Harold Bloom
Encyclopedia
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor
of Humanities
at Yale University
. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic
poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary critic. Bloom is a 1985 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.
and lived in the South Bronx
at 1410 Grand Concourse
. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household and learned Yiddish and literary Hebrew before learning English.
Bloom has frequently recounted that his attachment to poetry began when, at the age of ten, he discovered Hart Crane
's book White Buildings at the Fordham Library in the Bronx. "Together with William Blake (an influence upon him)," Bloom would write, "Hart Crane was my first love among the great poets, and like Blake he gave me a lifelong addiction to high poetry." He also found and read the Poems and Prophecies of William Blake
. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary
there for the first time," he said many years later. "I remember being so touched by the enormous availability of large and complex dictionaries and concordance
s. I remember ransacking them." Bloom says he knew "by age eleven or twelve that all I really liked to do was read poetry and discuss it."
Bloom entered Cornell University
in 1947 on scholarship (as one of 65 people in the Bronx that year to win a scholarship from the State Department of Education). At Cornell he found a mentor in M. H. Abrams
, a leading scholar of Romanticism
and the founding and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature
. He earned a B.A. in 1952, and spent a year at Pembroke College, Cambridge
, in 1953-4. He then went to Yale University
, receiving his Ph.D. in 1955 and winning the John Addison Porter
Prize the following year, and has worked as a member of the Yale faculty ever since. In 1959, he married Jeanne Gould; they have two sons, Daniel Jacob and David Moses.
as his nearest precursor. He told Imre Salusinszky
in 1986: "In terms of my own theorizations... the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry
a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. Kenneth Burke
, who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye." However, he also admits an indebtedness, especially in his later period, to earlier critics such as William Hazlitt
, Ralph Waldo Emerson
, Walter Pater
, A. C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson
, whom he acknowledges in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him".
Bloom began his career by defending the reputations of the High Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century against neo-Christian
critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot
, who became a recurring intellectual foil. He had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of Shelley
. After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Emerson, Sigmund Freud
, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism
, Kabbalah
, and Hermeticism
. He would later come to describe himself to interviewer D. Leybman in the Paris Review
as a "Jewish gnostic," explaining "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. 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." Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write. The first of these books, Yeats, a magisterial examination of the poet
, challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the [Freudian] anxiety-principle." A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say. The poet becomes disappointed because he "cannot be Adam
early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."
In order to evade this psychological obstacle, the new poet must convince himself that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that he may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poet's love for his heroes turns into antagonism towards them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." The book that followed Yeats, The Anxiety of Influence
, which Bloom had started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of Walter Jackson Bate
's The Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors in systematic psychoanalytic form. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which a poet broke free from his precursors to achieve his own poetic vision. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets" who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets" who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios," through which each strong poet passes in the course of his career. A Map of Misreading picked up where The Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism attempted to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the Lurianic Kabbalah, as explicated by scholar Gershom Scholem
, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his 'influence' books. He capped off this period of intense creativity with another monograph, a full-length study of Wallace Stevens
, with whom he identified more than any other poet at this stage of his career, as he told an interviewer in the early 1980s.
Bloom's fascination with the fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus
by David Lindsay
led him to take a brief break from criticism in order to compose a sequel to Lindsay's novel. This novel, The Flight to Lucifer
, remains Bloom's only work of fiction. Though reviews were very positive, he soon disowned this book. As he himself admitted, the author's self-conscious theoretical interest in the nature of fantasy literature weighed it down too heavily. He has said that he would remove every copy of the book from every library if he could.
) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work. They further envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israel
ite kings David
and Solomon — a piece of speculation which drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations didn't go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the Biblical Bathsheba
.
In The American Religion, Bloom surveyed the major varieties of Protestant and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States
and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most shared more in common with gnosticism
than with historical Christianity
. The exception was the Jehovah's Witnesses
, whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that the Mormon
and Pentecostal strains of American Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades. In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he revisits some of the territory he covered in The Book of J in discussing the significance of Yahweh and Jesus of Nazareth as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism.
From 1988 to 2004, Bloom served as Berg Professor of English at New York University
while maintaining his Sterling Professorship at Yale and continuing to teach there. In 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College
, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia that focuses on primary texts.
In 1994, Bloom published The Western Canon, a survey of the major literary works of Europe
and the Americas
since the 14th century, focusing on 26 works he considered sublime and representative of their nations and of the Western canon
. Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, the major concern of the volume is reclaiming literature from those he refers to as the "School of resentment
", the mostly academic critics who espouse a social purpose in reading. Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the "forces of resentments'" goal of improvement of one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet
would tell us something about feminism and Marxism, he says, but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.
In addition to the amount of influence one writer has had on later writers, Bloom introduces the concept of "canonical strangeness" as a benchmark of a literary work's merit. The Western Canon also included a list — which aroused more widespread interest than anything else in the volume — of all the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or (among more recent works) candidates for that status. Bloom has said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he does not stand by it. The notoriety surrounding The Western Canon turned Bloom into something of a celebrity.
As of November 2011, he was working on a play called "To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman".
, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones, as well as his other influences, Ovid
and Chaucer.
In his 1998 survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces." Written as a companion to the general reader and theatergoer, Bloom declares that bardolatry
"ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is." He also contends in the work (as in the title) that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our changes. The two paragons of his theory are Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV
and Hamlet
, whom Bloom sees as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Throughout Shakespeare, characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other; this has been decried by numerous contemporary academics and critics as hearkening back to the out of fashion character criticism of A.C. Bradley and others, who happen to gather explicit praise in the book. As in The Western Canon, Bloom cheerfully attacks what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and instead balkanizing
the study of literature through various multicultural and historicist
departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaims him as the only multicultural
author, and rather than the "social energies" historicists ascribe Shakespeare's authorship to, Bloom pronounces his modern academic foes — and indeed, all of society — to be "a parody of Shakespearian energies."
as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.
Observers often identified Bloom with deconstruction
in the past, but he himself never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with the deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology
.... There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do."
Bloom's association with the Western canon
has provoked a substantial interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett
. He's certainly the most authentic."
After Beckett's death in 1989, Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon.
Concerning British writers: "Geoffrey Hill
is the strongest British poet now active", and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Iris Murdoch
's eminence". Since Murdoch's death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as Peter Ackroyd
, Will Self
, John Banville
, and A. S. Byatt
.
In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named the late Portuguese
writer and Nobel Prize
winner José Saramago
as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today", and as "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".
Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 that "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise". He claimed that "they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works," and he identified them as Thomas Pynchon
, Philip Roth
, Cormac McCarthy
and Don DeLillo
. He named their strongest works as, respectively, Gravity's Rainbow
and Mason & Dixon
; American Pastoral
and Sabbath's Theater
; Blood Meridian; and Underworld
. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley
as these writers' equal, reserving particular praise for his novel Little, Big
.
In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren
, James Merrill
, John Ashbery
, and Elizabeth Bishop
as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole
as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian
poet Anne Carson
, particularly her verse novel
Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists Jay Wright
as one of only a handful of major living poets.
Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon (1987) features his canon of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner
sees Bloom as an important influence on his work; his play Angels in America
is the last work listed in the appendices of The Western Canon.
, Maya Angelou
, Stephen King
, and J. K. Rowling
. In the pages of the Paris Review
, he criticized the populist
-leaning poetry slam, saying, "It is the death of art." When Doris Lessing
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
, he bemoaned the "pure political correctness
" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction
."
In a February 2004 article in New York Magazine, "The Silent Treatment," Naomi Wolf
accused Bloom, her former professor, of having "sexually encroached" on her when she was a Yale undergraduate, by touching her thigh. Although she acknowledged that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, she claimed to have harbored this secret for 21 years. Bloom denied the accusations.
Sterling Professor
A Sterling Professorship is the highest academic rank at Yale University, awarded to a tenured faculty member considered one of the best in his or her field...
of Humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary critic. Bloom is a 1985 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.
Early life and education
Harold Bloom, son of William and Paula Bloom, was born in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and lived in the South Bronx
South Bronx
The South Bronx is an area of the New York City borough of The Bronx. The neighborhoods of Tremont, University Heights, Highbridge, Morrisania, Soundview, Hunts Point, and Castle Hill are sometimes considered part of the South Bronx....
at 1410 Grand Concourse
Grand Concourse (Bronx)
The Grand Concourse is a major thoroughfare in the borough of the Bronx in New York City...
. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household and learned Yiddish and literary Hebrew before learning English.
Bloom has frequently recounted that his attachment to poetry began when, at the age of ten, he discovered Hart Crane
Hart Crane
-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
's book White Buildings at the Fordham Library in the Bronx. "Together with William Blake (an influence upon him)," Bloom would write, "Hart Crane was my first love among the great poets, and like Blake he gave me a lifelong addiction to high poetry." He also found and read the Poems and Prophecies of William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
there for the first time," he said many years later. "I remember being so touched by the enormous availability of large and complex dictionaries and concordance
Concordance (publishing)
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Vedas, Bible, Qur'an...
s. I remember ransacking them." Bloom says he knew "by age eleven or twelve that all I really liked to do was read poetry and discuss it."
Bloom entered Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
in 1947 on scholarship (as one of 65 people in the Bronx that year to win a scholarship from the State Department of Education). At Cornell he found a mentor in M. H. Abrams
M. H. Abrams
Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S...
, a leading scholar of Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
and the founding and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Norton Anthology of English Literature
The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. It has gone through eight editions since its inception in 1962; it is the publisher's best-selling anthology, with some eight million copies in print. The influential critic...
. He earned a B.A. in 1952, and spent a year at Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college has over seven hundred students and fellows, and is the third oldest college of the university. Physically, it is one of the university's larger colleges, with buildings from almost every century since its...
, in 1953-4. He then went to Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, receiving his Ph.D. in 1955 and winning the John Addison Porter
John Addison Porter
John Addison Porter was an American Professor of Chemistry. He was born in Catskill, New York and died in New Haven, Connecticut...
Prize the following year, and has worked as a member of the Yale faculty ever since. In 1959, he married Jeanne Gould; they have two sons, Daniel Jacob and David Moses.
Early career
Bloom credits Northrop FryeNorthrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
as his nearest precursor. He told Imre Salusinszky
Imre Salusinszky
Imre Salusinszky in an Australian journalist and English literature academic with a strong literary interest in Northrop Frye, a Canadian poet.-Background and career:...
in 1986: "In terms of my own theorizations... the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry
Fearful Symmetry (Frye)
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the very first...
a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.-Personal history:...
, who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye." However, he also admits an indebtedness, especially in his later period, to earlier critics such as William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is...
, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, A. C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
, whom he acknowledges in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him".
Bloom began his career by defending the reputations of the High Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century against neo-Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, who became a recurring intellectual foil. He had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
. After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Emerson, Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
, Kabbalah
Kabbalah
Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...
, and Hermeticism
Hermeticism
Hermeticism or the Western Hermetic Tradition is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus...
. He would later come to describe himself to interviewer D. Leybman in the Paris Review
Paris Review
The Paris Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S...
as a "Jewish gnostic," explaining "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. 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." Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write. The first of these books, Yeats, a magisterial examination of the poet
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
, challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the [Freudian] anxiety-principle." A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say. The poet becomes disappointed because he "cannot be Adam
Adam
Adam is a figure in the Book of Genesis. According to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions, he is the first human. In the Genesis creation narratives, he was created by Yahweh-Elohim , and the first woman, Eve was formed from his rib...
early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."
In order to evade this psychological obstacle, the new poet must convince himself that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that he may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poet's love for his heroes turns into antagonism towards them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." The book that followed Yeats, The Anxiety of Influence
The Anxiety of Influence
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is a book by Harold Bloom, published in 1973. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism....
, which Bloom had started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of Walter Jackson Bate
Walter Jackson Bate
Walter Jackson Bate was an American literary critic and biographer. He was born in Mankato, Minnesota.He is known for two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, of John Keats and Samuel Johnson...
's The Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors in systematic psychoanalytic form. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which a poet broke free from his precursors to achieve his own poetic vision. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets" who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets" who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios," through which each strong poet passes in the course of his career. A Map of Misreading picked up where The Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism attempted to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the Lurianic Kabbalah, as explicated by scholar Gershom Scholem
Gershom Scholem
Gerhard Scholem who, after his immigration from Germany to Palestine, changed his name to Gershom Scholem , was a German-born Israeli Jewish philosopher and historian, born and raised in Germany...
, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his 'influence' books. He capped off this period of intense creativity with another monograph, a full-length study of Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
, with whom he identified more than any other poet at this stage of his career, as he told an interviewer in the early 1980s.
Bloom's fascination with the fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus
A Voyage to Arcturus
A Voyage to Arcturus is a novel by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the...
by David Lindsay
David Lindsay (novelist)
David Lindsay was a Scottish author now most famous for the philosophical science fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus .-Biography:...
led him to take a brief break from criticism in order to compose a sequel to Lindsay's novel. This novel, The Flight to Lucifer
The Flight to Lucifer
The Flight to Lucifer is the only novel by the American literary critic Harold Bloom . Published during 1979, it was composed as a sequel to the David Lindsay novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which supplied the concept of a voyage through space to a distant planet created by a demiurge, and a few other...
, remains Bloom's only work of fiction. Though reviews were very positive, he soon disowned this book. As he himself admitted, the author's self-conscious theoretical interest in the nature of fantasy literature weighed it down too heavily. He has said that he would remove every copy of the book from every library if he could.
Later career
Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, and he has written little since that does not invoke his ideas about influence. Acknowledging that his early output often tends toward the abstruse, he has turned to more accessible criticism aimed at a general readership in his later work, beginning with The Book of J (for which he wrote the introduction and commentary) in 1990. In The Book of J, he and David Rosenberg (who translated the Biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the bible (see documentary hypothesisDocumentary hypothesis
The documentary hypothesis , holds that the Pentateuch was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors...
) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work. They further envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
ite kings David
David
David was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, an ancestor of Jesus Christ through both Saint Joseph and Mary...
and Solomon — a piece of speculation which drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations didn't go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the Biblical Bathsheba
Bathsheba
According to the Hebrew Bible, Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah the Hittite and later of David, king of the United Kingdom of Israel and Judah. She is most known for the Bible story in which King David seduced her....
.
In The American Religion, Bloom surveyed the major varieties of Protestant and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most shared more in common with gnosticism
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
than with historical Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
. The exception was the Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The religion reports worldwide membership of over 7 million adherents involved in evangelism, convention attendance of over 12 million, and annual...
, whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that the Mormon
Mormon
The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...
and Pentecostal strains of American Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades. In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he revisits some of the territory he covered in The Book of J in discussing the significance of Yahweh and Jesus of Nazareth as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism.
From 1988 to 2004, Bloom served as Berg Professor of English at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
while maintaining his Sterling Professorship at Yale and continuing to teach there. In 2010 he became a founding patron of Ralston College
Ralston College
Ralston College is a liberal arts college in Savannah, Georgia, United States. It was founded on February 1, 2010 and as of December 2010 is not yet accepting applications for admission. The patrons of Ralston College are Harold Bloom, Hilary Putnam, and Salman Rushdie. The members of the Board...
, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia that focuses on primary texts.
In 1994, Bloom published The Western Canon, a survey of the major literary works of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
since the 14th century, focusing on 26 works he considered sublime and representative of their nations and of the Western canon
Western canon
The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...
. Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, the major concern of the volume is reclaiming literature from those he refers to as the "School of resentment
School of resentment
School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.Broadly, Bloom terms...
", the mostly academic critics who espouse a social purpose in reading. Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the "forces of resentments'" goal of improvement of one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
would tell us something about feminism and Marxism, he says, but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.
In addition to the amount of influence one writer has had on later writers, Bloom introduces the concept of "canonical strangeness" as a benchmark of a literary work's merit. The Western Canon also included a list — which aroused more widespread interest than anything else in the volume — of all the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or (among more recent works) candidates for that status. Bloom has said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he does not stand by it. The notoriety surrounding The Western Canon turned Bloom into something of a celebrity.
As of November 2011, he was working on a play called "To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman".
Work on Shakespeare
Bloom has a deep appreciation for Shakespeare and considers him to be the supreme center of the Western Canon. The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom considered, at the time, barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, adds a long preface that mostly expounds on Shakespeare's agon with his contemporary Christopher MarloweChristopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones, as well as his other influences, Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
and Chaucer.
In his 1998 survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces." Written as a companion to the general reader and theatergoer, Bloom declares that bardolatry
Bardolatry
Bardolatry is a term that refers to the excessive adulation of William Shakespeare, a portmanteau of "bard" and "idolatry." Shakespeare has been known as "the Bard" since the nineteenth century. One who idolizes Shakespeare is known as a Bardolater....
"ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is." He also contends in the work (as in the title) that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our changes. The two paragons of his theory are Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597. It is the second play in Shakespeare's tetralogy dealing with the successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV , and Henry V...
and Hamlet
Prince Hamlet
Prince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and...
, whom Bloom sees as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Throughout Shakespeare, characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other; this has been decried by numerous contemporary academics and critics as hearkening back to the out of fashion character criticism of A.C. Bradley and others, who happen to gather explicit praise in the book. As in The Western Canon, Bloom cheerfully attacks what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and instead balkanizing
Balkanization
Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a geopolitical term, originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other, and it is considered pejorative.The term refers to the...
the study of literature through various multicultural and historicist
New Historicism
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaims him as the only multicultural
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
author, and rather than the "social energies" historicists ascribe Shakespeare's authorship to, Bloom pronounces his modern academic foes — and indeed, all of society — to be "a parody of Shakespearian energies."
Influence
Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literatureWestern literature
Western literature refers to the literature written in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related languages such as Basque, Hungarian, and so forth...
as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings.
Observers often identified Bloom with deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
in the past, but he himself never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with the deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology
Negative theology
Apophatic theology —also known as negative theology or via negativa —is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God...
.... There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do."
Bloom's association with the Western canon
Western canon
The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...
has provoked a substantial interest in his opinion concerning the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. He's certainly the most authentic."
After Beckett's death in 1989, Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon.
Concerning British writers: "Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation...
is the strongest British poet now active", and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious...
's eminence". Since Murdoch's death, Bloom has expressed admiration for novelists such as Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award...
, Will Self
Will Self
William Woodard "Will" Self is an English novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time...
, John Banville
John Banville
John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter.Banville's breakthrough novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award. His eighteenth novel, The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011...
, and A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner...
.
In his 2003 book, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, he named the late Portuguese
Portuguese people
The Portuguese are a nation and ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south-west Europe. Their language is Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion....
writer and Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winner José Saramago
José Saramago
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom has described Saramago as "a...
as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today", and as "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".
Of American novelists, he declared in 2003 that "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise". He claimed that "they write the Style of our Age, each has composed canonical works," and he identified them as Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
, Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...
and Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
. He named their strongest works as, respectively, Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
and Mason & Dixon
Mason & Dixon
Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon published in 1997. It centers on the collaboration of the historical Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in...
; American Pastoral
American Pastoral
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American businessman and former high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s, which in the...
and Sabbath's Theater
Sabbath's Theater
Sabbath's Theater is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It received the National Book Award for fiction in 1995.-Summary and themes:Mickey Sabbath Sabbath's Theater (1995, ISBN 0-679-77259-6) is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey...
; Blood Meridian; and Underworld
Underworld (DeLillo novel)
Underworld is a postmodern novel published in 1997 by Don DeLillo. It was nominated for the National Book Award, was a best-seller, and is one of DeLillo's better-known novels....
. He has also praised fantasy writer John Crowley
John Crowley
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer...
as these writers' equal, reserving particular praise for his novel Little, Big
Little, Big
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament is a modern fantasy novel by John Crowley, published in 1981. It won the World Fantasy Award in 1982.-Plot synopsis:...
.
In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, James Merrill
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
, John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, and Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A.R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he has lately come to identify Henri Cole
Henri Cole
Henri Cole is an award-winning American poet.-Biography:Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to an American father and French mother, and raised in Virginia, United States. His father, a North Carolinian, enlisted in the service after graduating from high school and, while stationed in...
as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He has expressed great admiration for the Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
poet Anne Carson
Anne Carson
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980-1987....
, particularly her verse novel
Verse novel
A verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there will usually be a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a...
Autobiography of Red. Bloom also lists Jay Wright
Jay Wright (poet)
Jay Wright is an African-American poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he currently lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim...
as one of only a handful of major living poets.
Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon (1987) features his canon of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.-Life and career:Kushner was born...
sees Bloom as an important influence on his work; his play Angels in America
Angels in America
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning play in two parts by American playwright Tony Kushner. It has been made into both a television miniseries and an opera by Peter Eötvös.-Characters:...
is the last work listed in the appendices of The Western Canon.
Controversy
In the early 21st century, Bloom has often found himself at the center of literary controversy, leveling attacks on popular writers such as Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...
, Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou is an American author and poet who has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer" by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly...
, Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
, and J. K. Rowling
J. K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling, OBE , better known as J. K. Rowling, is the British author of the Harry Potter fantasy series...
. In the pages of the Paris Review
Paris Review
The Paris Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S...
, he criticized the populist
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
-leaning poetry slam, saying, "It is the death of art." When Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH is a British writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos....
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
, he bemoaned the "pure political correctness
Political correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
."
In a February 2004 article in New York Magazine, "The Silent Treatment," Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf is an American author and political consultant. With the publication of The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokesperson of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement.-Biography:...
accused Bloom, her former professor, of having "sexually encroached" on her when she was a Yale undergraduate, by touching her thigh. Although she acknowledged that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, she claimed to have harbored this secret for 21 years. Bloom denied the accusations.
Books
- Shelley's Mythmaking. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
- The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Rev. and enlarged ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
- Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Anchor Books: New York: Doubleday and Co., 1963.
- The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin.; Edited with introduction. New York: DoubleDay, 1965.
- Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean; edition with introduction. New York: New American Library, 1970.
- Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism.; Edited with introduction. New York: Norton, 1970.
- Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. ISBN 0-19-501603-3
- The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of PoetryThe Anxiety of InfluenceThe Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is a book by Harold Bloom, published in 1973. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical approach to literary criticism....
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; 2d ed., 1997. ISBN 0-19-511221-0 - The Selected Writings of Walter Pater; edition with introduction and notes. New York: New American Library, 1974.
- A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
- Kabbalah and Criticism. New York : Seabury Press, 1975. ISBN 0-8264-0242-9
- The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
- Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
- Figures of Capable Imagination. New York: Seabury Press, 1976.
- Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
- Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Seabury Press, 1980.
- The Flight to Lucifer: Gnostic FantasyThe Flight to LuciferThe Flight to Lucifer is the only novel by the American literary critic Harold Bloom . Published during 1979, it was composed as a sequel to the David Lindsay novel A Voyage to Arcturus, which supplied the concept of a voyage through space to a distant planet created by a demiurge, and a few other...
. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. ISBN 0-394-74323-7 - Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York : Oxford University Press, 1982.
- The Breaking of the Vessels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
- Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
- The Book of J: Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg; Interpreted by Harold Bloom. New York: Grove Press, 1990 ISBN 0-8021-4191-9
- The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation; Touchstone Books; ISBN 0-671-86737-7 (1992; August 1993)
- The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
- Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
- Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: 1998. ISBN 1-57322-751-X
- How to Read and Why. New York: 2000. ISBN 0-684-85906-8
- Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages. New York: 2001.
- El futur de la imaginació (The Future of the Imagination). Barcelona: Anagrama / Empúries, 2002. ISBN 84-7596-927-5
- Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: 2003. ISBN 0-446-52717-3
- Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. New York: 2003.
- The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost. New York: 2004. ISBN 0-06-054041-9
- Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? New York: 2004. ISBN 1-57322-284-4
- Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine 2005. ISBN 1-57322-322-0
- American Religious Poems: An Anthology By Harold Bloom 2006. ISBN 1-931082-74-X
- Fallen Angels, illustrated by Mark Podwal. Yale University Press, 2007 ISBN 0300123485
- Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems Harper, 2010.
- Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life Yale University Press, 2011.
- The King James Bible: A Literary Appreciation Yale University Press, 2011.
Articles
- On Extended Wings; Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. By Helen Hennessy Vendler, (review), New York Times, October 5, 1969.
- Poets' meeting in the heyday of their youth; A Single Summer With Lord Byron, New York Times, February 15, 1970.
- An angel's spirit in a decaying (and active) body, New York Times, November 22, 1970.
- The Use of Poetry, New York Times, November 12, 1975.
- Northrop Frye exalting the designs of romance; The Secular Scripture, New York Times, April 18, 1976.
- On Solitude in America, New York Times, August 4, 1977.
- The Critic/Poet, New York Times, February 5, 1978.
- A Fusion of Traditions; Rosenberg, New York Times, July 22, 1979.
- Straight Forth Out of Self, New York Times, June 22, 1980.
- The Heavy Burden of the Past; Poets, New York Times, January 4, 1981.
- The Pictures of the Poet; The Painting and Drawings of William Blake, By Martin Butlin. Vol. I, Text. Vol. II, Plates, (Review) New York Times, January 3, 1982.
- A Novelist's Bible; The Story of the Stories, The Chosen People and Its God. By Dan Jacobson, (Review) New York Times, October 17, 1982.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer's Jeremiad; The Penitent, By Isaac Bashevis Singer, (Review) New York Times, September 25, 1983.
- Domestic Derangements; A Late Divorce, By A. B. Yehoshua Translated by Hillel Halkin, (Review) New York Times, February 19, 1984.
- War Within the Walls; In the Freud Archives, By Janet Malcolm, (Review) New York Times, May 27, 1984.
- His Long Ordeal by Laughter; Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy and Epilogue. By Philip Roth, (Review) New York Times, May 19, 1985.
- A Comedy of Worldly Salvation; The Good Apprentice, By Iris Murdoch, (Review) New York Times, January 12, 1986.
- Freud, the Greatest Modern Writer (Review) New York Times, March 23, 1986.
- Passionate Beholder of America in Trouble; Look Homeward, A Life of Thomas Wolfe. By David Herbert Donald, (Review) New York Times, February 8, 1987.
- The Book of the Father; The Messiah of Stockholm, By Cynthia Ozick, (Review) New York Times, March 22, 1987.
- Still Haunted by Covenant; The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, Edited by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse and Khone Shmeruk; American Yiddish Poetry, A Bilingual Anthology. Edited by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav; Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, Edited and translated by Richard J. Fein, (Reviews) New York Times, January 31, 1988.
- New Heyday of Gnostic Heresies, New York Times, April 26, 1992.
- A Jew Among the Cossacks; The first English translation of Isaac Babel's journal about his service with the Russian cavalry. 1920 Diary, By Isaac Babel, (Review) New York Times, June 4, 1995.
- Kaddish; By Leon Wieseltier, (Review) New York Times, October 4, 1998.
- View; On First Looking Into Gates's Crichton, New York Times, June 4, 2000.
- What Ho, Malvolio!'; The election, as Shakespeare might have seen it, New York Times, December 6, 2000.
- Macbush, (play) Vanity Fair, April, 2004.
- "The Lost Jewish Culture" The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
54/11 (28 June 2007) : 44-47 [reviews The Dreams of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Peter ColePeter ColePeter Cole is an American Jewish poet who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.-Early life:Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981.-Literary career:... - "The Glories of Yiddish" The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
55/17 (6 November 2008) [reviews History of the Yiddish Language, by Max WeinreichMax WeinreichMax Weinreich was a linguist, specializing in the Yiddish language, and the father of the linguist Uriel Weinreich, who edited the Modern Yiddish-English English-Yiddish Dictionary.- Biography :Max Weinreich began his studies in a German school in Kuldiga,...
, edited by Paul Glasser, translated from the Yiddish by Shlomo Noble with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman] - "Yahweh Meets R. Crumb", The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, 56/19 (3 December 2009) [reviews The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. CrumbRobert CrumbRobert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
] - "Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?", New York Times Sunday Review, 12 November 2011.
Further reading
- Allen, Graham, Harold Bloom: Poetics of Conflict, Harvester Wheatsheaf (New York, NY), 1994.
- Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 24, Gale (Detroit), 1983.
- De Bolla, Peter, Harold Bloom: Toward Historical Rhetorics, Routledge (New York, NY), 1988.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 67: Modern American Critics since 1955, Gale, 1988.
- Fite, David, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst), 1985.
- Moynihan, Robert, A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man, Archon, 1986.
- Saurberg, Lars Ole, Versions of the Past—Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.
- Scherr, Barry J., D. H. Lawrence's Response to PlatoPlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
: A Bloomian Interpretation, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1995. - Sellars, Roy (ed.), and Graham Allen (ed.). The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom. Cambridge: Salt, 2007. More info.
- Interview with Bloom on NPR, regarding his book Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
- Interview with Bloom on The NewsHour with Jim LehrerJim LehrerJames Charles "Jim" Lehrer is an American journalist and the executive editor and former news anchor for PBS NewsHour on PBS, known for his role as a frequent debate moderator during elections...
, regarding his book How to Read and Why (2000). - God and Harold at Yale, an essay from the Claremont Review on Bloom and his book, "Jesus and Yahweh"
- Breakfast with Brontosaurus, an October 26, 2004 interview by Ieva Lesinska.
- Radio interview with Christopher Lydon, Harvard Law Weblogs, September 3, 2003.
- Interview with Jennie Rothenberg, The Atlantic, July 16, 2003.
- The sage of Concord, a May 24, 2003 Guardian UnlimitedGuardian Unlimitedguardian.co.uk, formerly known as Guardian Unlimited, is a British website owned by the Guardian Media Group. Georgina Henry is the editor...
article on Ralph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo EmersonRalph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
by Bloom. - Excerpts from various Bloom interviews, The Stanford Presidential Lecture Series.
- Dumbing down American readers, Harold Bloom, Boston Globe, September 24, 2003.
- "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes". Harold Bloom, Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2000. His famous criticism of the Harry PotterHarry PotterHarry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...
series. - Out of Panic, Self-Reliance. The New York Times, Opinion on R.W. Emerson. October 12, 2008.
- List of Bloom's contributions to The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
External links
at Yale UniversityYale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
- Harold Bloom at Stanford Presidential Lectures
- "Introduction to Theory of Literature Lecture 14". Open Yale lectures on the influence of Bloom and Eliot.