Harold
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
— Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
I spent a semester in a seminar with Harold Bloom in graduate school. There were about a dozen of us and the course was vaguely titled “American Poetry” as I recall. One oddity I could never understand was that the poet Robert Bly sat near me and why he was there at all.
Bloom was a consummate performer. He has often admitted that his favorite character in Shakespeare was Falstaff, a figure that for Bloom represents a turning point in Shakespeare's mature characters, liberating him from his influence by Marlowe, as a character that Bloom not only admired but identified with in the ecstatic rendering of that character. He was in his way, if we’re giving historical comparisons, like Samuel Johnson, the Johnson of Lives of the Poets (Bloom calls Johnson, “my critical forerunner”) in that he commandeered the positioning of great writers based solely on his criteria for that greatness.
He commanded a classroom as one who was steeped in his writings would have expected, but with a gentleness of spirit and extreme kindness and consideration towards others. We read his usual favorites: Stevens, Bishop, Eliot, and also Yeats, Hardy, and Lawrence, despite this being a class on American poetry. His capacious memory for literature, to recall a sonnet by Meredith to point to some rhetorical device on the spot as I’ve heard him do, was legendary.
He was less forgiving of his colleagues. One had to visit him during office hours to discuss the one paper assignment we were required to submit for the course. The door to his office was often ajar and open to the human traffic in the lounge. Once a colleague passed to whom Bloom quipped, “He’s not a critic, he’s a book-reviewer.”
He had, at times, a withering opinion of other critics. I was writing about Eliot’s Four Quartets and mentioned one critic I was using which raised his ire: “She’s a Catholic writer my Jewishness can’t abide.” He looked at me as if to say, “That should be quite plain.”
His readings of the poems were brilliant. I sill have the notes I took in the margins of those books.
Bloom is a writer who continued to write the same book over and over again, beginning with The Anxiety of Influence, (1973) which solidified his ideas about the relationship of poets to each other. The themes of influence as Freudian informs these relationships as fraught, contesting in an anxious and agonistic relationship with their precursors. Bloom, in recounting the sudden inspiration that led him to write about literary influence in a sort of follow-up book in 2011, The Anatomy of Influence, writes that in living with these poets, “after some years, their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns.”
Influence, for Bloom, was never a kind of direct and “benign” literary inheritance but a legacy of belatedness the later poet experiences in the work of the earlier “strong” precursor poet expressed as agon, as a competitive struggle.
The other major aspect of Bloom’s theory is his notion of misprision, or misreading, where a poet deliberately misreads their precursor poet. The creative side to misreading is also attributable to the critic for revealing it in their reading, as Bloom illustrates in his reading of William Blake’s influence on Hart Crane.
It is in some way a closed system of literary development, one that dismisses the then current trends in literature departments of New Historicism and French theorists for its own map of canon formation.
He was a preserver of that canon just when it was under attack from without. This put him in bad stead with many in the academy but he was unyielding in what he considered true excellence and would not bend to current fashions in literature.
Bloom had no truck with the flattening of the canon, as he saw it, with identity politics. This attitude of resentment towards the fashionable trends in university literature departments, of Marxist, feminist, or other critical perspectives, did not disqualify Bloom from passing his own judgement on the state of American political culture as well as the “institutionalized counterculture” he witnessed in the university of the late 60s and early 70s.
In revisiting the conditions of writing The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom does not hesitate to bemoan the fate of literary reception (he calls it, collectively, “The New Cynicism”) within the academy but rather acknowledges, from the perspective of years, in the writing of The Anatomy of Influence that the earlier work may have been “an attempt to forge a weapon against the gathering storm of ideology that soon would sweep away many of my students.”
Bloom worked in a seemingly anachronistic area of literary aesthetics, that is, of the aesthetic value of a text, a sensibility that goes back to Pater and Wilde. This is another way of indicating priority given over to the imaginative. This stance would seem to leave Bloom vulnerable to attack, especially in an age dominated by cultural studies that is characterized as less judgmental than the aesthetic theory propounded by Bloom which indeed confers judgment on literary merit or “greatness.”
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This takes us to the Longinian version of the sublime and it ambiguities, its strangeness and relation to Freud’s “Uncanny” (das Unheimliche) as at once both familiar and strange, where we arrive back at the anxiety of influence.
For a strong writer, strangeness is the anxiety of influence. The inescapable condition of sublime or high literature is agon: Pindar, the Athenian tragedians, and Plato struggled with Homer, who always wins. The height of literature commences again with Dante, and goes on through Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, and Pope. Implicit in Longinus’s famous celebration of the sublime — “Filled with delight and pride we believe we have created what we have heard” — is influence anxiety. What is my creation and what is merely heard? This anxiety is a matter of both personal and literary identity. What is the me and the not-me? Where do other voices end and my own begin? The sublime conveys imaginative power and weakness at once. It transports us beyond ourselves, provoking the uncanny recognition that one is never fully the author of one’s work or one’s self.
Relatedly to the sublime is Bloom’s fascination with Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Platonism, and Hermeticism, incorporating these practices and systems into his literary criticism in addition to his writings on religious texts. An element of the ecstatic governs Bloom’s approach to the aesthetic as literature that should ignite the passions and summons the Lucretius of De Rerum Natura. Bloom believed the best writers wrote as prophets and seers and described his own Anxiety of Influence as a dithyramb composed in a “state of metaphysical terror.” It’s one of the pleasures of reading Bloom that you feel such a sense of urgency in the writing.
The Anatomy of Influence is Bloom’s summation of a life’s work (“my virtual swan song”), his “final reflection upon the influence process.” “In this, my final statement on the subject, I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.”
As a recurring mode in Bloom’s work, the tone of this book is elegiac. The sense of belatedness — so vital in his theory of poetic influence — seems to descend on him as a critic striving to encode the literary canon as it erodes before his eyes. This is the writing of someone who has taught literature for over half a century and we are treated to a familiar roster of influencing poets, including “William Blake on Hart Crane, Milton and Wordsworth on Shelley, Walt Whitman on T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Keats on Tennyson.” Emerson, of course. Trends in literary criticism have long pushed past Bloom. His elevation of the canon is met with scorn. The Anatomy of Influence was written as a testament of sorts:
More than any other I have written, this book is a critical self-portrait, a sustained meditation on the writings and readings that have shaped me as a person and a critic. Now in my eightieth year, I remain gripped by particular questions. Why has influence been my obsessive concern? How have my own reading experiences shaped my thinking? Why have some poets found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?
Bloom is the link between these influences in his role as the influencer of the classroom, producing a generation, and more, of students and scholars under his tutelage. His elevation and positioning of Emerson alone in American letters is of singular note and helped to create a serious reconsideration of Emerson for colleagues and future Emerson specialists.
Shakespeare takes up the bulk of this late work as it has Bloom’s work in general (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) with Freud less in the ascendency than in the earlier work, seen as more “textual,” a surprising devaluation: “I urge us to regard him as the Montaigne or Emerson of the twentieth century….Freud is an inevitable presence in this book; yet he is only one presence among many.” Milton, too, seems overshadowed by the Bard from his former regard by Bloom (“For me Shakespeare is the Law, Milton the Teaching, Blake and Whitman the Prophets”).
The Anatomy of Influence settles old scores with Bloom’s New Criticism forebears including William K. Wimsatt (“my fierce former teacher had abstained from voting on my tenure, telling his colleagues, ‘He is an eighteen-inch naval gun, with tremendous firepower but always missing the cognitive target’), and Northrop Frye, who initially had a powerful influence on Bloom but split with him over the aspect of influence as anxiety-inducing. Surely it’s difficult to miss the title’s reference to Frye’s own Anatomy of Criticism, although Bloom’s inspiration was Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. And it is, after all, in Bloom’s system of reading that melancholy is most the keenly characteristic feeling that colors literary influence.
We read Bloom, often, if not always, for the sheer spectacle of his performance. We know we’ll be entertained, at the very least. We read Bloom the same way we read Freud, not because he’s right — god, no, to both — but because both writers are always refining and revising their ideas and — most significantly — both are excellent writers.
I am reminded often, in reading Bloom, of Johnson’s remark his “Life of Cowley” about the metaphysical poets and their use of wit where, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Consider:
Hamlet centers the literary cosmos, Eastern as well as Western. His only rivals are comic — Don Quixote — or on the border of divinity: the Gospel of Mark’s amazingly enigmatic Jesus, who is unsure who he is and keeps asking his thickheaded disciples, But who or what do people say I am? Don Quixote in contrast says he knows exactly who and what he is and who he may be if he chooses. Hamlet seems to me even stranger than Mark’s Jesus and Cervantes’s hero. He does not want to know who he is.
Hamlet, Don Quixote, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel are put in play with each other where the stakes are high, as if there exists a literary foundation upon which we can all agree that greatness rests. We cannot entertain a theory of influence as Bloom maps one without first establishing a basis in some adamantine tradition.
I enjoy reading Bloom for the simple reason that he increases my pleasure in reading generally. I may occasionally wince at what he writes but his influence is undoubtable. He helped to make me a better and more thoughtful reader.
In many ways, Bloom’s map of misreading is his get out of jail free card: it allows him to make of the canon and organize it for his own purposes what he deems true. As Richard Rorty says of this process,
the critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions, but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose … the strong misreader, like Foucault or Bloom, prides himself on the same thing, on being able to get more out of the text than its author or its intended audience could possibly have found there. (Quoted in Adam Phillips LRB essay, “On Getting the Life you Want”)
It almost seems beside the point to take Bloom to task for the mythologizing of strong poets he creates. There are fixed points that act as lodestars in his galaxy: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton to name the strongest poets (in English) that emanate a gravitational pull that all future poets must contend with. That Bloom persists in characterizing these relationships as agon is of a piece with the influence of Freud on his writing. It could have been otherwise, as it was with Frye’s account over which Bloom and Frye split.
Bloom’s writings represent an engine of literary interpretation that embody a structure and a past that is highly regulated. The canon as deployed by Bloom is an impregnable fortress manned by the strong poet.
Those who knew him personally called him, unceremoniously, Harold. He addressed his students and those who knew him as, “my dear.”
