Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom was the most influential and most controversial literary critic of the late twentieth century — a man of prodigious learning, volcanic personality, and inexhaustible productivity who read and wrote about literature with a passion and a conviction that had no parallel in the academic world. His theory of the “anxiety of influence” — the idea that strong poets create their work by misreading and struggling against the work of their predecessors — transformed literary criticism in the 1970s. His defence of the Western literary canon against what he called the “School of Resentment” — feminist, Marxist, New Historicist, and deconstructionist critics who, in Bloom’s view, valued literature for its political content rather than its aesthetic power — made him a public figure and a lightning rod for the culture wars of the 1990s. And his claim that Shakespeare “invented the human” — that the depth of consciousness we take for granted in modern life was largely created by Shakespeare’s dramatic characters — was the most audacious argument ever made by a literary critic.

The Bronx and Yale

Harold Bloom was born in the Bronx in 1930, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. He grew up speaking Yiddish and taught himself English by reading poetry — Blake, Shelley, Hart Crane — with an intensity that bordered on possession. He attended Cornell and then Yale, where he wrote his dissertation on Shelley and remained for the rest of his career, eventually holding the Sterling Professorship of the Humanities.

His early works — Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963) — established him as the foremost critic of the English Romantic poets, a reader of extraordinary sensitivity and erudition who treated poetry as a form of knowledge rather than an object of formal analysis.

The Anxiety of Influence

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973) was Bloom’s most original and most influential work. The book argued that strong poets — major poets, poets who matter — do not simply learn from their predecessors; they struggle against them, misread them, and create their own work through a series of “revisionary ratios” (clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades) that transform the precursor’s work into something new.

The theory was Freudian in structure (the precursor as father, the ephebe as anxious son) and Romantic in sympathies (the strong poet as heroic individual), and it was deeply controversial. Critics accused Bloom of reducing literary history to a Oedipal psychodrama and of ignoring the social, political, and material conditions of literary production. But the theory’s influence was enormous, and “anxiety of influence” entered the critical vocabulary permanently.

The Canon Wars

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994) was Bloom’s most popular and most pugnacious work — a defence of the traditional literary canon (Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce) against the “School of Resentment” that Bloom saw as having taken over the humanities departments of American universities. Bloom argued that the canon was not a conspiracy of dead white males but a living tradition of works whose aesthetic power — their strangeness, their cognitive strength, their ability to enlarge human consciousness — was the only valid criterion for inclusion.

The book was a bestseller and a cultural event. It was praised by conservatives as a defence of civilisation and attacked by progressives as a reactionary nostalgia trip. Bloom himself rejected both readings: he insisted that his position was aesthetic, not political, and that the canon was threatened not by feminism or multiculturalism but by the reduction of literature to ideology.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) was Bloom’s most ambitious work — a reading of all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays organised around the argument that Shakespeare, more than any other writer, invented the modern human personality. Falstaff, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Iago — these characters, Bloom argued, taught subsequent humanity how to think about itself, and the depth of self-consciousness that we consider natural is in fact a literary achievement.

The Late Bloom and the Problem of Excess

Bloom’s later career was marked by an almost manic productivity that some admirers found troubling. He wrote introductions to hundreds of volumes in the Chelsea House series, published book after book on religion, genius, and the human condition (The American Religion, 1992; Omens of Millennium, 1996; Genius, 2002; Jesus and Yahweh, 2005), and increasingly presented himself not as a literary critic but as a secular prophet — a role that suited his temperament but strained his authority. His prose, always exuberant, became in the late work sometimes self-parodic, and the accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in 2004 (detailed in Naomi Wolf’s account of an incident from the 1980s) complicated his public image without ending his career.

Yet the core achievement remains formidable. Bloom was the last critic who could command a general audience, the last who could make literary criticism matter to people outside the academy. His readings of Shakespeare, Whitman, Stevens, and Hart Crane are among the finest in the language, and The Anxiety of Influence — for all its excesses — articulated a truth about the creative process that every serious writer recognises. He belonged to the great tradition of critic-as-writer: Johnson, Hazlitt, Ruskin, Pater — men for whom criticism was itself a form of literature, not a science.

Collecting Bloom

The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford University Press, 1973) in first edition is the primary scholarly target. The Western Canon (Harcourt Brace, 1994) is the most widely collected single volume. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (Riverhead, 1998) is also sought. Bloom’s prodigious output — over forty books, hundreds of introductions — means that material is abundant, but signed first editions of the major works are increasingly valued.