Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930, Bronx, New York, U.S.—died October 14, 2019, New Haven, Connecticut) was an American literary critic known for his innovative interpretations of literary history and of the creation of literature.

Bloom’s first language was Yiddish, and he also learned Hebrew before English. He attended Cornell (B.A., 1951) and Yale (Ph.D., 1955) universities and began teaching at Yale in 1955; he also taught at New York University from 1988 to 2004. As a young man, he was much influenced by Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), a study of William Blake, and he later stated that he considered Frye “certainly the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English language” since Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

Bloom’s own early books, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961, rev. and enlarged ed., 1971), and The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (1971), were creative studies of the Romantic poets and their work, then out of fashion. He examined the Romantic tradition from its beginnings in the 18th century to its influence on such late 20th-century poets as A.R. Ammons and Allen Ginsberg, quickly making a name for himself with his individual and challenging views.

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With the publication of Yeats (1970), Bloom began to extend his critical theory, and in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), he systematized one of his most original theories: that poetry results from poets deliberately misreading the works that influence them. Figures of Capable Imagination (1976) and several other works of the next decade develop and illustrate this theme.

One of Bloom’s most controversial popular works appeared in his commentary on The Book of J (1990), published with David Rosenberg’s translations of selected sections of the Pentateuch. In it Bloom speculated that the earliest known texts of the Bible were written by a woman who lived during the time of David and Solomon and that the texts are literary rather than religious ones, on which later rewriters imposed beliefs of patriarchal Judaism. This work was one of a number of his books—including Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), The American Religions (1992), Omens of Millennium (1996), Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005), and the novel The Flight to Lucifer (1979)—to deal with religious subjects.

Perhaps Bloom’s greatest legacy is his passion for poetry and literature of other types too. This is reflected in his best-known work, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), which rejects the multiculturalism prevalent in late 20th-century academia. He once said of multiculturalism that “it means fifth-rate work by people full of resentment.” In an interview published in 1995, Bloom reflected on the great authors of the Western world, stating,

We have to read Shakespeare, and we have to study Shakespeare. We have to study Dante. We have to read Chaucer. We have to read Cervantes. We have to read the Bible, at least the King James Bible. We have to read certain authors.…They provide an intellectual, I dare say, a spiritual value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief. They remind us in every sense of re-minding us. They not only tell us things that we have forgotten, but they tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them, and they reform our minds. They make our minds stronger. They make us more vital.

Bloom’s critics accused him of arguing too forcefully for the superiority of the likes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, and others – all male and white – at the expense of the multiculturalists he disdained. In 2004, feminist author Naomi Wolf accused Bloom of inappropriate behavior when she was his student in 1983. He denied her allegation.

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Bloom continued to both praise and analyze the literary canon in such books as Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), How to Read and Why (2000), and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). He returned to the study of influence, the subject that established his critical reputation, in The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011). In The Daemon Knows (2015) Bloom discussed 12 writers he believed were the “creators of the American Sublime.” In 2017 he published Falstaff: Give Me Life, the first in the Shakespeare’s Personalities series. In addition, he selected the content of, and provided commentary for, the collection The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost (2004).

In the mid-1980s Bloom began to work with Chelsea House Publishers to “chronicle all of Western literature,” and he subsequently edited hundreds of volumes. Series titles included Bloom’s BioCritiques on individual authors, presented in a format that includes an extensive biography and critical analyses; Bloom’s Guides, on individual literary masterpieces; Bloom’s Literary Places, guides to such cities as London, Dublin, and Paris; Bloom’s Major Literary Characters; Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, on major works; Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, on major writers; and Bloom’s Period Studies.