For For readers interested in faith and the arts, beauty and suffering; four lectures for a university audience, not a beginner's book on prayer.
Should I read this?
For the general reader
3 of 5worth your time
For the researcher
4 of 5important
Difficulty
2 of 5moderate
Four 1982 lectures on meaning, beauty and ugliness, the last drawing on his wartime experience.
How it proceeds
Philosophic4 of 5
Scriptural1 of 5
Experiential4 of 5
Sociological2 of 5
Historical1 of 5
Independent intensities, 0–5 — what the work is made of, not how good it is.
The four T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures Bloom gave at the University of Kent, Canterbury, in November 1982, published by Darton, Longman and Todd in 2023, edited with footnotes by James Heywood and with a foreword by Rowan Williams. The lectures take up meaning, beauty (across two lectures) and ugliness. Reviewers singled out the last, on ugliness, in which he drew on his wartime experience and his work with survivors of the concentration camps.
