Harold Bloom, the Yale University eminence who died last week at age 89, was the most famous, most prolific, and—to use the apt word—most influential literary critic in America from the time he published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973. The title of that book has entered our critical vocabulary, as has Bloom’s thesis that a “strong” poet must overcome the influence of a powerful precursor. To become himself, Wordsworth had to contend with Milton, for example, while John Ashbery had to endure a wrestling match with Wallace Stevens.
In the books he wrote in the aftermath of The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom employed an esoteric critical vocabulary—askesis, clinamen, agon—that didn’t catch on, but what succeeded spectacularly in such books as A Map of Misreading (1975) was his ingenious effort to integrate Freud usefully into the interpretation of texts. Bloom also distinguished himself by the force of his assertions and the excellence of his judgment. With great fervor, he saluted the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and championed such contemporary poets as Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, and James Merrill way ahead of nearly everyone else.
When, during the culture wars of the 1980s and since, the literary canon came under attack, Bloom was among the most voluble defenders of great books and the related ideas of genius and originality, which academics were doing their best to deconstruct, a shifty word that in this context means “to destroy.” The Western Canon (1994) was a best seller, with chapters on Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Dr. Johnson, Goethe, Jane Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and other truly great authors. Bloom’s assertions were sometimes controversial and almost always compellingly worded. I just pulled my copy from the shelf, and at random plucked these three remarkable quotes:
—“All literature is plagiaristic” (inasmuch as all writing feeds on the “communal”).
—Henry James, reviewing Drum Taps, dismissed Whitman as “only, as it were, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day.”
—“Strangeness … is one of the prime requirements for entrance into the canon.”
The use of “strangeness” or “the uncanny” as a criterion for evaluating poetry was just one of Bloom’s original insights. Keep reading by clicking here.
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