Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (New York, 1930 – New Haven, 2019) was an American literary critic who taught for decades at Yale University. He is best known for defending the Western literary canon during the bitter campus debates of the late twentieth century. He wrote in English, yet his books were translated into more than forty languages, and the English Romantic poets served as the starting point for much of his thinking.

He grew up in the South Bronx in an Orthodox Jewish household where Yiddish was spoken. He learned literary Hebrew before English, which he picked up at about the age of six, and that early exposure to languages shaped how he approached texts. He studied at Cornell, where M. H. Abrams was one of his teachers, then spent a Fulbright year at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and finally earned his doctorate at Yale in 1955. He stayed there for the rest of his career. His first books, on Shelley, Blake, Yeats and Stevens, argued for the High Romantics against critics influenced by neo-Christian readings. They drew sharp reactions in the academy, and Bloom's combative tone and personal style kept the controversy alive.

After a personal crisis in the late 1960s, he turned to Emerson, Freud and the mystical traditions of Gnosticism and Kabbalah. From this mix came his theory of the anxiety of influence. New poets admire their predecessors, but that admiration hardens into rivalry, and they can only create by misreading those models in productive ways. He separated strong poets, capable of such creative misreadings, from weak ones who simply repeat received doctrines. Later he turned to religious criticism, with books such as Ruin the Sacred Truths and The Book of J, written with David Rosenberg. His only novel, The Flight to Lucifer, was a sequel to a fantasy by David Lindsay.

His most visible legacy is The Western Canon, published in 1994, which gathered the twenty-six authors he considered indispensable. Critics on both the left and the right attacked the book, yet it renewed debate about what we read and why. Bloom left a lasting mark on discussions of literary tradition and on the case for aesthetic reading against the politicization of criticism. He died in New Haven at the age of 89, having taught almost until the end.