Harold Bloom

Based on Wikipedia: Harold Bloom

"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."

That combative declaration came from Harold Bloom, who spent six decades at Yale University waging intellectual war on behalf of great books. He was, by many accounts, the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world—a designation that might seem paradoxical, since literary critics rarely achieve any kind of fame at all. But Bloom managed it through sheer force of personality, prolific output, and an unwavering conviction that some books are simply better than others, and that pretending otherwise does damage to human souls.

A Yiddish Childhood and the Discovery of Poetry

Bloom came into the world on July 11, 1930, in the Bronx, into a household where Yiddish was the native tongue and English was a foreign language. His parents were Jewish immigrants—his father William had fled from Odesa, Ukraine, and worked in the garment industry; his mother Paula came from near Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus. Harold was the youngest of five children, with three older sisters and a brother. He would outlive them all.

He didn't learn English until he was six years old. But he could already read literary Hebrew, the ancient language of scripture and commentary. This early bilingualism—or trilingualism, really—planted something in him. Languages were not just communication tools. They were doorways into different ways of thinking, different traditions of wisdom and beauty.

The transformation came when young Harold encountered Hart Crane's Collected Poems. Hart Crane was an American poet of intense difficulty and even more intense vision, a writer who drowned himself in the Caribbean at thirty-two after producing some of the most compressed and allusive verse in the language. For most readers, Crane is nearly impenetrable. For the boy from the Bronx, he was a revelation. This collection ignited what Bloom later described as a lifelong fascination with poetry—not poetry as a pleasant pastime or cultural refinement, but poetry as the highest achievement of human consciousness.

His formal education was checkered in the way that often marks future intellectuals. At the Bronx High School of Science, his grades were poor. But his standardized test scores were exceptional. This pattern—mediocre compliance with institutional demands combined with obvious brilliance—would characterize his entire career.

The Making of a Critic

Bloom earned his bachelor's degree in classics from Cornell University in 1951, where he studied under M. H. Abrams, himself a distinguished literary scholar. He then moved to Yale for his doctoral work, completing his degree in 1955. Along the way, he spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, immersing himself in the British academic tradition.

At Yale, he clashed almost immediately with the reigning critical establishment. The dominant school at the time was called the New Criticism, an approach that insisted on treating literary texts as self-contained objects, divorced from their authors' biographies and intentions. The New Critics focused obsessively on close reading—examining the words on the page without reference to anything outside them.

Bloom found this approach sterile and even dishonest. Literature, for him, was not a museum exhibit to be studied under glass. It was a living struggle between ambitious minds across centuries. He dedicated one of his most important books to William K. Wimsatt, a leading New Critic and Yale colleague, in what can only be described as an aggressive gesture of intellectual respect—the kind of tribute that says "I honor you as a worthy opponent."

He joined the Yale English Department in 1955 and never left. For sixty-four years, until his death in 2019, he taught there. He gave his final class just four days before he died. He had always said that the only way he would leave the classroom was "in a great big body bag," and he meant it literally.

The Anxiety of Influence

In 1973, Bloom published the book that would make his reputation: The Anxiety of Influence. The title alone entered the intellectual vocabulary of the era. The idea it named was deceptively simple but genuinely revolutionary.

Here is the problem Bloom identified: How does any poet—or any creative artist—manage to produce original work when everything worth saying has apparently already been said? Homer wrote the foundational epics of Western literature nearly three thousand years ago. Shakespeare seems to have anticipated every human emotion and situation. Milton conquered religious epic; Wordsworth conquered the poetry of nature and memory. What is left for anyone else?

Most people never feel this pressure because they are not trying to create masterpieces. But for those who are—for the "strong poets," as Bloom called them—the weight of tradition is crushing. Every great writer you admire is also your rival. Every beautiful line they wrote is one you can never write first.

Bloom argued that strong poets overcome this anxiety through creative misreading. They convince themselves, often unconsciously, that their predecessors made mistakes or left things incomplete. They find gaps in the work they love, places where they can insert their own vision. They wrestle with their literary fathers and mothers like Jacob wrestling with the angel, refusing to let go until they receive their own blessing.

This psychological drama plays out across generations. John Milton struggled with the shadow of Edmund Spenser. The Romantic poets—William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats—struggled with Milton. Walt Whitman struggled with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Each generation must slay its predecessors symbolically in order to claim its own authority.

The term "weak poets," in Bloom's vocabulary, didn't necessarily mean bad poets. It meant poets who simply accepted their predecessors' visions uncritically, repeating received ideas as if following a religious doctrine. Weak poets are epigones—derivative followers. Strong poets are heretics who transform what they inherit.

The Religious Turn

Something changed in Bloom during the late 1960s. He went through what he later called a "personal crisis," the details of which he kept private. What emerged from this crisis was a deep fascination with mystical traditions: Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism.

Gnosticism was a religious movement in the early centuries of the Common Era that taught that the material world was created by a flawed or even malevolent deity, and that salvation came through secret knowledge—the Greek word gnosis means "knowledge"—that revealed our true divine origins. Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical tradition, filled with elaborate symbolic systems for interpreting scripture and understanding the hidden structure of reality. Hermeticism is a body of philosophical and magical texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary sage who supposedly lived in ancient Egypt.

What connected these traditions, for Bloom, was their shared conviction that official religious institutions had obscured the truth rather than revealed it. The Gnostics rejected the god of the Old Testament as a bumbling craftsman. The Kabbalists read the Torah as an elaborate code concealing infinitely deeper meanings. The Hermeticists claimed access to wisdom older and purer than Christianity or Judaism.

Bloom called himself a "Jewish Gnostic." He remained emphatically Jewish—"I am nothing if not Jewish," he insisted. "I really am a product of Yiddish culture." But he could not accept the God of traditional Judaism, the all-powerful and all-knowing creator. "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."

This theological rebellion informed his later books. In The Book of J, published in 1990, he and translator David Rosenberg argued that one of the foundational sources of the first five books of the Bible—the source scholars call "J" because it uses the name Yahweh for God—was written by a literary genius with no intention of producing religious doctrine. Even more provocatively, they speculated that this author might have been a woman, possibly connected to the court of King Solomon. Later, Bloom suggested he hadn't gone far enough: perhaps the author was actually Bathsheba, David's wife and Solomon's mother.

In The American Religion, published in 1992, Bloom turned his gnostic lens on the religious landscape of the United States. His thesis was startling: most American Protestantism, despite its official doctrines, actually functions as a kind of gnosticism. American believers, he argued, are less interested in the Jesus of the New Testament than in a personal, internal experience of the divine—a private knowledge of their own divine spark. The Mormons, the Pentecostals, the Southern Baptists—all of them, in Bloom's reading, were gnostics who didn't know it.

The one exception he noted was the Jehovah's Witnesses, who maintained what he saw as a genuinely non-gnostic theology, emphasizing obedience to an external God rather than the discovery of inner divinity.

The School of Resentment

As Bloom pursued his idiosyncratic blend of literary criticism and religious speculation, the academy around him was changing in ways he despised.

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the following decades, literature departments were increasingly influenced by theoretical frameworks drawn from Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and what came to be called cultural studies. These approaches shared a common premise: literature could not be understood apart from the social conditions that produced it. Reading Shakespeare meant examining the power structures of Elizabethan England. Reading Jane Austen meant analyzing the marriage market and class anxieties of Regency society. Reading any "great books" meant asking uncomfortable questions about whose greatness was being celebrated and whose voices were being excluded.

Bloom gave this constellation of approaches a dismissive label: the School of Resentment.

The phrase was characteristic. Bloom rarely engaged with his opponents' arguments in technical detail. Instead, he diagnosed their psychological motivations. They resented aesthetic achievement because they could not match it. They resented Shakespeare's genius because it implicitly rebuked their mediocrity. They wanted to tear down the monuments because they could not build monuments of their own.

His counter-position was uncompromising. The purpose of reading literature, he insisted, was not social improvement. You do not read Hamlet to become a better citizen or to understand Elizabethan gender roles. You read Hamlet for "solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight." Literature was not a means to political ends. Literature was an end in itself—perhaps the highest end human beings could pursue short of religious experience, and possibly higher than that.

A feminist reading of Hamlet, Bloom allowed, might tell you something about feminism. A Marxist reading might tell you something about Marxism. But neither would tell you anything about Hamlet. And Hamlet was what mattered.

The Western Canon

In 1994, Bloom published his most popular and controversial book: The Western Canon. It was a survey of what he considered the essential literary works of European and American civilization, organized around twenty-six exemplary texts spanning from Dante's Divine Comedy in the fourteenth century to Samuel Beckett's plays in the twentieth.

The book was an explicit provocation. At a moment when many academics were questioning whether a "canon" of great works could or should exist—arguing that canons were merely ideological constructs designed to privilege certain voices and silence others—Bloom doubled down. Yes, he said, some books are better than others. Yes, some authors are more important than others. Yes, Shakespeare stands at the center of Western literature, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.

He introduced the concept of "canonical strangeness" as his criterion for greatness. The truly great works are not great because they perfectly embody their cultural moment. They are great because something about them is irreducibly strange, uncanny, resistant to explanation. Shakespeare's characters seem to have interior lives richer than any theory can capture. Dante's vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven has a hallucinatory specificity that defies allegory. These works survive not because they reflect universal values but because they are so peculiar, so individual, so absolutely themselves that no other works can replace them.

The Western Canon also included an appendix that attracted enormous attention: a list of all the books Bloom considered canonical or potentially canonical, organized by era and nationality. The list ran to hundreds of titles. Bloom later said he had compiled it off the top of his head at his editor's request and didn't entirely stand by it. But the list circulated widely and influenced countless reading programs.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Bloom's deepest love was reserved for William Shakespeare. He called Shakespeare the center of the Western canon—not merely one great writer among others, but the central consciousness around which Western literature organized itself.

In 1998, he published Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a massive book providing commentary on all thirty-eight of Shakespeare's plays. The thesis was characteristically audacious: Shakespeare, Bloom argued, essentially invented modern human personality. Before Shakespeare, literary characters were types—the jealous lover, the ambitious schemer, the virtuous maiden. After Shakespeare, characters became individuals with recognizable inner lives, capable of change, self-reflection, and surprise.

The key innovation, in Bloom's account, was what he called "overhearing." Shakespeare's greatest characters—Hamlet, Falstaff, Iago, Cleopatra—seem to listen to themselves thinking. They make remarks, pause, consider what they have said, and react to their own words. This creates the illusion of an interior space where thought actually happens, rather than merely being reported. We, the audience, overhear these characters overhearing themselves. And in doing so, we learn to overhear ourselves.

This is a strong claim. Bloom was essentially arguing that human self-consciousness, as we now understand it, is a cultural invention barely four centuries old, and that one dramatist deserves primary credit for inventing it.

Professional academics largely rejected the book. They accused Bloom of reviving a discredited approach called "character criticism," which treats fictional characters as if they were real people with psychological depths beyond what the text explicitly states. Modern literary theory had moved decisively away from this kind of reading. Bloom responded that he didn't care. The academics were missing the point. Shakespeare's characters did seem more real than real people. That was the miracle. Explaining it away was a failure of imagination.

He also used the book for another attack on the School of Resentment. His opponents claimed to value multiculturalism, diversity, the representation of marginalized voices. Fine, Bloom said. But Shakespeare is already multicultural. His plays are performed and beloved all over the world—in Japan, in India, in Africa, in every country with a theatrical tradition. Shakespeare does not belong to England or to white Europeans. Shakespeare belongs to humanity. The academics who wanted to dethrone him in favor of "diversity" were actually impoverishing the genuinely diverse global audience that treasured his work.

The Man Himself

Bloom was, by all accounts, an overwhelming presence. He was physically large and intellectually larger. He claimed to be able to read four hundred pages an hour while retaining everything. He said he had memorized most of the major poetry in English and could recite Paradise Lost from memory. Whether these claims were entirely accurate or slightly exaggerated, his erudition was genuine and intimidating.

He was also controversial for reasons beyond his academic positions. A 1990 article in GQ magazine accused him of having affairs with female graduate students. He called the article "a disgusting piece of character assassination." A colleague acknowledged that Bloom's "wandering" had been something he "rather bragged about" for years. In 2004, the writer Naomi Wolf publicly accused Bloom of sexual harassment, claiming that when she was an undergraduate at Yale in 1983, he had placed his hand on her inner thigh during a dinner meeting about her writing. Bloom denied this allegation.

He married Jeanne Gould in 1958, and they had two children. Their marriage lasted until his death. In a 2005 interview, Jeanne stated that they were both atheists. Harold immediately contradicted her: "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist." Whether he believed in God, and if so what kind of God, remained characteristically ambiguous. He was a Jewish Gnostic, after all. He rejected the God of the rabbis while remaining somehow religious in his own fashion.

He was fond of endearments, calling students and colleagues "my dear" regardless of gender. He collected disciples and inspired devotion. He wrote more than fifty books and edited hundreds of anthologies. His works were translated into over forty languages. He received a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called "genius grant"—in 1985. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995. He taught at both Yale and New York University simultaneously for sixteen years.

His health declined in his later years. He had open-heart surgery in 2002. He broke his back in a fall in 2008. But he kept teaching. On October 10, 2019, four days before his death, he gave his final class. On October 14, he died at a New Haven hospital. He was eighty-nine years old.

The Argument That Remains

Harold Bloom's legacy is not a settled matter. His critics argue that he was fundamentally reactionary, defending an elitist conception of culture against necessary democratization. His admirers argue that he was defending something precious against philistine reduction—the irreplaceable experience of encountering a mind greater than your own.

What cannot be denied is that he made a case. He argued, with passion and learning, that some human achievements are simply better than others. That great literature is not great because scholars declare it so, but because it does something to readers that lesser literature cannot do. That encountering Shakespeare or Dante or Cervantes is a different kind of experience than encountering competent but ordinary writing. That the difference matters.

Whether this is elitism or simply recognition of reality depends on your premises. If you believe that all cultural products are essentially equivalent, differing only in the social power of their advocates, then Bloom was an ideologue defending unjust hierarchies. If you believe that some things genuinely are more beautiful, more profound, more conducive to human flourishing than others, then Bloom was simply telling the truth.

He would have had no doubt which view was correct. He would have quoted Shakespeare or Milton at you until you either agreed or fled. He would have been charming and overbearing and probably right. He would have called you "my dear" and assigned you a hundred pages of reading.

And somewhere, in a library or a dorm room or a bus stop, someone who has never heard of Harold Bloom is picking up Hamlet for the first time and discovering that it contains more truth about human nature than any academic theory. That was what Bloom lived for. That was what he meant by the Western canon. Not a list. Not a curriculum. A living encounter with greatness that changes you forever.