Quote 256 of 495

[Harold] Bloom is famous for his memory and his reading speed. He has
memorized a large proportion of canonical poetry written in English;
once, when drunk, as an undergraduate at Cornell, he recited Hart
Crane's long poem "The Bridge" backward, word by word. He claims that
in his youth he read a thousand pages an hour.
		-- "The Prophet of Decline," by Larissa Maqfarquhar,
		   The New Yorker, September 30, 2002, p. 87.

Tags: poetry memory bridge undergraduate poem decline proportion cornell prophet newyorker larissa wordbyword readingspeed haroldbloom hartcrane