Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, and died on October 14, 2019. He was an American literary critic and held the position of Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale University. In 2017, he was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom authored more than 50 books, including over 40 works of literary criticism, many books about religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of collections featuring writings by many literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing company. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 1995, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Bloom supported the traditional Western canon during a time when many literature departments focused on ideas he criticized as the "School of Resentment," which included movements such as multiculturalism, feminism, and Marxism. He received his education at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.

Early life and education

Harold Bloom was born in New York City on July 11, 1930, to Paula (née Lev) and William Bloom. He lived at 1410 Grand Concourse in the Bronx. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a household that spoke Yiddish, where he studied literary Hebrew. He learned English at the age of six. Bloom’s father, a garment worker, was born in Odesa. His mother, a homemaker, was born near Brest-Litovsk in what is now Belarus. Harold had three older sisters and an older brother. He was the last surviving sibling.

As a boy, Bloom read Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, a book that sparked his lifelong interest in poetry. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, where his grades were low, but his scores on standardized tests were high. In 1951, he earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Cornell University, where he studied under literary critic M. H. Abrams. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Yale University. Between 1954 and 1955, Bloom was a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

At Yale, Bloom was an outstanding student. He had disagreements with the faculty of the New Critics, including William K. Wimsatt. Years later, Bloom dedicated his book The Anxiety of Influence to Wimsatt.

Teaching career

Harold Bloom was part of the English Department at Yale University from 1955 until 2019. He taught his last class four days before he passed away. In 1985, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. From 1988 to 2004, he held the Berg Professor of English position at New York University while continuing his work at Yale. In 2010, he helped start Ralston College, a new school in Savannah, Georgia, that emphasizes studying original texts. He often used the term "my dear" when speaking to students and friends, regardless of their gender.

Personal life and death

Harold Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958. They had two children. In a 2005 interview, Jeanne said that she and Harold were both atheists. Harold disagreed, saying, "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist."

Harold Bloom was the subject of a 1990 article in GQ titled "Bloom in Love," which claimed he had affairs with female graduate students. He called the article a "disgusting piece of character assassination." His friend and colleague, biographer R. W. B. Lewis, said in 1994 that Bloom's "wandering" was no longer a secret, as he had previously spoken about it openly.

In a 2004 article for New York magazine, Naomi Wolf wrote that during her time as an undergraduate student at Yale University in 1983, Bloom placed his hand on her inner thigh at a dinner to discuss her writing. Bloom "vigorously denied" the claim. Camille Paglia criticized Wolf, saying she started a witch hunt and called it "indecent" to bring up events from 20 years earlier. Andrea Dworkin defended Wolf's honesty, even though they disagreed on many issues. Jenni Murray, Marcelle d'Argy Smith, and Elizabeth Wurtzel were more critical, questioning the reliability of Wolf's account and the long time between the event and her statement.

Harold Bloom never retired from teaching, saying he would need to be removed from the classroom "in a great big body bag." He had open heart surgery in 2002 and broke his back after a fall in 2008. He died at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 14, 2019. He was 89 years old.

Writing career

Harold Bloom began his career by writing several important books about famous poets. His early works included Shelley's Myth-making (Yale University Press, originally his doctoral dissertation), Blake's Apocalypse (Doubleday), Yeats (Oxford University Press), and Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Cornell University Press). In these books, Bloom defended the ideas of the High Romantics against critics influenced by writers like T. S. Eliot, who often disagreed with him. His first book, Shelley's Myth-making, criticized some critics for not carefully reading Shelley’s work.

After a difficult time in the late 1960s, Bloom became very interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and ancient traditions like Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. In a 2003 interview, Bloom said he called himself a "Jewish Gnostic." He explained that he meant "Gnostic" in a broad way and that he felt deeply connected to Jewish culture. He struggled to understand how a powerful and all-knowing God could allow terrible events like the Nazi death camps or mental illnesses like schizophrenia.

Bloom’s reading influenced his later work, which focused on how poets create their own unique styles while avoiding being influenced too much by earlier poets. His first book on this topic, Yeats, challenged common ideas about William Butler Yeats’s career. In the introduction, Bloom described his approach: "Poetic influence, as I see it, is a type of sadness or anxiety." New poets are inspired by older poets, but they often feel frustrated when they realize the older poets have already expressed similar ideas. This leads to disappointment because the new poets feel they cannot be the first to say something important.

To overcome this, Bloom believed poets must think that earlier poets made mistakes, leaving room for new ideas. He said that poets’ admiration for their heroes often turns into conflict: "Love for the older poet changes into a struggle to revise their work, which is necessary for a poet to become unique." His next book, The Anxiety of Influence (begun in 1967), used the ideas of Walter Jackson Bate to explain how poets in the 17th and 18th centuries felt unable to match their predecessors. Bloom described how poets break free from their influences to create their own visions. He divided poets into "strong" and "weak" types, with strong poets making creative reinterpretations of earlier works and weak poets simply copying them. He explained this process using "revisionary ratios" that describe how poets evolve over time.

In A Map of Misreading, Bloom refined his ideas about revisionary ratios. Kabbalah and Criticism used the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, as explained by scholar Gershom Scholem, to explore poetic influence. Figures of Capable Imagination collected shorter writings Bloom had written while developing his theories.

Bloom continued writing about influence throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and most of his later work connected to these ideas. His interest in David Lindsay’s fantasy novel A Voyage to Arcturus led him to write a sequel, The Flight to Lucifer, which was his only work of fiction.

Bloom then focused on "religious criticism," starting with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989). In The Book of J (1990), he and David Rosenberg suggested that one of the ancient texts used to write the first five books of the Bible was created by a woman in the court of King David or Solomon. This idea caused much discussion. Later, Bloom thought the theory might not go far enough and considered linking the author to Bathsheba, a biblical figure. In Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2004), he explored the roles of Yahweh and Jesus as literary characters, arguing that Christianity and Judaism are fundamentally different.

In The American Religion (1992), Bloom examined American Protestant and post-Protestant faiths, saying they shared more with Gnosticism than with traditional Christianity, except for Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom he considered non-Gnostic. He predicted that Mormon and Pentecostal groups would become more popular than mainstream Protestant groups. In Omens of Millennium (1996), Bloom linked American religious traditions to a broader Gnostic tradition involving ideas about angels, dreams, near-death experiences, and beliefs about the end of the world.

In an essay about The Gospel of Thomas, Bloom noted that the original Aramaic sayings in the text were not preserved. Marvin Meyer agreed, saying the text was likely written in Aramaic or Greek. Meyer praised Bloom’s essay. Bloom compared the Jesus in Thomas to the "American Jesus," highlighting differences in how Jesus is portrayed.

In The Western Canon (1994), Bloom reviewed 26 major literary works from the 14th century onward, calling them sublime and representative of Western culture. He argued that literature should be read for personal enjoyment and self-discovery, not to improve society. He criticized critics who focused on social issues, saying their approach was misguided. He believed politics had no place in literary criticism, arguing that feminist or Marxist interpretations of Hamlet would reveal more about those theories than about the play itself.

Influence

In 1986, Harold Bloom said that Northrop Frye was the most important influence on his ideas. He told Imre Salusinszky, "In my own writing and thinking, the most important influence was Northrop Frye. I bought and read Frye’s book Fearful Symmetry shortly after it was published in Ithaca, New York. The book deeply moved me. I tried to find another influence in Kenneth Burke, who is a talented and powerful critic, but I do not come from Burke—I come from Frye."

However, in Anatomy of Influence (2011), Bloom wrote, "I no longer have time to read Frye’s work." Instead, he named Angus Fletcher as one of his living contemporaries who influenced him. That same year, Bloom recommended Fletcher’s book Colors of the Mind and M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. Later, Bloom also emphasized the work of earlier critics like William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Pater, A. C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson. He described Johnson in The Western Canon as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him." In a 2012 introduction to The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, Bloom noted the influence of M. H. Abrams during his time at Cornell.

Bloom’s theory of poetic influence describes how Western literature develops through borrowing and reinterpreting the work of earlier writers. He believed that writers find inspiration in past writers but must create something different to make their own work unique. Bloom argued that truly powerful authors must "misread" their predecessors to make space for new ideas.

Some people compared Bloom to the movement called deconstruction, but he said he shared only a few ideas with deconstructionists. In 1983, he told Robert Moynihan, "What I have in common with deconstructionists is a way of thinking that focuses on what is not present, but this comes from a concept called negative theology. There is no escape from the world as it is, and we must accept what is given."

Bloom’s focus on the Western canon led many to ask about his views on modern writers. In the late 1980s, he said, "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett. He is certainly the most authentic."

Of British writers, Bloom said, "Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active," and "no other contemporary British novelist seems as important as Iris Murdoch." After Murdoch died, Bloom praised novelists Peter Ackroyd, Will Self, John Banville, and A. S. Byatt.

In Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003), Bloom called the Portuguese writer José Saramago "the most gifted novelist alive today" and "one of the last titans of a fading literary genre."

Of American novelists, Bloom said in 2003, "There are four living American novelists I know of who are still working and who deserve our praise." He called them Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. He named their most important works as The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon; Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral; Blood Meridian; and Underworld. He also praised John Crowley for his work, especially his Ægypt series and Little, Big, calling the latter "a neglected masterpiece" and "the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know." Bloom wrote the afterword for a 40th-anniversary edition of Little, Big. Before his death, Bloom admired the works of Joshua Cohen, William Giraldi, and Nell Freudenberger.

In Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A. R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill. Later, he named Henri Cole as the most important American poet of the next generation. Bloom greatly admired the Canadian poets Anne Carson, especially her verse novel Autobiography of Red, and A. F. Moritz, whom he called "a true poet." Bloom also listed Jay Wright as one of the few major living poets and the best American poet after Ashbery’s death.

In his introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1986), Bloom described his list of the "twentieth-century American Sublime," the greatest works of American art from the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner said Bloom was an important influence on his work.

Reception

Harold Bloom’s work has received divided opinions, even from well-known scholars. He was described as “probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States” and “America’s best-known man of letters.” A 1994 article in The New York Times noted that some younger critics viewed Bloom as “outdated and unusual,” while a 1998 article in the same publication called him “one of the most gifted of contemporary critics.”

In an obituary from The Guardian, Kenan Malik highlighted both the importance and the flaws in Bloom’s work. He wrote, “Bloom mixed judgment with understanding. We can judge a literary work based on its own qualities, but its social, political, and historical background is still important for understanding it.”

James Wood criticized Bloom, saying, “Bloom used overly dramatic and repetitive language, though he had a unique charm, even if some found it unusual. In recent years, Bloom’s work has had little influence.” Bloom responded to Wood in an interview, stating, “There are outdated styles in criticism, just as there are in novels and poetry. Trends change, and they will fade. There is nothing special about Wood. I do not wish to discuss him.”

In the early 2000s, Bloom often sparked debate by criticizing popular writers, including Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou, and David Foster Wallace. In The Paris Review, he criticized poetry slams, calling them “the death of art.” When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bloom criticized the award as “pure political correctness” for giving it to an author of “fourth-rate science fiction,” even though he acknowledged his appreciation for Lessing’s earlier work.

In 2011, a group called MormonVoices, linked to the Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, listed Bloom on its “Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements” for saying, “The current leader of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as ‘prophet, seer and revelator,’ is no different from powerful wealthy leaders who control power in our democracy.” This was despite Bloom’s admiration for Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, whom he called a “religious genius.”