Station33

The Western Canon

Harold Bloom

List taken from Bloom's 1994 book, The Western Canon. All comments are his. The formatting is all over the place, but I did what I could to clean it up.


A. The Theocratic Age

Here, as in the following lists, I suggest translations wherever I have derived particular pleasure and insight from those now readily available. There are many valuable works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that are not here, but the common reader is unlikely to have time to read them. As history lengthens, the older canon necessarily narrows. Since the literary canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical, and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would think that, of all the books in this first list, once the reader is conversant with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial work is the Koran. Whether for its aesthetic and spiritual power or the influence it will have upon all of our futures, ignorance of the Koran is foolish and increasingly dangerous.

I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary texts, because of their influence on the Western Canon. The immense wealth of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available to us.

-- THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST --
-- ANCIENT INDIA (SANSKRIT) --
-- THE ANCIENT GREEKS --
-- HELLENISTIC GREEKS --
-- THE ROMANS --
-- THE MIDDLE AGES: LATIN, ARABIC, AND THE VERNACULAR BEFORE DANTE --

B. The Aristocratic Age

It is a span of five hundred years from Dante’s Divine Comedy through Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, an era that gives us a huge body of reading in five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted. We begin also to encounter the phenomenon of “period pieces,” a sorrow that expands in the Democratic Age and threatens to choke us in our own century. Writers much esteemed in their own time and country sometimes survive in other times and nations, yet often shrink into once-fashionable fetishes. I behold at least several scores of these in our contemporary literary scene, but it is sufficient to name them by omission, and I will address this matter more fully in the introductory note to my final list.

-- ITALY --
-- PORTUGAL --
-- SPAIN --
-- ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND --
-- FRANCE --
-- GERMANY --
Erasmus, a Dutchman living in Switzerland and Germany, while writing in Latin, is placed here arbitrarily, but also as an influence on the Lutheran Reformation.

C. The Democratic Age

I have located Vico’s Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength of both Russian and American literature begins. I have resisted the backward reach of the current canonical crusades, which attempt to elevate a number of sadly inadequate women writers of the nineteenth century, as well as some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans. Expanding the Canon, as I have said more than once in this book, tends to drive out the better writers, sometimes even the best, because pragmatically none of us (whoever we are) ever had time to read absolutely everything, no matter how great our lust for reading. And for most of us, the harried young in particular, inadequate authors will consume the energies that would be better invested in stronger writers. Nearly everything that has been revived or discovered by Feminist and African-American literary scholars falls all too precisely into the category of “period pieces,” as imaginatively dated now as they were already enfeebled when they first came into existence.

-- ITALY --
-- SPAIN AND PORTUGAL --
-- FRANCE --
-- SCANDINAVIA --
-- GREAT BRITAIN --
-- GERMANY --
-- RUSSIA --
-- THE UNITED STATES --

D. The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy

I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug’s game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical; literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any sort. What I have omitted seem to me fated to become period pieces: even their “multiculturalist” supporters will turn against them in another two generations or so, in order to clear space for better writings. What is here doubtless reflects some accidents of my personal taste, but by no means wholly represents my idiosyncratic inclinations. Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin are here because I seem to be the only critic alive who regards them as overesteemed, and so I am probably wrong and must assume that I am blinded by extra-aesthetic considerations, which I abhor and try to avoid. I would not be surprised, however, could I return from the dead half a century hence, to discover that Lowell and Larkin are period pieces, as are many whom I have excluded. But critics do not make canons, any more than resentful networks can create them, and it may be that poets to come will confirm Lowell and Larkin as canonical by finding them to be inescapable influences.

-- ITALY --
-- SPAIN --
-- CATALONIA --
-- PORTUGAL --
-- FRANCE --
-- GREAT BRITAIN and IRELAND --
-- GERMANY --
-- RUSSIA --
-- SCANDINAVIA --
-- SERBO-CROAT --
-- CZECH --
-- POLISH --
-- HUNGARIAN --
-- MODERN GREEK --
-- YIDDISH --
-- HEBREW --
-- ARABIC --
-- LATIN AMERICA --
-- THE WEST INDIES --
-- AFRICA --
-- INDIA (in English) --
-- CANADA --
-- AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND --
-- THE UNITED STATES --