Harold Bloom

• 1. Introduction

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  Harold Bloom was, by the time he died in 2019, probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world. He grew up at 1410 Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a boy in an Orthodox Jewish household where Yiddish was spoken and English came only at the age of six. His father, a garment worker, was born in Odesa. His mother was from near Brest-Litovsk, in what is today Belarus. From those beginnings, Bloom would go on to hold the Sterling Professorship of Humanities at Yale University for more than six decades, publish over fifty books, and edit hundreds of anthologies. His work would be translated into more than forty languages.

  The questions his life raises are worth sitting with. How does a child who gets poor grades at the Bronx High School of Science grow into a figure who, at eighty-nine, is still teaching? What drives a man to spend his career arguing that reading a poem should be a private, solitary pleasure rather than a political act? And what is it about his central theory, the idea that every poet must struggle to escape the shadow of the poets who came before, that made it so divisive, and so enduring?

  The answer begins with a collection of poetry he encountered as a boy, one that, as he later described it, ignited a fascination that would not dim for the rest of his life.

• 2. A Boy and His Poems

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  Hart Crane's Collected Poems was the book that started it all. Bloom encountered it as a child and it set the course of his intellectual life toward poetry and its mysteries. He enrolled in Cornell University, where he studied classics and came under the influence of the literary critic M. H. Abrams, a figure whose work on Romanticism he would later champion. He completed his B.A. in 1951 and his Ph.D. at Yale in 1955.

  Between those two degrees, in 1954-55, he held a Fulbright Scholarship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. When he returned to Yale as a faculty member, he did not fit in quietly. He clashed with the New Critics who dominated the department, including William K. Wimsatt. The friction was real enough that it left a mark in an unusual way: Bloom eventually dedicated The Anxiety of Influence, his most celebrated book, to Wimsatt.

  His earliest books were careful defenses of the High Romantics, poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, against critics whom Bloom believed were reading carelessly or through the distorting lens of neo-Christian assumptions. That first book, Shelley's Myth-making, published by Yale University Press in 1959, began as his doctoral dissertation and charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of Shelley. The tone was combative from the start.

• 3. The Anxiety Theory

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  After a personal crisis in the late 1960s, Bloom turned his attention toward Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. Out of that reading, and out of a book called The Burden of the Past and The English Poet by Walter Jackson Bate, came the idea that would define his reputation.

  Bloom began writing The Anxiety of Influence in 1967. Its central argument was built around what he described as a psychological drama at the heart of all poetry. New poets read earlier poets and are inspired by them, but that admiration curdles into resentment when they realize the poets they love have already said everything they themselves want to say. Bloom gave this predicament a quotable formulation: poets become disappointed because they cannot be Adam early in the morning, because "there have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."

  To escape that trap, a poet must convince himself that his predecessors went wrong somewhere and left open a door. Bloom described the resulting creative struggle as "revisionary strife", arguing that "initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." He divided poets into the strong, who perform what he called strong misreadings of their predecessors, and the weak, who simply repeat.

  Bloom mapped this psychological journey through what he called a sequence of revisionary ratios. A Map of Misreading then extended the system. Kabbalah and Criticism reached toward the Lurianic Kabbalah, as explored by the scholar Gershom Scholem, as an alternate map for the same territory. The influence theory dominated his output through the 1970s and 1980s, and he rarely moved far from it afterward.

• 4. The Western Canon

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  In 1994, Bloom published The Western Canon, and it made him famous beyond academic circles. The book surveyed major literary works of Europe and the Americas from the fourteenth century onward and focused on twenty-six works he considered sublime and representative. Its real provocation was not the list but the argument surrounding it.

  Bloom named the enemy directly: what he called the "School of Resentment", the academic critics who applied feminist, Marxist, and multiculturalist frameworks to literary study. His position was blunt. A feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet, he wrote, would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about Hamlet. The purpose of reading, in his view, was solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight, not social improvement. He called it absurd to think you benefit the insulted and injured by having them read authors of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare.

  He also introduced the concept of canonical strangeness, drawing on the idea of the uncanny, as a measure of literary merit alongside the question of how much influence a writer exerted on later writers. The list appended to the book drew wide public interest, though Bloom later said he composed it at his editor's request, off the top of his head, and did not stand by it.

  That same Shakespeare-centered worldview drove his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in which he analyzed all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays, declaring that twenty-four of them are masterpieces. He argued that Shakespeare invented humanity in the sense of establishing the practice of overhearing oneself, and called bardolatry something that "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is". Sir John Falstaff and Prince Hamlet were his two central exhibits, representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing respectively.

• 5. Religious Territory

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  Starting in 1989 with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, Bloom entered what he called a phase of religious criticism. The Book of J, published in 1990 and written with translator David Rosenberg, proposed that one of the ancient source documents behind the first five books of the Bible was the work of a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon. The speculation drew considerable attention. Bloom later said the book had not gone far enough, and that perhaps he should have identified the author with the biblical Bathsheba.

  In The American Religion, published in 1992, he argued that most American Protestant and post-Protestant faiths had more in common, psychologically, with gnosticism than with historical Christianity. The exception he noted was the Jehovah's Witnesses, whom he regarded as non-Gnostic. He predicted that the Mormon and Pentecostal strains of American Christianity would eventually overtake mainstream Protestant denominations in popularity.

  Bloom described himself in a 2003 interview as a "Jewish Gnostic", though he immediately clarified that he used the word gnostic broadly. He said: "I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all-knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia."

  In a 2005 book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, he returned to the territory of The Book of J, treating Yahweh and Jesus of Nazareth as literary characters and asserting what he saw as the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism. His relationship to religion was never comfortable or settled, which may be why it kept drawing him back.

• 6. Opinions and Controversies

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  Bloom was not a critic who kept his judgments private. In 1975, in Kabbalah and Criticism, he named Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. In 2003 he called the Portuguese novelist José Saramago "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre." Of British writers, he declared Geoffrey Hill the strongest British poet then active, and after Iris Murdoch died, he named Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, John Banville, and A. S. Byatt as novelists worthy of admiration.

  Of American fiction, he singled out Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo in 2003, naming their specific masterpieces: The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason and Dixon for Pynchon; Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral for Roth; Blood Meridian for McCarthy; and Underworld for DeLillo. He also insisted on the importance of John Crowley's novel Little, Big, calling it "a neglected masterpiece" and "the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know."

  The controversies were just as pointed. When Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bloom called it "pure political correctness" and described Lessing's science fiction as fourth-rate, while acknowledging admiration for her earlier work. In The Paris Review he attacked the poetry slam as "the death of art." His early-21st-century criticisms of Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, and David Foster Wallace kept placing him at the center of public argument.

  His reception among scholars was polarized. A 1994 article in the New York Times found that younger critics saw him as an outdated oddity. A 1998 article in the same publication called him one of the most gifted contemporary critics. In an obituary in The Guardian, Kenan Malik argued that Bloom conflated judgment and understanding, separating literary quality from the social and historical context that shapes meaning. James Wood wrote that Bloom, though never without a peculiar charm, had been largely unimportant as a critic in his later years. Bloom's response to Wood was characteristically unguarded: "There's nothing to the man... I don't want to talk about him."

• 7. The Teacher Who Never Stopped

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  Bloom joined the Yale English Department in 1955 and never left. He taught his final class four days before he died on the 14th of October 2019, in a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. He was eighty-nine. He had sworn that he would need to be removed from the classroom "in a great big body bag", and the facts bore that out almost exactly.

  From 1988 to 2004 he also held the Berg Professorship of English at New York University, maintaining both positions simultaneously. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. In 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, a new institution built around primary texts. He addressed students and friends of both sexes as "my dear."

  He had open heart surgery in 2002 and broke his back after a fall in 2008. Neither stopped him. In July 2011, after completing The Anatomy of Influence and finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock, he was simultaneously at work on three further projects, including a literary memoir that was eventually published as Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism in 2019, the last book he published during his lifetime.

  He married Jeanne Gould in 1958. They had two children. In a 2005 interview, Jeanne said they were both atheists. Bloom rejected the label with a characteristic turn: "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist." He was the last of his siblings to die. Among his stated influences in his late phase were the earlier critics William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Pater, A. C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson, whom he described in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him."