Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was a prominent American literary critic, scholar, and author, known for his extensive work on English and European literature. Born in the South Bronx, Bloom was a prodigy who engaged with literature from a young age, ultimately earning his PhD from Yale University, where he spent most of his academic career. He became renowned for his critical theories, particularly articulated in his seminal work, "The Anxiety of Influence," where he explored the complex relationships between writers and their predecessors, suggesting that the anxiety of originality can lead to misinterpretation of earlier works. Bloom's literary approach often diverged from contemporary theories, positioning him as a maverick in the literary world.
Throughout his career, he wrote extensively on various authors, particularly William Shakespeare, whose influence he believed shaped modern self-understanding. Bloom also delved into religious themes, examining sacred texts and American Christianity. His pedagogy aimed to make literature accessible to the general public, producing popular guides and anthologies. Despite his acclaim, Bloom's life was marked by controversy, including allegations of inappropriate conduct, which he denied. Nonetheless, his impact on literary criticism and appreciation remains significant, characterized by a passionate defense of the Western literary canon and a belief in the transformative power of literature.
Harold Bloom
Literary Critic
- Born: July 11, 1930
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: October 14, 2019
- Place of death: New Haven, CT
Bloom, a leading literary critic and influential academic in the field of Western literature, became almost synonymous with the "Western canon," those great works of literature that form the basis of the twentieth-century American literature curricula.
Early Life
Harold Bloom was born in the South Bronx area of New York City to William and Paula Bloom. His family was Yiddish speaking, and Bloom learned Yiddish and Hebrew before English. He has recalled that Yiddish literature first captivated him. Bloom proved a precocious boy, reciting English poetry by the age of seven. By ten he was reading books from Fordham University, including William Blake's poetry. By sixteen he was reading Moby Dick (1851), William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens.
Bloom was graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. In 1947, he won a scholarship to Cornell University, where he was greatly influenced by M. H. Abrams, a leading Romantic scholar. He graduated in 1952, then spent a year at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. He attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut for his PhD, which he obtained in 1955. He was then offered a position in the English Department, and he remained at Yale for the rest of his academic life. In 1959 he married Jeanne Gould, with whom he had two children.
Bloom never fully embraced Judaism but remained interested in the Hebrew Bible and religious matters. In the 1960s, a personal crisis pushed him to reading the Kabbalah, Jewish esoteric or mystic writings based on Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, and his religious outlook became increasingly Gnostic.
Life's Work
Although Bloom remained an active teacher all his life, eventually becoming Sterling Professor of Humanities and English at Yale, his reputation rests on the prodigious amount of critical work he wrote or edited on English and European literature. His first work, Shelley's Myth-Making (1959), signaled both his early interest in Romantic poets and his typical confrontational stance, accusing earlier critics of misreading. This was followed by more works on English Romanticism, The Visionary Company (1961) and Blake's Apocalypse (1963). Blake's influence on him was profound, especially in developing his Gnostic beliefs.
However, Bloom's lifelong interest developed into how literary tradition works, especially in the way one writer may be influenced by earlier writers, and the way the literary canon is formed. An early example was his book on William Butler Yeats, written in 1970. His first major work was The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry in 1973. Previous critics had written on tradition, from Samuel Johnson through Matthew Arnold, to F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, and, Bloom's great Canadian contemporary, Northrop Frye. Bloom's understanding of how tradition works was altogether more complex than that of these writers, being based on psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's theory of anxiety. The book is extremely technical, with Bloom using terminology from Kabbalistic writings in tracing a sixfold categorization of types of influence. The basic theory is that a writer's anxiety to be original will lead them to misread earlier writers. According to Bloom, the angst for originality developed with Samuel Johnson and the subsequent Romantic movement. He claims that Shakespeare altogether escaped it or easily brushed aside influences such as Christopher Marlowe. To the Romantics, however, poets such as Shakespeare and John Milton proved major hazards to avoid.
Bloom went on to develop this theory in A Map of Misreading (1975) and Kabbalah and Criticism (1975). Here he strengthened his differentiation between "strong" and "weak" or imitative writers. He also expounded on "influence" as necessarily a baleful source of anxiety for strong writers. The 1970s, of course, was also the period when European literary theory went in quite new directions, especially through such writers as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. After initial brushes with deconstruction, Bloom found himself increasingly determined not to be influenced by such theories and consequently alienated himself from the American establishment's rush to poststructuralism, new historicism, and feminist theory. However, he did share their fascination with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, though he counterbalanced this with equal admiration for the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the late 1980s Bloom turned his attention to the writing of sacred texts, in Ruin the Sacred Truths (1989), The Book of J (1990), and Jesus and Yahweh (2005), and to religion in general in The American Religion (1992), in which he sees American Christianity becoming Gnostic. The Book of J, which became a best seller, takes the old and somewhat outdated theory of a Yahwist writer of the Torah. In Blakean fashion, Bloom sees the depiction of God as Gnostic, jokingly adding that the writer was probably Bathsheba.
Later in his career Bloom pursued two quite different efforts: first, to edit a series of guides to major writers or texts from the past and, second, to appeal over the heads of academia to the "general reader" to continue reading literature as a humane and liberal study. Both these missions drew on his nearly unprecedented popular reach as literary critic. A cottage industry emerged under the imprint of Chelsea House Press: a series with titles such as Bloom's Guides, Bloom's Bio-Critiques, and Bloom's Literary Criticism. Books aimed at the common reader are How to Read and Why (2000) and a 2007 anthology of great poems in English. They show Bloom's amazing range of reading and his personal enthusiasms, but at times he cannot help theorizing in ways that alienate rather than attract readers. Probably Bloom's greatest popularization was of his idol, Shakespeare. In his Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom goes through most of the plays, trying to show that Shakespeare's construction of his characters was the forerunner of how people view themselves today.
Bloom's high-profile status and outspoken views often drew controversy in literary circles, and at times his personal life drew criticism as well. Reports frequently circulated that he had affairs or otherwise close relationships with various graduate students. Notably, writer Naomi Wolf alleged in a 2004 New York magazine article that Bloom had touched her inappropriately in 1983 when she was a student of his at Yale and that the Yale administration was uncooperative when she brought the issue to their attention in 2003. Wolf also reported that she requested information regarding the sexual safety of students on campus. Media controversy erupted immediately. Critics noted that her 2004 account differed from a fictionalized memoir account she had previously published; that Bloom was never given an opportunity to refute the charge formally; and that the account was not investigated and reported by an objective third-party but by the alleged victim herself. Bloom himself strongly denied all accusations against him.
In 2015, Bloom published The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, a persuasive examination of the creative spirit of twelve iconic American writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. In his early eighties, Bloom suffered from various health ailments and accidental injuries, some of which compelled him to be hospitalized. Nevertheless, he continued to teach seminars on Shakespeare and poetry out of his New Haven home. Among his later books were several entries in a series on Shakespearean characters—including Falstaff: Give Me Life (2017), Lear: The Great Image of Authority (2018), and Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind (2019)—and Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (2019).
Bloom died in a New Haven hospital on October 14, 2019. He was eighty-nine years old.
Significance
Throughout his career Bloom received many awards, becoming Berg Professor of English at New York University and Charles Norton Professor at Harvard. As one of the best known literary critics of all time, he achieved a level of commercial success unusual for an academic. Bloom's confrontational methodology took on the form of a maverick defiance of antiliberal theory, which he labeled "the politics of resentment," and this often made him a figure of controversy as well as admiration. However, Bloom backed up his views with his general and generous scholarship and sheer knowledge of a huge corpus of literary and nonliterary texts. For him, the Greek ideal, not social or societal improvement—to know oneself—is the ultimate goal of all reading.
Bibliography
Allen, Graham. Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict. New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1994. Print.
Bloom, Harold. "Harold Bloom: Preposterous 'Isms' Are Destroying Literature." Interview by Michael Skafidas. World Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 10 June 2015. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.
D'Addario, Daniel. "10 Questions with Harold Bloom." Time 7 May 2015: n. pag. Academic Search Complete. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.
Fite, David. Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2009. Print.
Mikics, David. "Harold Bloom Is God." Tablet. Nextbook Inc., 2 Jan. 2013. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.
Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Versions of the Past—Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom. New York: St. Martin's, 1996. Print.
Sellars, Roy, and Graham Allen, eds. The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom. Cambridge: Salt, 2007. Print.
Smith, Dinitia. "Harold Bloom, Critic Who Championed Western Canon, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 14 Oct. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html. Accessed 11 Dec. 2019.
Warren, Marcus. "Yale Sex Claims Brings Out Knives for Wolf." Sydney Morning Herald. Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Feb. 2004. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.