Author: Cameron Aitken

If a budding young matriculate of English Literature were to stumble drunkenly up to me in the student union bar just a week before their undergraduate studies officially commenced and implored me to give them some insightful yet entertaining pre-reading, the name “Harold Bloom” would descend upon me like a literary hand of God. It would be unnerving as to why this particular critic should be intoned upon me in this manner. What does it say about Bloom’s accessibility, his worth? Either way, a reason must be ascertained.

Harold Bloom was a gargantuan figure in both the world of academia and literary criticism. His prodigious efforts are still on reading lists today and he is often quoted by people who are new to the world of literary criticism. He produced works that developed his own theories of literature, ordered them in order of importance and genius, and even edited countless editions of essays by other authors on a particular work of literature. There is never a single way into Bloom, for each of his works are stand alone forces of their own that are always useful to have near.

He was also a fierce educator, teaching at both Yale at New York university. He adored Yale and the sheer breadth of his library, the contents of which even he admitted would never be able to be completely read by him. Bloom taught at Yale from 1955 to 2019 and taught his final class just four days before his death. If he wasn’t in his study writing his latest work, he was in the lecture theatre teaching many postgraduates about an interesting surmising he had formed about a poem by Wallace Stevens. He was devoted and persistent; even though he lived a long and fruitful life, he always emphasised the notion that, as a student of literature, one never has enough time to read everything that was worth reading. This leads us to one of Bloom’s most sensational and contentious work: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.

Like any reasonable critic or lover of literature, an interest in Shakespeare will always remain throughout one’s reading journey; however, Bloom took this to the extreme and it became a kind of unvarying obsession. Bloom even self-appellated the term bardolator in his colossal work on Shakespeare. He almost went as far as to place Shakespeare at the centre of the literary universe, similar to a literary version of musica universalis — a harmony of spheres that keeps the universe in place. This concept was widely criticised upon the release of the Western Canon because it was viewed as an attack on teaching other works that academics thought might be more beneficial to teach to some students instead of Shakespeare and other older writers. But, of course, Bloom was not afraid of controversy and provocation because he explicitly outlines in the prefatory material that this is his exact aim. He desired quite vehemently to cause conflict among academics who did not share his views of preserving the tradition of the teaching of literature, and advising against getting drawn into what he regarded as the “School of Resentment”. Bloom is terse in his summary of the practice of this school: ‘The cardinal principle of the current School of Resentment can be stated with singular bluntness: what is called aesthetic value emanates from class struggle.’ Bloom emphasises his own resentment towards this school, ostensibly labelling their practice a form of political reading which disregards aesthetic and literary merit. The notion Bloom propounds in his tome certainly has its own merits, for he recalls knowing students who went through entire undergraduate courses without ever having read a work of Shakespeare. Bloom calls his initial chapter ‘An Elegy for the Canon’ which insinuates that the teaching of literature is already dead and that returning to what it once was is a forlorn endeavour. Was Bloom’s assessment a clairvoyant insight into the state of the humanities? The numbers of individuals who partake in the study of English Literature at a high level has unequivocally dropped. Perhaps Bloom may have had a point after all.

Questions of the canon and whether or not it should be trimmed and decolonised are contentious and will be debated for many decades to come. Yet Bloom was not merely sensational with his writings; he proposed many theories and ideas in his earlier years which still remain influential. His creative and most original work is The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, in which he argued that poets wrestle with their precursors in an interminable battle of misreading. Bloom is inordinately fond of taking terms from other disciplines and applying them purposefully to his own theoretical contributions. In the case of The Anxiety of Influence he uses legal and scientific words such as misprision and clinamen; these tend to outline a certain subsection of his theory that combine a mildly coherent whole. The work from his early days remains difficult. Not only is he esoteric, but he is fiercely masterful in his analysis and understanding of poetry. One reason for his ability was his extensive memory, as well as being able to hold many lines of poetry in his head at one specific time. It is said that you could spot Bloom walking around the grounds of Yale to his next class, declaiming a line of Paradise Lost to himself, and he could gift you with the following line, uttered without a modicum of hesitation. This could either be true or it could be heavily mythologised and romanticised. What is true, however, is that he could recall an immense amount of poetry — always able to select the most suitable quotation when needed.

Once again, the most remarkable aspect of Bloom’s character was his dedication to the subject and to his students. It is unlikely that we will ever see another powerhouse critic like Harold Bloom. While he was so enthusiastic and ebullient when he wrote, he was a rather mellow and placid figure in person. The Charlie Rose interviews on YouTube tell us that he was always in his fine teaching mode. There are even bootlegs available on YouTube of lectures that he gave to postgraduate students, and it is clear that he seldom ever changed his persona. He was always Bloom.

Cameron Aitken is a First Class English Literature Graduate and Jazz Musician. He loves poetry and philosophy, and has a background in literary theory. He is also interested in psychoanalysis, and thinks about films through this lens. He is an Early Modernist at heart.