Harold Bloom
Rarely does a literary critic display the kind of genius and creativity characteristic of the famous authors he analyzes.
Harold Bloom, who died at the age of 89 on Oct. 14, was such a critic. Over a long, distinguished, and varied career, he reinvented himself several times. Starting out as our premiere exponent of English Romanticism, at mid-career he dazzled the world as the theorist of what he called “the anxiety of influence” among poets. He spent the last decades of his life as the embattled champion of the Western canon, celebrating true artistic greatness in the face of the mean-spirited attacks on traditional authors that had increasingly come to dominate literary criticism in what Bloom dubbed the “School of Resentment.” A prolific author, he was also an inspiring teacher, mostly at Yale University. The number and quality of his students are testimony to the profound impact Bloom had on literary scholarship.
In view of how far Bloom traveled in the course of his long career, many have forgotten that he started out in a fairly delimited and conventional academic field, the study of English Romantic poetry. His first book was a monograph on Percy Shelley and his second was one on William Blake. But Bloom’s approach to these Romantic poets was far from conventional. Although his originality was not fully evident at the time, in retrospect we can see that for the young Bloom, the key to Romantic poetry was, strange as it may sound, Jewish mysticism and Gnosticism. In the WASPy world of literary criticism in the 1950s and '60s, Bloom used the Jewish thinker Martin Buber as his way of entering into the world of Shelley’s mythmaking, and if Bloom penetrated the mysteries of Blake’s universe, it was the Jewish Kabbalah that was his guide. Steeped in the Old Testament, Bloom recognized the prophetic character of Shelley’s poetry and, above all, Blake’s. While most New Critics at the time were approaching the Romantic poets in purely formalist terms, Bloom took seriously their notion of the “poet as prophet” and read apocalyptic messages out of their visionary works.
Had Bloom done nothing more than his pioneering studies of the English Romantics, he would still have been one of the great literary critics of his era. His Blake’s Apocalypse (1963) is still the best synoptic book on the poet; it taught us how to read his complex works, grasping the big picture in Blake’s bewildering mythic system, while also explicating the works in minute detail, poem by poem. Bloom understood the Romantics because he was at heart a Romantic himself, seeking, as they did, to find spiritual redemption through poetry. There was always a biblical earnestness to Bloom’s readings of the Romantic poets. Blake’s prophecies became his Torah and, like a Talmudic scholar, he painstakingly commented on the profound questions they raised. Bloom obviously relished the role of serving as the High Priest of a heretic poet — the William Blake who proudly offered the world his “Bible of Hell.”
But Romanticism was not a large enough field for someone with Bloom’s wide-ranging mind. As he moved into studying late 19th-century and modern poetry, particularly in his important book on W. B. Yeats, Bloom uncovered the roots of Victorianism and modernism in Romanticism. He became interested in literary history, but not in the conventional sense of categorizing poets into successive periods or the standard practice of documenting who was influenced by whom. For Bloom, literary history was not a story of linear progress, but rather of a kind of catastrophism. He saw literary history as a site of struggle — an agon between younger poets and their imposing predecessors.
The fruit of his studies in this area was perhaps his most striking and original book, 1973’s The Anxiety of Influence. In the midst of the Theory Boom in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bloom startled the world with his new Theory of Everything in literary criticism. It is difficult to recapture how shocking this book seemed when it came out. Bloom had hitherto distinguished himself by the clarity of his prose, the ease with which he had explained complicated passages in Blake’s poetry. In The Anxiety of Influence, though, we found ourselves confronted with arcane terms such as kenosis, askesis, clinamen, and apophrades.
I was already a great admirer of Bloom at that time, having learned much of what I knew about Romanticism from his books. I confess, however, that I was baffled by what Bloom wrote in The Anxiety of Influence. Despite re-readings, I could barely understand the book. In retrospect, his baroque burst of mystifying terminology seems to have been a mistake; despite his apparent hopes, the details of his theory never really caught on in the literary profession. The less famous sequel to the book, A Map of Misreading (1975), strikes me as a better, and certainly more useful, volume. There the concrete examples Bloom offers of how the anxiety of influence operates make the concept comprehensible.
Before Bloom, literary influence was generally looked upon as a benevolent process, or at least a benign one. Prior poets generously (if only posthumously) provided models for later poets, in effect mentoring them, inspiring them, and teaching them what great poetry is. For Bloom, influence became a darker phenomenon. In Bloom’s scenario, later poets feel overwhelmed and even threatened by their illustrious predecessors. They start writing and suddenly they find the words of earlier poets flooding out onto their pages, infiltrating their poetry and denying them their own voice. Young poets must struggle to carve out a distinctive space for their literary achievement. In Bloom’s terms, the later poets must “misread” their predecessors, surpassing them by correcting them. For example, faced with the grandeur and magniloquence of a celebrated predecessor, a would-be successor might radically simplify his own vocabulary and syntax. Turning his necessity into a virtue, he would make his precursor’s poetry sound overblown and pretentious by comparison and thereby triumph over him.
Or, feeling like a latecomer on the poetic scene, an author might try to outflank his predecessors by seeking out subject matter earlier than theirs. For example, John Milton, daunted by the achievement in the world of epic by his great precursors Homer and Virgil, went back to the moment of creation itself in his Paradise Lost. By pursuing the most originary and hence original of subjects, Milton gave the impression that Greek and Latin poets were paradoxically derivative from him. Milton presents Homer’s fictional story of a god falling from Heaven (Hephaistos in the Iliad) as a distorted version of the biblical tradition’s true account of Lucifer’s fall. He writes of the pagan poets: “Thus they relate, / Erring; for he with this rebellious rout / Fell long before.” Milton may be writing long after Homer and Virgil, but his story antedates theirs. Milton possesses the originary truth; Homer and Virgil had access only to a distant echo of it. Bloom called this strategy “turning a belatedness into an earliness.” As he writes, “The precursors return in Milton, but only at his will, and they return to be corrected.”
Bloom almost single-handedly remade the understanding of influence in literary criticism. There was something monomaniacal about his focus on poetic misreading, and his critics were right to claim that influence is not always the violent Oedipal struggle Bloom claimed it to be. Nevertheless, after reading Bloom on the subject, I could never read poetry the same way again, and I found examples of poetic misreading in work after work. Bloom thus claimed his place among the foremost literary theorists of his day, and for several years in the 1970s, he made common cause with the Theory Movement, joining several of his Yale colleagues at the time — Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman — and the godfather of what was known as the hermeneutical mafia, the French mystagogue Jacques Derrida. But to his credit, Bloom came to recognize a danger in the way that studying Theory was crowding out studying literature itself. He broke with his colleagues and ended up where he belonged — in a movement that had only one member: Harold Bloom.
Bloom’s turn away from the elitism of High Theory was also accompanied by a turn to a broader audience, one outside the academy. Bloom saw that the Great Books of the literary tradition — the so-called Western Canon — were under attack by a motley crew of Marxists, deconstructionists, historicists, feminists, and other critics with a revolutionary bent. Instead of teaching readers how to appreciate the greatness of canonical authors, these critics set out to tear down the reputations of the established masters by accusing them of various forms of prejudice: racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, and so on. In response to the increasing efforts to steer readers to politically correct literature — contemporary efforts to give expression to hitherto marginalized voices — Bloom set himself up as the staunch defender of the traditional giants of English literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and their successors, including the great Romantics.
This crusade drew Bloom out of his original area of expertise, as he surveyed wider and wider realms of literary achievement. Despite being accused of championing a narrow range of canonical authors, Bloom’s vision was actually quite capacious and encompassed authors little-known in American literary circles. By broadening his subject matter, Bloom risked getting out of the range of his scholarly competence, and in his later years, his readings did tend to become more idiosyncratic and sometimes even self-absorbed. But being as brilliant as he was, Bloom continued to offer genuine and unique insights into the masterpieces he discussed. And although his taste also could be idiosyncratic, he often called attention to obscure works that merited greater scrutiny from critics and the reading public as well.
As a result, Bloom worked assiduously to spread the gospel of great literature, battling to restore aesthetic value as a criterion of literary excellence. And his impact was broad. It is very rare for a literary critic to come up with a bestseller, but Bloom wrote several of them, including The Western Canon (1994) and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). As a Shakespeare scholar, I could quarrel with many of Bloom’s claims in the latter book, but I would never question its central thesis — that Shakespeare is the greatest author of all time and the most profound student ever of human nature. Throughout his career, Bloom remained loyal to the Romantic disposition that originally gave him such an affinity with authors such as Blake. This tendency led him to take an overly Romantic approach to Shakespeare and thereby distorted his readings of the plays. It led him, for example, to side unequivocally with Falstaff in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s history plays, thereby missing the importance of political order to the playwright.
One can legitimately criticize the details of Bloom’s ambitious attempt to give an overview of the entire Western canon. Still, one cannot fault the overall mission of his work — to restore interest in and respect for the great works of literature that were and still are disappearing from the reading lists of college courses and also of general readers. Bloom did as much as anyone to counteract this trend and revive interest in our central cultural heritage. In the end, that may well be his greatest achievement and the one for which he will long be remembered.
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