Critic of Influence and the Canon
A Bronx boy who learned English sounding out Blake, then spent 64 years at Yale arguing that every strong poem misreads the poem it loves, and fighting for Shakespeare.
Literary Critic & Teacher
Harold Bloom grew up in a Yiddish-speaking flat in the East Bronx, learned English partly by sounding out William Blake, and taught at Yale from 1955 until four days before he died in 2019. His big idea, set out in The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, is that a strong poet does not simply inherit from the poets he loves: he misreads them, wilfully, to make room for himself. In the 1990s he became a bestseller and a culture-war combatant, defending a Western canon centred on Shakespeare against what he called the “School of Resentment”. He was also a performer, a self-described “monster” of reading with a memory full of whole poems, a man a colleague said bragged about affairs with graduate students, and the professor Naomi Wolf accused in 2004 of putting his hand on her thigh, which he denied. This page pairs his theory with a poem and its precursor, and sets the canon beside its sharpest critics.
Harold Bloom was born on 11 July 1930 in the East Bronx, the youngest of five children of William and Paula (Lev) Bloom, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, a garment worker, was born in Odessa; his mother came from near Brest-Litovsk. Yiddish was the language of the household, and Bloom told Adam Begley in 1994 that neither parent ever learned to read English. He learned it largely from books: “You try and learn English in an all Yiddish household in the East Bronx by sounding out the words of Blake’s Prophecies,” he told The Paris Review in 1991. In the same interview he remembered the 1930s border with an Irish neighbourhood around Southern Boulevard, and street fights “involving broken bottles and baseball bats” with Irish toughs, some of whom he said were under the influence of the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts.
He told the story of finding Hart Crane two ways. To The Paris Review he was ten or eleven, picking up Crane’s Collected Poems in the Bronx library and being “swept away” by a trope from The Bridge, “O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of the lark’s return,” long before he understood it. He begged his oldest sister for a copy, and the edition she gave him for his birthday in 1942 was the first book he owned. To Begley he was seven or eight, and his sister Esther took him to the Melrose branch of the New York Public Library to borrow Crane, Eliot and Auden. Either way, Crane came first and Blake next: “I memorized almost instinctively all of the long poems. I went from Blake to Milton and from Milton to Shakespeare.” He added: “I am probably the largest monster of reading I have ever known. I can read at a shocking rate and I can remember nearly everything.”
His parents had hoped for a doctor, a lawyer or a dentist. An uncle who kept a candy store in Brooklyn told the small boy that Harvard and Yale had professors of poetry, and Bloom announced that he would be one; in the late 1980s he held named chairs at both at once. He was a poor student at the Bronx High School of Science (“that ghastly place”), but his exam scores won him a scholarship to Cornell, where the Romanticist M. H. Abrams became his teacher. Abrams later said Bloom was “a prodigy, beyond anything I’d ever seen”, and that after he graduated in 1951 the Cornell faculty insisted he go elsewhere: “We couldn’t teach him anything more.” He went to Yale, spent 1954–55 as a Fulbright scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, took his Yale doctorate on Shelley in 1955 and joined the Yale faculty the same year.
The Yale English department of the 1950s belonged to the New Criticism, which read poems as self-contained verbal structures and took its taste from T. S. Eliot: Donne and Herbert up, Shelley and the Romantics down. Bloom wrote that it was “no accident” that the poets the New Critics favoured were Catholics or High Church Anglicans, and that academic criticism had become “almost an affair of church wardens.” “And I am very Jewish,” he said, “and lower-class Jewish at that.” He answered with books: Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963) and Yeats (1970), which are widely credited with helping to bring the English Romantics back into the centre of the syllabus. In 1958 he married Jeanne Gould, later a school psychologist; they had two sons, Daniel and David.
In his mid-thirties Bloom went into a deep depression. The Associated Press obituary describes years of obsessive reading in Freud and an attempt at an epic poem prompted by a nightmare; he came out of the late 1960s absorbed in Emerson, Freud and the Gnostic and Kabbalistic traditions. He began The Anxiety of Influence in 1967 and published it in 1973. Its central claim, as his friend and colleague John Hollander quoted it in The New York Times: “Poetic Influence — when it involves two strong, authentic poets — always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” His model poet was Milton’s Satan, who denies that God made him and declares himself self-created.
The book gives the misreading six names, which Bloom called revisionary ratios. Clinamen, Lucretius’ word for the swerve of atoms, is the corrective swerve: the new poem implies that the precursor “went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves.” Tessera is completion: the later poet keeps the older poem’s terms but means them “in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.” Kenosis, St Paul’s word for Christ’s self-emptying, is a retreat in which the later poet seems to stop being a poet but empties the precursor out too. Daemonization is a “personalized Counter-Sublime”: the later poet suggests that the precursor’s power came from something beyond him, which makes it less his own. Askesis is self-curtailment: the later poet gives up part of his gift in order to stand apart, and cuts the precursor down with him. Apophrades, the Athenian days when the dead came back to live in their old houses, is the late return: the strong poet opens his poem to the precursor so completely that it seems “as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.” Hollander’s example of the uncanny effect is finding Tennyson’s Maud sounding like The Waste Land.
Hollander called it a “remarkable, short, frequently difficult book” and warned that it would “outrage and perplex” scholars, poets and psychologists. He also noted a limit that critics returned to for decades: “Bloom alludes, adduces and evokes texts, but never explicates.” Terry Eagleton called the theory “one of the most daringly original literary theories of the past decade”; Larissa MacFarquhar later wrote that its terms made it seem “written by a kabbalistic Lewis Carroll.”
Bloom wrote the sequels fast. A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism both appeared in 1975, and by 1976 he had published four books in three years on the poetics of influence, prompting Christopher Ricks’s line in The New York Times Book Review: “Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him.” Kabbalah and Criticism took the sixteenth-century Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, as explained by Gershom Scholem, as a model of how a tradition reads itself. A Map of Misreading refined the ratios, pairing them with figures of rhetoric and psychological defences, then tested the whole map on one poem: Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
Browning was a Shelleyan to begin with: at twenty he published Pauline (1833), a confession that hails the dead Shelley as “Sun-treader — life and light be thine for ever.” Childe Roland appeared in Men and Women in 1855. Its knight has hunted the Dark Tower so long that his heart leaps at “finding failure in its scope”; he crosses a poisoned, dying landscape and, at the tower, sees ranged on the hills “the lost adventurers my peers”, everyone who failed before him. The poem ends: “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, / And blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’” Bloom had given the poem an essay of its own in The Georgia Review (Fall 1974, “How to Read a Poem: Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’”), and the book chapter “Testing the Map: Browning’s Childe Roland” is where he runs his map over it. What follows is his own wording wherever it is in quotation marks.
He does not read the quest as a plain failure. He reads the poem “as a revisionary text, on the model of our map of misprision.” The opening swerve, the first ratio, clinamen, “is marked rhetorically by the trope of irony, imagistically by an interplay of presence and absence.” The closing stanzas, the knight’s sudden recognition and the blast, he calls “a transumptive scheme or figure of a figure, which undoes the figurative assertions of Roland throughout the entire poem before them”: transumption, or metalepsis, is the trope he pairs with the sixth ratio, apophrades, the return of the dead. Its effect on time is the whole point: “Roland is belated, the last of the Band, and yet of his belatedness he now makes (and breaks) an earliness, at the apparent expense of his life.” The dread that drove the quest, in his phrase, was the “sympathetic antipathy (as Kierkegaard called his concept of Dread)” of failing as his precursors failed, and so “Roland has triumphed by failing precisely as his precursors failed, and by recognizing and so knowing that their ‘failure’ was a triumph also.” There is no villain outside the knight: “There is only Roland himself to serve both as hero and as villain.” We have read these passages, not the whole chapter, so the page does not guess at how Bloom assigns the middle ratios (tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis) to the poem’s stanzas.
Shelley enters at the horn. A sentence of Bloom’s about the end of the poem names Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind “and perhaps of all Shelley’s poetry,” and the next has Roland at last seeing himself “as what he is, the solitary poet-quester, the penseroso so dangerously internalized as to have become anti-natural or antithetical.” He makes Roland “the culmination, akin to Tennyson’s Ulysses,” of a line of Romantic wanderers: “Wordsworth’s Solitary in The Excursion, Byron’s Childe Harold, Shelley’s poet-wanderer in Alastor and in Prince Athanase.” Then the horn: “Undefeated by his total knowledge, he abandons the world of romance and enters prophecy, by setting the slug-horn of the tragic, suicidal, too-early Romantic poet Chatterton to his lips. What he blows is his poem, as we have to read it, the trumpet of a prophecy because of its transumptive relation to Romantic prophecy.” (“The trumpet of a prophecy” is Shelley’s phrase, from the Ode’s last lines, where he asks the wind to make him that trumpet.) Bloom adds a pun of his own: “fool” goes back to the Latin follis, “bellows”, so a fool was originally a windbag, and the root bhel, to blow or swell, “gives a triumphant twist to Roland’s final act of blowing his slug-horn.” In the medieval Song of Roland the horn-blast is a signal to friends, at the cost of almost the hero’s last breath; Childe Roland’s friends are “disgraced and dead,” and only his heart has been wounded “by the blind foolishness of questing for failure.”
Bloom also puts the doubt against himself. Having read the poem on his map, he says, “two large questions remain unanswered”: what the theoretical basis is for the division between the ratios, tropes, defences and images, and “how comprehensive and useful can our map be, anyway?” Critics pressed such questions harder than he did. John Hollander, reviewing the first book in 1973, found that Bloom “alludes, adduces and evokes texts, but never explicates”; the Browning chapter is the place to judge, text in hand, whether the map explains the poem or the poem merely accommodates the map.
The most productive answer came from feminist critics. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar took Bloom’s Oedipal drama of sons fighting poetic fathers and asked what happened to a nineteenth-century woman writer who had no mother-precursor to fight. Her problem, they argued, was not an anxiety of influence but an “anxiety of authorship”: doubt that she could write at all. Others objected to the gender bias of the Freudian model outright. Helen Vendler, who called Bloom the foremost critic of her generation, kept the insight and dropped the combat: “Every poem is an answer to an anterior poem.”
In the 1970s Bloom was briefly grouped with the Yale deconstructionists Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and the visiting Jacques Derrida, and he contributed to their joint volume Deconstruction and Criticism, but he soon mocked their “French fanciness.” In 1977, after twenty-two years of feuding, he left the English department altogether. Yale made him a professor of the humanities, later Sterling Professor, the university’s highest rank: in his phrase, a department of one. He took the MacArthur Fellowship in 1985, and from 1988 to 2004 he was also Berg Professor of English at New York University, teaching in both cities each week.
Part of the reason for the workload was money. Begley reported in 1994 that one of Bloom’s sons had a chronic disability requiring expensive care, which Bloom would not discuss. From 1984 he edited critical anthologies for the publisher Chelsea House, 395 volumes by 1994 and some 600 in the end, each stamped with his name and prefaced by a short and, even friends admitted, sometimes cursory introduction. A bleeding ulcer nearly killed him a few years before 1994. He turned to what he called religious criticism: Ruin the Sacred Truths (1989); The Book of J (1990), in which David Rosenberg translated the oldest strand of the Pentateuch and Bloom argued that its author was a woman at the court of Solomon’s successors, a bestseller that biblical scholars did not accept; and The American Religion (1992), which heard a Gnostic strain in American faith.
The fame brought scrutiny of his private life. In 1990 GQ ran “Bloom in Love”, an article insinuating affairs with female graduate students. Bloom called it “a disgusting piece of character assassination.” His friend and colleague R. W. B. Lewis told Begley: “His wandering, I gather is a thing of the past. I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn’t very secret for a number of years.”
The Western Canon (1994), written on a $600,000 advance, studies twenty-six writers from Dante and Chaucer to Kafka and Beckett, with Shakespeare at the centre, and appends lists of some 850 writers Bloom expected to last. Its enemy is the “School of Resentment”: in his words “Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors” who read literature to “advance their programs for social change.” “You must choose,” he wrote. “Either there were aesthetic values or there are only the overdeterminations of race, class and gender.” He said he had resisted attempts “to elevate a number of sadly inadequate women writers of the 19th century, as well as some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans,” and he had told The Paris Review that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was “of no aesthetic interest or value whatsoever.” To Begley he staged a deathbed: “The battle is lost. These resentniks have destroyed the canon.”
The serious replies did not deny that some books are better than others. John Guillory, who had taught at Yale for ten years, had been shaped by The Anxiety of Influence and had just published Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), said that “Bloom’s paradigm is circumscribed” by his refusal to relate works to their historical moment. Hollander, his close friend, said that “Harold is not particularly a good explainer”: his mode was “vatic.” Camille Paglia, who called Bloom her mentor, doubted the book would change any minds. After his death Kenan Malik granted that Bloom “was right that some books are more profound, more significant and more valuable than others,” but argued that he “conflated judgment and understanding”: he insisted, for example, that Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon be judged chiefly as her struggle with Faulkner, setting aside the African American experience she herself saw as its source.
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) goes through every play, “twenty-four of which are masterpieces,” and makes the most extravagant claim of Bloom’s career: that Shakespeare created the human personality as we now understand it. The mechanism is what he called self-overhearing. Shakespeare’s great characters, above all Falstaff and Hamlet, hear what they have just said and change because of it; they “develop rather than unfold.” Falstaff was Bloom’s favourite, and in 1994 Begley found him “apt to become Sir John,” a wit with a glutton’s appetites. “Shakespeare is God,” he said, and he argued that bardolatry “ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is.” Popular books followed: How to Read and Why (2000), Genius (2002, on a reported $1.2 million advance) and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003). In 2002 he had open-heart surgery.
In February 2004 Naomi Wolf published “The Silent Treatment” in New York magazine. She wrote that in the late fall of 1983, when she was a 20-year-old Yale senior, her adviser John Hollander urged her to take an independent study with Bloom, who agreed to meet her weekly and wrote a reference for her Rhodes Scholarship application. After weeks without a meeting, Bloom came to dinner at the house she shared with one of his editorial assistants, bringing a bottle of Amontillado that he drank throughout; she drank too. When the others had left, she says, he ignored her poetry manuscript, told her “You have the aura of election upon you,” and put his hand on her inner thigh; she pulled away, backed against the sink and vomited, and he said “You are a deeply troubled girl” and left. Wolf said she had told a disguised version in her 1997 book Promiscuities. Her stated reason for naming him was Yale: she had spent nine months asking for a confidential assurance that its grievance procedures had improved, and was told, among other things, that the statute of limitations had passed.
Bloom did not comment at the time; “He has no comment,” his wife told reporters. He later denied it outright, saying that Wolf had never been his student, and told Time in 2015: “I have never been indoors with that human being in my life.” His account and hers cannot both be true, and no Yale finding was ever made. The response split along familiar lines. Paglia, his former student, called it a witch-hunt and said it was “indecent” to wait twenty years; Andrea Dworkin, who disliked Wolf’s work, said “I’m certain Wolf is telling the truth”; Elizabeth Wurtzel called Bloom “kinda creepy” while doubting Wolf’s timing.
He broke his back in a fall in 2008 and kept teaching, swearing he would have to be carried out of the classroom “in a great big body bag.” Students remember him in The Chair, surrounded by stacks of books, calling men and women alike “my dear” and kissing them on the top of the head. The memory was part of the act, and also real. By his own account he could read and absorb a 400-page book in an hour and had by heart the whole of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, all of Blake, the Hebrew Bible and The Faerie Queene; the Associated Press reported that he once recited Crane’s The Bridge backwards. The philosopher Richard Bernstein said watching him read was “scary.”
The Anatomy of Influence (2011), which he called his “virtual swan song,” returned to the old theme in a more personal key and conceded that a critic must take traditions outside the West seriously. It was not the end: he published a series of short books on Shakespeare’s personalities, from Falstaff to Macbeth, in 2017–19, and in 2019 Possessed by Memory, readings of more than eighty texts he had carried by heart since childhood. That autumn he was teaching “Shakespeare and the Canon” and “Poetic Influence from Shakespeare to Keats.” He taught his last class on Thursday 10 October 2019 and died in a New Haven hospital on 14 October, aged 89. His colleague Langdon Hammer called him “visionary, sorrowing, wicked, elegant, funny, profoundly learned, personal, and loving.”
G. K. ChestertonContrasting readers whose criticism is inseparable from personality and conviction.
C. S. LewisA neighboring route through canon, myth, faith and the uses of reading.
