Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American professor and literary critic.

Biography

The son of William and Paula Bloom, Harold Bloom was born in New York City and lived in the East Bronx at 1410 Grand Concourse. He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household, and learned Yiddish and literary Hebrew before learning English.

Related Topics:
New York City - East Bronx - Yiddish - Hebrew

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He entered Cornell University in 1947 on scholarship (he was one of 65 people in the Bronx that year to win a scholarship from the State Department of Education).

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Bloom has frequently recounted that his attachment to poetry began when, at the age of ten, he discovered Hart Crane's book White Buildings at the Bronx public library. He claims that he knew "by age eleven or twelve that all I really liked to do was read poetry and discuss it." He earned a B.A. in 1951, and then went to Yale University for graduate study. He received his Ph.D. in 1955 and has been a member of the Yale faculty since that time. In 1958 he married Jeanne Gould; they have two sons, Daniel Jacob and David Moses, one of whom is severely disabled. Bloom refuses to discuss his children in interviews.

Related Topics:
Hart Crane - White Buildings - Yale University

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Bloom credits Northrop Frye as his major precursor as critic. He told Irme Salusinzky in 1986, "In terms of my own theorizations... the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. Burke, who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye."

Related Topics:
Northrop Frye - Fearful Symmetry - Burke

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Bloom began his career by defending the reputations of the High Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T.S. Eliot. His approach was contentious: his first book, Shelley's Mythmaking, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of Shelley.

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After a personal crisis in the late sixties, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Hermetism. He would later come to describe himself as a 'Jewish gnostic,' explaining "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But 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."

Related Topics:
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Sigmund Freud - Gnosticism - Kabbalah - Hermetism - Yahweh - Nazi - Death camp - Schizophrenia

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Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write. The first of these books was Yeats, a magisterial examination of William Butler Yeats that challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." A new poet is inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that everything he wishes to say has already been said by these poets whom he idolized. The poet is disappointed because he "cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."

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In order to evade this psychological obstacle, the new poet must convince himself that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that he may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poet's love for his heroes turns into antagonism towards them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." (Map of Misreading p. 10)

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The book that followed Yeats, The Anxiety of Influence, which Bloom had started writing in 1967, set out his new doctrine in a systematic form. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which a poet broke free from his precursors to achieve his own poetic vision. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets" who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets" who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though they were a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios," through which each strong poet passed in the course of his career.

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A Map of Misreading picked up where The Anxiety of Influence left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism attempted to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the Lurianic kabbalah, as explicated by scholar Gershom Scholem, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination was a collection of odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his influence books. He capped off this period of intense creativity with another monograph, a full-length study of Wallace Stevens, with whom, as he told an interviewer in the early 1980s, he identified more than any other poet at this stage of his career.

Related Topics:
Kabbalah - Gershom Scholem - Wallace Stevens

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Bloom's fascination with the fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay led him to take a brief break from criticism in order to compose an attempted sequel to Lindsay's novel. This novel, The Flight to Lucifer, has been Bloom's only attempt at fiction writing. Though reviews were not entirely discouraging, he soon disowned this book. As he himself admitted, it was too heavily weighted down by the author's self-conscious theoretical interest in the nature of fantasy literature. He has said that he would remove every copy of the book from every library if he could.

Related Topics:
A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay

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Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the seventies and eighties, and he has rarely written anything since which does not invoke his ideas about influence.

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Beginning with The Book of J (for which he wrote the introduction and commentary) in 1990, Bloom began a series of miscellaneous works that reached out to a more popular audience. In The Book of J he argued that the ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the bible (see documentary hypothesis) were the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work. Bloom further argued that this anonymous writer was a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon — a piece of speculation which drew much attention. Later, he said (perhaps jokingly) that his speculations didn't go far enough, and he should have identified J with the biblical Bathsheba.

Related Topics:
The Book of J - Documentary hypothesis - Bathsheba

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In The American Religion, Bloom surveyed the major varieties of Protestant and post-Protestant religious faiths in the United States, and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, all shared more in common with gnosticism than with historical Christianity.

Related Topics:
The American Religion - Gnosticism

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In 1994, Bloom published The Western Canon, a survey of the major literary works of post-Roman Europe, which including an introduction and conclusion explicitly attacking the rise of ideologically-driven literary studies among academic critics. The book also included a list—which aroused more widespread interest than anything else in the volume—of all the Western works from antiquity to the present which Bloom considered to be either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or (among more recent works) candidates for that status. The publicity surrounding The Western Canon turned him into something of a celebrity.

Related Topics:
1994 - The Western Canon

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His critical work is often associated with that of his protege at Yale in the 1970s, Camille Paglia.

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