https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Following the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime, he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the literary canon wars of the early 1990s. He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Early life

Bloom was born in New York City, the son of Paula (Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew; he learned English at the age of six. Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in Odessa and his mother, a homemaker, near Brest Litovsk in what is today Belarus. Harold had three older sisters and an older brother; he was the last living sibling.

As a boy, Bloom read Hart Crane's Collected Poems, a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry. Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science (where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high), and subsequently received a B.A. in Classics from Cornell in 1951, where he was a student of English literary critic M. H. Abrams, and a PhD from Yale in 1955. In 1954-55 Bloom was a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty of New Critics including William K. Wimsatt. Several years later, Bloom dedicated his first major book, The Anxiety of Influence, to Wimsatt.

Teaching career

Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, which focuses on primary texts.

Personal life

Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958. In a 2005 interview his wife said that she regarded him and herself as both atheists while he denied being an atheist saying "No, no I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist."

Bloom was accused of sexual harassing his students at Yale University in 2004. He "vigorously denied" the allegation.

Death

Bloom died at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut on October 14, 2019.

Writing career

Defense of Romanticism

Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley's Myth-making, Yale University Press, originally Bloom's doctoral dissertation), W. B. Yeats, (Yeats, Oxford University Press), and Wallace Stevens, (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press). In these, he defended the High Romantics against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.

Influence theory

After a personal crisis during the late nineteen sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham, the book editor for The Baltimore Sun, posited that Bloom has long referred to himself as a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom explained: "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 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."

The agon, strong and weak misreadings

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 in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors. 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.

Addenda and developments of his theory 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.

Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, and penned little thereafter which did not invoke his ideas about influence.

Novel experiment

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.

Religious criticism

Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989).

In The Book of J (1990), 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 hypothesis) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work (see Jahwist). They further envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite 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 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.

In The American Religion (1992), 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 Omens of Millennium (1996), Bloom identifies these American religious elements as on the periphery of an old – and not inherently Christian – gnostic, religious tradition which invokes a complex of ideas and experiences concerning angelology, interpretation of dreams as prophecy, near-death experiences, and millennialism.

In his essay in The Gospel of Thomas, Bloom states that none of Thomas' Aramaic sayings have survived to this day in the original language. Marvin Meyer generally agreed and further confirmed that the earlier versions of that text were likely written in either Aramaic or Greek. Meyer ends his introduction with an endorsement of much of Bloom's essay. Bloom notes the other-worldliness of the Jesus in the Thomas sayings by making reference to "the paradox also of the American Jesus."

The Western Canon

The Western Canon (1994), a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focuses 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, Bloom's major concern in the volume was reclaiming literature from those he referred to as the "School of Resentment", the mostly academic critics who espoused a social purpose in reading. Bloom asserted that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal of improving one's society held by "forces of resentment". He cast the latter 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 was that politics had no place in literary criticism, that a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.

In addition to considering how much influence a writer had had on later writers, Bloom proposed the concept of "canonical strangeness" (cf. uncanny) 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 said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he did not stand by it.

Work on Shakespeare

Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare and considered him to be the supreme center of the Western canon. The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom then considered barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and Chaucer, and his agon with contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.

In his later survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom provided an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces." Written as a companion to the general reader and theater-goer, Bloom declared that bardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is." He also contended 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 were Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and Hamlet, whom Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Throughout Shakespeare, characters from disparate plays were imagined alongside and interacting with each other. This has been decried by numerous contemporary academics and critics as harking back to the out of fashion character criticism of A. C. Bradley (and others), who gathered explicit praise in the book. As in The Western Canon, Bloom criticized what he called the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and for balkanizing the study of literature through multicultural and historicist departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaimed him the only truly multicultural author. Repudiating the "social energies" to which historicists ascribed Shakespeare's authorship, Bloom pronounced his modern academic foes – and indeed, all of society – to be but "a parody of Shakespearian energies."

2000s and 2010s

Bloom consolidated his work on the western canon with the publication of How to Read and Why (2000) and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003). Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (also 2003) is an amendment to Shakespeare: Invention of the Human written after he decided the chapter on Hamlet in that earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of the Ur-Hamlet to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself. Some elements of religious criticism were combined with his secular criticism in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (2004), and a more complete return to religious criticism was marked by the publication of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). Throughout the decade he also compiled, edited and introduced several major anthologies of poetry.

Bloom took part in the documentary, the Apparition of the Eternal Church (2006), made by Paul Festa. This documentary centered on many individuals' reactions to hearing, for the first time, the renowned piece for organ, the Apparition de l'église éternelle, of Olivier Messiaen.

Bloom began a book under the working title of Living Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, which was published as The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011).

In July 2011, after the publication of The Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom was working on three further projects:

Achievement in the Evening Land from Emerson to Faulkner, a history of American literature following the canonical model, which ultimately developed into his book The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015). The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind: A Literary Memoir, which ultimately developed into his book Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (2019). a play with the working title Walt Whitman: A Musical Pageant.[36] By November 2011, Bloom had changed the title of the play to To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman.[37] Influence In 1986, Bloom credited Northrop Frye 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."[38]

However, in Anatomy of Influence (2011), he wrote "I no longer have the patience to read anything by Frye" and nominated Angus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his "critical guide and conscience" and elsewhere that year recommended Fletcher's Colors of the Mind and The Mirror and the Lamp by M. H. Abrams. In this late phase of his career, Bloom also emphasized the tradition of earlier critics such as William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Pater, A.C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson, describing Johnson in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him". In his 2012 Foreword to the book The Fourth Dimension of a Poem (WW Norton, 2012), Bloom indicated the influence which M. H. Abrams had upon him in his years at Cornell University.[39]

Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature 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.[40][41]

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."[42]

Bloom's association with the Western canon 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."[43] After Beckett died in 1989, Bloom 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". After Murdoch died, Bloom expressed admiration for novelists such as Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, John Banville, and A.S. Byatt.[44]

In Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003), he named the 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".[45] 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, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon; American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater; Blood Meridian; and Underworld. He added to this estimate the work of John Crowley, with special interest in his Aegypt Sequence and novel Little, Big saying that "only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets ... only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level".[46]

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 later identified Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He expressed great admiration for the Canadian poets Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red, and A.F. Moritz, whom Bloom called "a true poet."[47] Bloom also listed Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.[citation needed]

Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1986) 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.[48]

Reception For many years, Bloom's writings have drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars. Bloom was called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States"[49] and "America's best-known man of letters".[50] A New York Times article in 1994 said that many younger critics understand Bloom as an "outdated oddity,"[4] whereas a 1998 New York Times article called him "one of the most gifted of contemporary critics."[51]

James Wood described Bloom as "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own—a kind of campiness, in fact—Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant."[50] Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away ... There's nothing to the man ... I don't want to talk about him".[32]

In the early 21st century, Bloom often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich,[52] Maya Angelou,[53] and David Foster Wallace.[54] 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."[55]

In 2004 author Naomi Wolf wrote an article for New York magazine which accused Bloom of a sexual "encroachment" more than two decades earlier, by touching her thigh. The alleged incident was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and Wolf did not think of herself as a "victim", but she had harbored this secret for 21 years. Explaining why she had finally gone public with the charges, Wolf wrote, "I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge."[56] When asked about the allegations in 2015, Bloom stated, "I refuse to even use the name of this person. I call her Dracula's daughter, because her father was a Dracula scholar. I have never in my life been indoors with Dracula's daughter. When she came to the door of my house unbidden, my youngest son turned her away. Once, I was walking up to campus, and she fell in with me and said, 'May I walk with you, Professor Bloom?' I said nothing."[57]

MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for stating "The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator,' is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy".[58]

Selected bibliography 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 Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 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 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 Fantasy. 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. The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988. 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 Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus; translation with introduction, critical edition of the Coptic text and notes by Marvin Meyer, with an interpretation by Harold Bloom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. 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 0-300-12348-5 Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems Harper, 2010. ISBN 0-06-192305-2 The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life- Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 0-300-16760-1 The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 0-300-16683-4 The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. ISBN 0-812-99782-4 Falstaff: Give Me Life. Scribner, 2017. ISBN 978-1-5011-6413-2 Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air. Scribner, 2017. ISBN 978-1-5011-6416-3 Lear: The Great Image of Authority. Scribner, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-6419-4 Iago: The Strategies of Evil. Scribner, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-6422-4 Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind. Scribner, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5011-6425-5 Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. Knopf, 2019. ISBN 978-0-5255-2088-7 Articles "On Extended Wings"; Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. By Helen Hennessy Vendler, (Review), The New York Times, October 5, 1969. "Poets' meeting in the heyday of their youth; A Single Summer With Lord Byron", The New York Times, February 15, 1970. "An angel's spirit in a decaying (and active) body", The New York Times, November 22, 1970. "The Use of Poetry", The New York Times, November 12, 1975. "Northrop Frye exalting the designs of romance; The Secular Scripture", The New York Times, April 18, 1976. "On Solitude in America", The New York Times, August 4, 1977. "The Critic/Poet", The New York Times, February 5, 1978. "A Fusion of Traditions; Rosenberg", The New York Times, July 22, 1979. "Straight Forth Out of Self", The New York Times, June 22, 1980. "The Heavy Burden of the Past; Poets", The 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) The 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) The New York Times, October 17, 1982. "Isaac Bashevis Singer's Jeremiad; The Penitent, By Isaac Bashevis Singer", (Review) The New York Times, September 25, 1983. "Domestic Derangements; A Late Divorce, By A. B. Yehoshua Translated by Hillel Halkin", (Review) The New York Times, February 19, 1984. "War Within the Walls; In the Freud Archives, By Janet Malcolm", (Review) The New York Times, May 27, 1984. "His Long Ordeal by Laughter; Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy and Epilogue. By Philip Roth", (Review) The New York Times, May 19, 1985. "A Comedy of Worldly Salvation; The Good Apprentice, By Iris Murdoch", (Review) The New York Times, January 12, 1986. "Freud, the Greatest Modern Writer" (Review) The New York Times, March 23, 1986.

הרולד בלום

(באנגלית: Harold Bloom,‏ 11 ביולי 1930 – 14 באוקטובר 2019) היה מבקר ספרות וסופר יהודי-אמריקאי, פרופסור סטרלינג למדעי הרוח באוניברסיטת ייל. פרסם מעל 20 ספרים בנושא ביקורת ספרות, וכן ספרים שעסקו בדת ונובלה אחת. ספריו תורגמו ליותר מ-40 שפות. נודע בשל ההגנה שלו על הרכב הקאנון הספרותי המערבי.

תוכן עניינים 1 קורות חיים 1.1 ראשית חייו 1.2 קריירה אקדמית 2 כתיבתו 2.1 תאוריית ההשפעה 2.2 כתיבה בדיונית 2.3 כתיבה דתית 2.4 הקאנון המערבי 2.5 שייקספיר 2.6 שנות ה-2000 3 כותבים שזכו להערכתו 4 מספריו 5 קישורים חיצוניים 6 הערות שוליים קורות חיים ראשית חייו בלום נולד ברובע הברונקס בניו יורק, למשפחה יהודית אורתודוקסית. בביתו למד יידיש ועברית ספרותית, ולימד את עצמו אנגלית בגיל 7.[1] אביו בא מאודסה ואמו מאזור בריסק דליטא. הוא האח היחיד שנשאר מתוך חמישה.

למד בתיכון ברונקס למדעים.

קריירה אקדמית ב-1951 קיבל תואר ראשון בספרות אנגלית מאוניברסיטת קורנל, שם למד אצל מבקר הספרות מ. ה. אברהמס. ב-1955 השלים את לימודיו לתואר דוקטור באוניברסיטת ייל. בייל התנגד בלום לזרם הביקורת החדשה, ורבים ממאמציו היו כנגד ויליאם קורץ וימסט. מספר שנים לאחר מכן, הקדיש בלום את ספרו "The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry" (בעברית: "חרדת ההשפעה: תאוריה של השירה") לווימסט. מאז 1995 חבר במחלקה לספרות אנגלית של אוניברסיטת ייל. ב-1985 הפך לעמית מקארתור. בין 1988 ל-2004 היה פרופסור לאנגלית גם באוניברסיטת ניו יורק. ב-2010 היה בין מקימי מוסד אקדמי חדש לאמנויות חופשיות בשם "רלסטון קולג'", בסוואנה, ג'ורג'יה.

בלום נפטר ב-14 באוקטובר 2019. הותיר אחריו אישה - ג'ין גולד, לה היה נשוי מ-1958, ושני ילדים.

כתיבתו מאמריו הראשונים של בלום, כולל עבודת הדוקטורט שלו, עסקו ב"הגנה" על יצירותיהם של סופרים רומנטיקנים מוקדמים כביש שלי, ייטס ו-וולאס סטיבנס מפרשנותם של הוגים נאו-נוצרים כט. ס. אליוט, בגישה וכחנית מובהקת. פרסומים אלו זכו להערכה רבה מצד קהיליית המבקרים של אותה תקופה.

תאוריית ההשפעה Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle

השפעה פואטית, כפי שאני חווה אותה, נעה על הציר שבין מלנכוליה לחרדה.

— ההקדמה לספרו של בלום, "Yeats" אחרי משבר אישי שעבר בשלהי שנות ה-60 של המאה ה-20, התחיל בלום להתעניין יותר בכתביהם של פרויד ואמרסון, ובזרמים מחשבתיים כגנוסיס, הרמטיציזם וקבלה. הוא החל לכתוב על גישות שונות בפואטיקה, ובמיוחד על הקושי של משוררים לנכס לעצמם נקודת מבט עצמאית על שירה מבלי למחוק את השפעותיהם של אלו שקיבלו מהם השראה. גישתו של בלום גרסה את תהליך קבלת ההשראה כך:

המשורר קורא שירה מוקדמת לו, ומקבל השראה לכתוב שירה בעצמו; ההשראה הופכת לנטירת טינה, על כך שכל מה שרצה המשורר להגיד כבר נמצא בכתביהם של קודמיו; המשורר מתאכזב, כיוון שאינו יכול להיות הראשון להביע רעיון כלשהו בנושא שבו קיבל השראה מאחר; כדי להתגבר על אכזבתו, המשורר מוכרח לשכנע את עצמו - במודע או שלא במודע - כי המשוררים המוקדמים טעו במשהו או נכשלו בהצגת החזון שלהם; נקודת מבט זו מאפשרת למשורר להניח כי יש לו מה להוסיף למסורת השירה מעצמו. בלום טען שכל משורר "חזק" מקיים סוג של דו-שיח עם יצירותיהם של המשוררים שהשפיעו עליו, בסוג של יחסים אדיפליים - המשורר המאוחר, "הבן", ינסה לחקות ולתקן את יצירתו של המשורר המוקדם, "האב" - לא לפני שירצח אותו, כלומר יצביע על הפגמים ביצירתו.[2]

כתיבה בדיונית בלום עסק בנושאים המוזכרים לעיל עד לשלהי שנות ה-70 של המאה ה-20. בתקופה זו החל להתעניין בספרות בדיונית, ובמיוחד בעבודתו של דייוויד לינדזי ובספרו "A Voyage to Arcturus", ואף כתב לו מעין סיקוול בשם "The Flight to Lucifer", שהיה ונשאר יצירתו הבדיונית היחידה.

כתיבה דתית בשנות ה-80 המאוחרות התחיל לעסוק בתחום אותו כינה "ביקורת דת", וכתב על סוגות שונות בביקורת נוסח המקרא ועל הקשר שלהן לפואטיקה. כמו כן, כתב גם על היבטים ספרותיים של דמויות תנ"כיות (למשל הקשרים בין דוד, שלמה ובת שבע) ושל ההשוואה בין ישו לאלוהים, ועל היבטים ספרותיים של ההשוואה הכללית בין יהדות לנצרות.

בשנות ה-90 של המאה ה-20 החל לכתוב על השפעות של גנוסטיקה על הדת הפרוטסטנטית והפוסט-פרוטסטנטית בארצות הברית של אותה תקופה. הוא טען שהשפעות כאלו ניכרות כמעט בכל הזרמים הנוצריים, חוץ מאצל עדי יהוה. כמו כן, חזה בלום כי הזרמים המורמוניים והפנטקוסטליסטיים יחליפו את אלו הפרוטסטנטיים במיינסטרים הדתי במדינה בתוך כמה עשורים.

הקאנון המערבי ב"מלחמות הקאנון" האקדמיות של שנות ה-80 וה-90 של המאה העשרים, שבה נשאלו שאלות לגבי תהליכי ההווצרות של הקאנון המערבי, תפס בלום עמדה שמרנית. העמדה הזו התבטאה בספרו "The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages", שבו קיבץ 26 יוצרים מאמריקה ואירופה מהמאה ה-14 ואילך. בלום טען שיוצרים אלה מהווים את הבסיס של הקאנון ומייצגים את פסגת היצירה של תרבות המערב ושל אומותיהם. מטרת הספר הייתה הבעת התנגדות לזרם בביקורת הספרות שהתמקד בהיבטים החברתיים בהווצרות הקאנון - ובפרט להתנגד לטענות בדבר אחידות אתנית וגזעית שלו. כותבים אלו הציעו הרכב קאנוני שונה מזה שהיה מקובל על בלום: הוא דחה אותן וטען כי אין לייחס משמעויות חברתיות ולהכניס אפליה מתקנת לתוך הרכב הקאנון, וכי יש להכניס אליו את היצירות הטובות ביותר, ללא קשר למקורן הספציפי. הוא טען כי פרשנות חברתית ליצירה ספרותית חוטאת למקור, וקריאה אידאולוגית-חברתית ביצירה ספרותית יכולה ללמד את הקורא על האידאולוגיה, אך לא על היצירה.

בנוגע לקאנוניזציה ספרותית באופן כללי, הציע בלום מודל הבוחן שייכות לקאנון לא רק על בסיס השפעה על יוצרים מאוחרים, אלא גם על בסיס מה שהוא כינה "זרות קאנונית" (בדומה למושג הבעתה של פרויד). בספר הקדיש בלום חלק לרשימה של יצירות - מהעת העתיקה ועד היום, שנכללות או מועמדות, לדעתו, להיכלל בקאנון.

שייקספיר בלום העריך מאוד את ויליאם שייקספיר, והחשיב את יצירותיו כחלק מרכזי מהקאנון. הוא טען כי מתוך 38 מחזותיו, 24 הן יצירות מופת. בספרו מ-1998, "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human", טען בלום כי שייקספיר "המציא" את האנושות כפי שהיא מתקיימת היום, בכך שהציג את התכונה של בחינה עצמית (באנגלית: Self-Overhearing), הדוחפת את בני האדם לשינוי.

שנות ה-2000 בתחילת המאה ה-21 כתב בלום מספר ספרים, שעסקו בפילוסופיה של הקריאה, ביקורת דת, ביקורת שייקספירית וגאונות. כמו כן הוציא לאור מספר אנתולוגיות. בעשור השני של המאה ה-21 כתב מספר ספרים ואף מחזות, וכן עסק בנושא היסטוריית הספרות האמריקאית.

כותבים שזכו להערכתו בספרו "קבלה וביקורת" (אנגלית: Kabbalah and Criticism) מ-1975 כתב בלום כי ארבעת המשוררים האמריקאים החשובים של זמן זה היו רוברט פן וורן, ג'יימס מריל, ג'ון אשברי ואליזבת בישופ. בשנות ה-90 של המאה ה-20 ציין בלום גם את א. ר. אמונס והנרי קול. ב-2003 אמר בלום כי ארבעת הכותבים האמריקאיים הגדולים של זמן זה הם תומאס פינצ'ון, פיליפ רות, קורמק מקארתי ודון דלילו - בהתבסס על יצירותיהם העיקריות: "הזעקה של אוסף 49", "פסטורלה אמריקנית", "בלאד מרידיאן" ו"תת-עולם", בהתאמה. כותבים קנדים שבלום ציין לטובה באופן יוצא דופן הם אן קרסון, א. פ. מוריץ וג'יי רייט.

מספריו The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry‏, הוצאת אוניברסיטת אוקספורד, ניו יורק, 1973 (מהדורה שנייה: 1997), ISBN 0-19-511221-0 בעברית: חרדת ההשפעה: תאוריה של שירה, הוצאת רסלינג, תל אביב, 2008, בתרגום עופר שור ובעריכה מדעית של שולי ברזילי Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate, הוצאת אוניברסיטת קורנל, אית'קה, 1977 The Flight to Lucifer: Gnostic Fantasy‏, הוצאת וינטג' בוקס, ניו יורק, 1980, ISBN 0-394-74323-7 Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism‏, הוצאת אוניברסיטת אוקספורד, ניו יורק, 1982 The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation‏, הוצאת טאצ'סטון, 1992 (מהדורה שנייה: 1993), ISBN 0-671-86737-7 The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages‏, הוצאת הארקורט ברייס, ניו יורק, 1994 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human‏, ניו יורק, 1998, ISBN 1-57322-751-X How to Read and Why‏, ניו יורק, 2000, ISBN 0-684-85906-8 Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds‏, ניו יורק, 2003, ISBN 0-446-52717-3 Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine‏, 2005, ISBN 1-57322-322-0 The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, הוצאת אוניברסיטת ייל, 2011, ISBN 0-300-16760-1 קישורים חיצוניים Green globe.svg אתר האינטרנט הרשמי

של הרולד בלום באתר אוניברסיטת ייל הרולד בלום

באתר ההרצאות הנשיאותיות באוניברסיטת סטנפורד אריאנה מלמד, ספר חדש: "איך לקרוא ומדוע" - חוצפה מבוססת , באתר ynet, 10 ביולי 2000 דיוויד מיקיקיס, הרולד בלום על ספרות, יהדות ואמונה , באתר מידה, 18 באוקטובר 2019 https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%93_%D7%91...

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University.[1] Following the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than forty books,[2] including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime, he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm.[3][4] Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the literary canon wars of the early 1990s.[5] He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Contents Early life Bloom was born in New York City, the son of Paula (Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse.[6][7] He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew;[8] he learned English at the age of six.[9] Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in Odessa and his mother, a homemaker, near Brest Litovsk in what is today Belarus.[8] Harold had three older sisters and an older brother; he was the last living sibling.[8]

As a boy, Bloom read Hart Crane's Collected Poems, a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry.[10] Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science (where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high),[11] and subsequently received a B.A. in Classics from Cornell in 1951, where he was a student of English literary critic M. H. Abrams, and a PhD from Yale in 1955.[12] In 1954-55 Bloom was a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.[13]

Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty of New Critics including William K. Wimsatt. Several years later, Bloom dedicated his first major book, The Anxiety of Influence, to Wimsatt.[14]

Teaching career Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death.[15] He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, which focuses on primary texts.[16][17]

Personal life Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958.[18] In a 2005 interview his wife said that she regarded him and herself as both atheists while he denied being an atheist saying "No, no I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist."[19]

Bloom was accused of sexual harassing his students at Yale University in 2004.[20] He "vigorously denied" the allegation.[15]

Death Bloom died at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut on October 14, 2019.[15]

Writing career Defense of Romanticism Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley's Myth-making, Yale University Press, originally Bloom's doctoral dissertation), W. B. Yeats, (Yeats, Oxford University Press), and Wallace Stevens, (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press). In these, he defended the High Romantics against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley's Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.

Influence theory After a personal crisis during the late nineteen sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham, the book editor for The Baltimore Sun, posited that Bloom has long referred to himself as a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom explained: "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."[21] 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 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."

The agon, strong and weak misreadings 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."[22] 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 in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors. 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.

Addenda and developments of his theory 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.

Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, and penned little thereafter which did not invoke his ideas about influence.

Novel experiment 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.[23]

Religious criticism Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989).

In The Book of J (1990), 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 hypothesis) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work (see Jahwist). They further envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite 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.[24] 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.

In The American Religion (1992), 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 Omens of Millennium (1996), Bloom identifies these American religious elements as on the periphery of an old – and not inherently Christian – gnostic, religious tradition which invokes a complex of ideas and experiences concerning angelology, interpretation of dreams as prophecy, near-death experiences, and millennialism.[25]

In his essay in The Gospel of Thomas, Bloom states that none of Thomas' Aramaic sayings have survived to this day in the original language.[26] Marvin Meyer generally agreed and further confirmed that the earlier versions of that text were likely written in either Aramaic or Greek.[27] Meyer ends his introduction with an endorsement of much of Bloom's essay.[28] Bloom notes the other-worldliness of the Jesus in the Thomas sayings by making reference to "the paradox also of the American Jesus."[29]

The Western Canon The Western Canon (1994), a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focuses on 26 works he considered sublime and representative of their nations[30] and of the Western canon.[31] Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, Bloom's major concern in the volume was reclaiming literature from those he referred to as the "School of Resentment", the mostly academic critics who espoused a social purpose in reading. Bloom asserted that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal of improving one's society held by "forces of resentment". He cast the latter 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 was that politics had no place in literary criticism, that a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about Hamlet itself.

In addition to considering how much influence a writer had had on later writers, Bloom proposed the concept of "canonical strangeness" (cf. uncanny) 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 said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he did not stand by it.[32]

Work on Shakespeare Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare[33] and considered him to be the supreme center of the Western canon.[34] The first edition of The Anxiety of Influence almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom then considered barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt to Ovid and Chaucer, and his agon with contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.

In his later survey, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom provided an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces." Written as a companion to the general reader and theater-goer, Bloom declared that bardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is."[35] He also contended 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 were Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV and Hamlet, whom Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. Throughout Shakespeare, characters from disparate plays were imagined alongside and interacting with each other. This has been decried by numerous contemporary academics and critics as harking back to the out of fashion character criticism of A. C. Bradley (and others), who gathered explicit praise in the book. As in The Western Canon, Bloom criticized what he called the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and for balkanizing the study of literature through multicultural and historicist departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaimed him the only truly multicultural author. Repudiating the "social energies" to which historicists ascribed Shakespeare's authorship, Bloom pronounced his modern academic foes – and indeed, all of society – to be but "a parody of Shakespearian energies."

2000s and 2010s Bloom consolidated his work on the western canon with the publication of How to Read and Why (2000) and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003). Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (also 2003) is an amendment to Shakespeare: Invention of the Human written after he decided the chapter on Hamlet in that earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of the Ur-Hamlet to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself. Some elements of religious criticism were combined with his secular criticism in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found (2004), and a more complete return to religious criticism was marked by the publication of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). Throughout the decade he also compiled, edited and introduced several major anthologies of poetry.

Bloom took part in the documentary, the Apparition of the Eternal Church (2006), made by Paul Festa. This documentary centered on many individuals' reactions to hearing, for the first time, the renowned piece for organ, the Apparition de l'église éternelle, of Olivier Messiaen.

Bloom began a book under the working title of Living Labyrinth, centering on Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, which was published as The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011).

In July 2011, after the publication of The Anatomy of Influence and after finishing work on The Shadow of a Great Rock, Bloom was working on three further projects:

Achievement in the Evening Land from Emerson to Faulkner, a history of American literature following the canonical model, which ultimately developed into his book The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015). The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind: A Literary Memoir, which ultimately developed into his book Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (2019). a play with the working title Walt Whitman: A Musical Pageant.[36] By November 2011, Bloom had changed the title of the play to To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman.[37] Influence In 1986, Bloom credited Northrop Frye 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."[38]

However, in Anatomy of Influence (2011), he wrote "I no longer have the patience to read anything by Frye" and nominated Angus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his "critical guide and conscience" and elsewhere that year recommended Fletcher's Colors of the Mind and The Mirror and the Lamp by M. H. Abrams. In this late phase of his career, Bloom also emphasized the tradition of earlier critics such as William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Pater, A.C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson, describing Johnson in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him". In his 2012 Foreword to the book The Fourth Dimension of a Poem (WW Norton, 2012), Bloom indicated the influence which M. H. Abrams had upon him in his years at Cornell University.[39]

Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature 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.[40][41]

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."[42]

Bloom's association with the Western canon 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."[43] After Beckett died in 1989, Bloom 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". After Murdoch died, Bloom expressed admiration for novelists such as Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, John Banville, and A.S. Byatt.[44]

In Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003), he named the 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".[45] 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, The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon; American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater; Blood Meridian; and Underworld. He added to this estimate the work of John Crowley, with special interest in his Aegypt Sequence and novel Little, Big saying that "only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets ... only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level".[46]

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 later identified Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He expressed great admiration for the Canadian poets Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel Autobiography of Red, and A.F. Moritz, whom Bloom called "a true poet."[47] Bloom also listed Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets.[citation needed]

Bloom's introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1986) 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.[48]

Reception For many years, Bloom's writings have drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars. Bloom was called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States"[49] and "America's best-known man of letters".[50] A New York Times article in 1994 said that many younger critics understand Bloom as an "outdated oddity,"[4] whereas a 1998 New York Times article called him "one of the most gifted of contemporary critics."[51]

James Wood described Bloom as "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own—a kind of campiness, in fact—Bloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant."[50] Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away ... There's nothing to the man ... I don't want to talk about him".[32]

In the early 21st century, Bloom often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich,[52] Maya Angelou,[53] and David Foster Wallace.[54] 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."[55]

In 2004 author Naomi Wolf wrote an article for New York magazine which accused Bloom of a sexual "encroachment" more than two decades earlier, by touching her thigh. The alleged incident was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and Wolf did not think of herself as a "victim", but she had harbored this secret for 21 years. Explaining why she had finally gone public with the charges, Wolf wrote, "I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren't still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge."[56] When asked about the allegations in 2015, Bloom stated, "I refuse to even use the name of this person. I call her Dracula's daughter, because her father was a Dracula scholar. I have never in my life been indoors with Dracula's daughter. When she came to the door of my house unbidden, my youngest son turned her away. Once, I was walking up to campus, and she fell in with me and said, 'May I walk with you, Professor Bloom?' I said nothing."[57]

MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for stating "The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator,' is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy".[58]

Selected bibliography 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 Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 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 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 Fantasy. 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. The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988. 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 Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus; translation with introduction, critical edition of the Coptic text and notes by Marvin Meyer, with an interpretation by Harold Bloom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. 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 0-300-12348-5 Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems Harper, 2010. ISBN 0-06-192305-2 The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life- Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 0-300-16760-1 The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 0-300-16683-4 The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. ISBN 0-812-99782-4 Falstaff: Give Me Life. Scribner, 2017. ISBN 978-1-5011-6413-2 Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air. Scribner, 2017. ISBN 978-1-5011-6416-3 Lear: The Great Image of Authority. Scribner, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-6419-4 Iago: The Strategies of Evil. Scribner, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-6422-4 Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind. Scribner, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5011-6425-5 Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. Knopf, 2019. ISBN 978-0-5255-2088-7 Articles "On Extended Wings"; Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. By Helen Hennessy Vendler, (Review), The New York Times, October 5, 1969. "Poets' meeting in the heyday of their youth; A Single Summer With Lord Byron", The New York Times, February 15, 1970. "An angel's spirit in a decaying (and active) body", The New York Times, November 22, 1970. "The Use of Poetry", The New York Times, November 12, 1975. "Northrop Frye exalting the designs of romance; The Secular Scripture", The New York Times, April 18, 1976. "On Solitude in America", The New York Times, August 4, 1977. "The Critic/Poet", The New York Times, February 5, 1978. "A Fusion of Traditions; Rosenberg", The New York Times, July 22, 1979. "Straight Forth Out of Self", The New York Times, June 22, 1980. "The Heavy Burden of the Past; Poets", The 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) The 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) The New York Times, October 17, 1982. "Isaac Bashevis Singer's Jeremiad; The Penitent, By Isaac Bashevis Singer", (Review) The New York Times, September 25, 1983. "Domestic Derangements; A Late Divorce, By A. B. Yehoshua Translated by Hillel Halkin", (Review) The New York Times, February 19, 1984. "War Within the Walls; In the Freud Archives, By Janet Malcolm", (Review) The New York Times, May 27, 1984. "His Long Ordeal by Laughter; Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy and Epilogue. By Philip Roth", (Review) The New York Times, May 19, 1985. "A Comedy of Worldly Salvation; The Good Apprentice, By Iris Murdoch", (Review) The New York Times, January 12, 1986. "Freud, the Greatest Modern Writer" (Review) The New York Times, March 23, 1986.