Harold Bloom

The household in the East Bronx spoke Yiddish and kept Orthodox observance. William Bloom worked in tailoring shops and was often out of work. Harold, the youngest of five, learned English at about six by sounding out the words of Blake's Prophecies, as he told it, and found Hart Crane in the Bronx library a few years later. An uncle asked what he would do for a living. He said he wanted to read poetry, and was told there were professors of poetry at Harvard and Yale. Bronx Science followed, then Cornell on scholarship, then a Yale doctorate in 1955, at a time when English departments were still barely open to Jews. He called himself a rough Yiddisher boy from the Bronx, and a proletarian too.

The argument that made him came in 1973. The Anxiety of Influence held that serious poets are not simply fed by the poets they love but crowded out by them, everything already named, no room left to say anything first. The only way through is to get the predecessor wrong on purpose. Strong poetry, on this account, is deliberate misreading. He built the case out of Freud and the Kabbalah, extended it in A Map of Misreading, and let readers file him with the Yale deconstructionists for years while insisting he shared almost nothing with them.

The Western Canon arrived in 1994, built on 26 works he called sublime and aimed at an enemy he named on nearly every page. The School of Resentment was his term for feminist, Marxist, New Historicist and multiculturalist critics, who in his account read books for their politics and taught students to prefer the second-rate. Aesthetic value was the only test he would accept, and Shakespeare set it. The answer came in two parts. The tradition he was defending was overwhelmingly white, male and European, and the strangeness he prized was not a neutral standard but his own taste written up as one. And the phrase itself assigned motives to whole fields rather than arguing with anything they had actually written. The book sold enormously. Nobody moved.

In February 2004 Naomi Wolf wrote in New York magazine that Bloom had put his hand on her inner thigh at a dinner in 1983, when she was an undergraduate at Yale. Bloom denied it. Yale told her that its two-year limit on such complaints had long since passed, and took no action. The output never slowed: more than 40 books of criticism, hundreds of edited anthologies, and a claim, often repeated, that he could read 1,000 pages an hour. He taught his last class from home on October 10, 2019 and died in New Haven four days later, at 89. Colin Burrow called him a great provoker of thought, of laughter and of resistance.

Harold Bloom's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Shelley's Mythmaking book
  His dissertation, and his first public accusation that other critics were not reading carefully 1959
• The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry book
  Strong poets misread their predecessors on purpose. Translated into dozens of languages 1973
• The Book of J book
  With translator David Rosenberg — argued the oldest strand of the Torah was written by a woman at the Solomonic court 1990
• The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages book
  26 writers, a much-argued appendix list, and the School of Resentment 1994
• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human book
  All 38 plays, and the claim that Shakespeare invented the modern inner life 1998
• Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism book
  The last book published in his lifetime 2019

• 1951 aged ~21 Takes a classics degree at Cornell, having read Northrop Frye to pieces He called Frye his authentic precursor, and decades later said he could no longer read him at all.
• 1955 aged ~25 Earns a Yale doctorate and joins the English department he will never leave The department was the headquarters of the New Criticism and made no secret of finding him out of place.
• 1959 aged ~29 Publishes Shelley's Mythmaking and picks his first fight in print
• 1973 aged ~43 The Anxiety of Influence puts the oedipal struggle at the centre of poetry Started in 1967, drawing on Walter Jackson Bate and recasting him in psychoanalytic terms.
• 1976 aged ~46 Resigns from the Yale English department and keeps teaching anyway Yale answered by making him Sterling Professor of the Humanities rather than lose him.
• 1985 aged ~55 Receives a MacArthur Fellowship
• 1994 aged ~64 The Western Canon names the School of Resentment and starts a decade of fighting
• February 20, 2004 aged 73 Naomi Wolf publishes her account of a 1983 encounter in New York magazine Bloom denied it. Yale said the complaint fell outside its two-year limit and took no action.
• October 14, 2019 aged 89 Dies in New Haven at 89, four days after teaching his last class

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. read as his precursor
• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. championed
• Edward Said 1935–2003
  His 1978 book Orientalism argued that Western knowledge of the East was built inside imperial power, and it remade several humanities fields. opposed on the canon
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. b. 1950
  Literary critic and Harvard professor who has shaped African American studies and popularized genealogy. canon war opponent
• Cornel West b. 1953
  Philosopher and public intellectual whose work bridges race, democracy, and American pragmatism. disagreed with
• Susan Sontag 1933–2004
  Against Interpretation, On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor rival critic