Review: Harold Bloom’s Genius: A Mosaic of 100 Exemplary Creative Minds

I stumbled upon Harold Bloom’s Genius as a casual reader, expecting to be overwhelmed by the density of names like Milton, Dante, and Goethe. Like many, I had once dismissed such “old” writers as relics—too distant to matter now. What a mistake that was. Bloom’s monumental work shattered that illusion with the force of revelation.

Across more than sixty years of scholarship, Bloom distilled a lifetime of obsessive reading into this sprawling, gnostic-inspired symphony of intellect and imagination. Genius is not merely a survey of a hundred creative minds; it is a reckoning with what it means to be human through the lens of artistic transcendence. His erudition feels almost mythic—he famously read a thousand pages an hour in his prime—and yet what astonishes most is not his speed but his clarity.

Bloom writes with the confidence of someone who has not only read the Western canon but wrestled with it. He does not hide behind jargon or academic hedging; instead, his prose is muscular, declarative, unapologetically personal. He dares to say what many critics will not: that genius exists, that it matters, and that it can be recognized through originality, influence, and that ineffable “spark” that no theory can quite explain.

The structure of the book—one hundred portraits of genius—reads almost like scripture for the literary imagination. His single page on Homer’s “peculiar genius” feels as thrilling as his dazzling defense of Milton’s blinding creativity. There are equally luminous passages on the Koran, on Shakespeare, on Kafka, and on the modern poets Bloom knew almost by heart. His affection for the twentieth century’s visionaries—Yeats, Stevens, Woolf, Proust—reminds us that genius is not confined to the past.

Reading Genius in the aftermath of 9/11, when attention itself seemed fractured, Bloom recognized the urgency of deep reading as an act of spiritual endurance. He makes the case, through his mosaic of minds, that literature is the last temple where the soul still meets itself.

For anyone who has ever loved books but feared the “classics,” Genius is both invitation and initiation—a reminder that the great works are not remote monuments but living presences waiting to speak.