares, for exam­ple, that ​“Ham­let cen­ters the lit­er­ary cos­mos, East­ern as well as West­ern. His only rivals are com­ic — Don Quixote — or on the bor­der of divin­i­ty: the Gospel of Mark’s amaz­ing­ly enig­mat­ic Jesus, who is unsure who he is and keeps ask­ing his thick-head­ed dis­ci­ples, ​“but who or what do peo­ple say I am?” While Bloom often repeats him­self many times over — some­times cre­at­ing the impres­sion that he’s thrown the book togeth­er from ear­li­er writ­ings with­out care­ful edit­ing — his deep wis­dom about life and lit­er­a­ture reveals itself in lit­tle gems like this one: ​“Lit­er­a­ture for me is not sim­ply the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no oth­er form.” As with the best lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, Bloom’s stun­ning new book com­pels us to lose our­selves in the lit­er­a­ture about which he writes so force­ful­ly and gracefully.