In this text, Harold Bloom dares to define genius. He ranges across 2500 years, from the 5th century BC through to the year 2002, and touches on all the principal cultures both east and west The book is divided into three sections: youth, the middle years and the later years. This is because Bloom is concerned to show how the wisest of men and women throughout the ages can help us cope with the problems that beset us on our paths through life. Here are the patterns, dilemmas, fulfilments and renunciations we must all experience - how have characters from Achilles, through Hamlet on to Tolstoy's Natasha dealt with mourning, and what are the most psychologically useful reflections that major writers have made upon it? What can Dante teach us about our own love affairs?;Religious founders, mystics, writers, scientists, from Confucius, Jesus, Zoroaster to Isaak Babel, Sappho, Homer and Beckett - Harold Bloom extracts the wisdom from this panoply of human knowledge and also asks: what possibilties are there for fresh genius in an age of information overload?; This book is a passionate defence of genius against its past and current detractors, from socio-biologists to historicists and th