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Stardom and celebrity are usually meant for actors, sports players, and occasionally for politicians. Once in a while, a person comes along who breaks that mould. Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was such a personality. Bloom is widely known as a literary critic and academician who achieved unprecedented fame for someone in his field.
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Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, in Bronx, New York. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. His first language was Yiddish. He also knew Hebrew and learned English at the age of six. Although he was not a particularly good student in his childhood, Bloom had a powerful memory that later enabled him to memorise and recall lines from poems and the classics.
Bloom studied the Classics at Cornell University and got a PhD from Yale University. Bloom attended the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship from 1954-55. He started his career as a teacher at Yale and New York University. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. Bloom was often described as charming and flirtatious by those who knew him. Bloom briefly became a subject of controversy when an article was published in the magazine GQ accusing him of inappropriate behaviour with his young students. Bloom denied the allegations.
Harold Bloom died at the age of 89 in 2019 in New Haven, Connecticut. He continued to teach at Yale University until four days before his death.
Bloom is considered to be one of the most popular literary critics of all time. As a writer, Bloom was controversial for his rejection of the mainstream theoretical perspectives of his contemporaries. He reportedly wrote for the everyday reader and did not want his books to be read and discussed by academics. Unlike the famous trope of an aloof intellectual, Bloom kept up with popular culture and social trends.
In his early years, Bloom was influenced by Northrop Frye, whom he considered to be one of the most influential literary critics in the English language. He was a student at Yale at a time when New Criticism was flourishing in American universities; he reportedly had differences with the views of the faculty, especially William K. Wimsatt. Even as a mature scholar and literary critic, Bloom condemned ‘literary theory’ as something that goes against the true nature of creating and enjoying literature.
New Criticism was a formalist school of literary theory and criticism in America. New Criticism regarded the text as autonomous and popularized 'close reading', a way of closely engaging with a text without paying attention to its social and historical contexts.
Bloom’s early books offered a renewed outlook on Romanticism. Bloom’s own early books, Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (1963) and The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (1971) contained innovative interpretations of the Romantic poetry. In these books, Bloom traced the influence of the Romantic imagination on the poets who came after the Romantic era.
Romanticism: Eighteenth-century movement in arts and literature that rose in reaction to the Enlightenment ideals of empiricism and rationality. The Romantic movement believed in poetic imagination, idealism, individualism, and inspiration. Solitude, spontaneity, and emphasis on emotion were the Romantic ideals.
The evolution of Bloom’s perspective on literary criticism is evident in his later works, such as The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975). In these texts, Bloom discusses the subject of the artistic process of creation and originality. He argues that writers fear and strive to overcome the influence of their celebrated predecessors on their works.
No poet can write a poem, without, in some sense, remembering another poem.
Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence (1973)
Bloom’s unconventional outlook was not limited to the study of literature. He wrote a series of books on religion. You can find Bloom’s controversial takes on the Kabbalah and the Hebrew Bible in Kabbalah and Criticism (1976) and The Book of J (1990). The latter was a bestseller and questioned the existing scholarship on religion by arguing that the God in Judeo-Christian theology was a fictional character. Other books by Bloom on the subject of religion are The American Religions (1992), Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection (1996), Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005), and his only novel, The Flight to Lucifer (1979).
Kabbalah: A Jewish mystic tradition that has to do with the interpretations of the Bible or Scripture. It is described as a 'cult' of mysticism or doctrine of secret knowledge, primarily because it is for people who have specialised knowledge and interest in it and not laypeople.
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, published in 1994, is regarded as Bloom’s magnum opus. The 690-page volume talks about 26 writers Bloom considered to be the most important names in literary history. Bloom was criticised for his selection being too exclusive and mostly made of white, male writers from the English-speaking world.
Canon: a selection of books considered to be the best and the most important in the history of literature. Derived from the 'Biblical canon', the set of texts that are regarded as part of the Bible.
Magnum opus: a masterpiece.
Bloom addressed the criticism in his later works and dismissed his critics as 'Resenters' from the 'School of Resentment'. Bloom’s new term referred to theorists from different schools like Marxism, feminism and postmodernism that paid more attention to social and historical foundations in and of literature.
Harold Bloom was among the foremost scholars of Shakespeare in modern times and wrote extensively about the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) explores in detail characters in Shakespeare’s plays. The premise of the book is that the modern idea of selfhood was a Shakespearean invention. Bloom famously likened Shakespeare to God in the impact Shakespeare’s works have had on Western thought and mindset.
In The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015), Bloom offered detailed analyses of several Shakespearean characters. His work on Shakespeare is meant to be simple and accessible for readers who aren’t academics. His fascination with Shakespeare’s characters was reportedly on a personal level, bordering on 'bardolatry'.
Bardolatry: extreme admiration of Shakespeare.
Bloom opposed the contemporary study of Shakespeare with regard to social, political and historical contexts. In the debate on the authorship of Shakespearean plays, Bloom took the stance that irrespective of whom the real author is, the quality and literary merit of the texts remain the same.
Bloom wrote over 50 books in his lifetime. Here is a selection of books written by Harold Bloom:
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Who is Harold Bloom?
Harold Bloom was a literary critic, writer, and professor at Yale University. He is the author of The Western Canon which has played a crucial role in the modern study of literature. Bloom is famous for his work on Shakespeare.
What is Harold Bloom famous for?
Harold Bloom is famous for his work on Shakespeare and an unorthodox method of literary criticism that defended canonical works against what he referred to as ‘schools of resentment’ that included feminism and Marxism.
What does Harold Bloom say about Shakespeare?
In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), Bloom argued that Shakespeare's characters shaped the modern sense of selfhood.
What does Harold Bloom say about Hamlet?
In his analysis of Hamlet, Bloom wrote that the consciousness and intellectualism of Hamlet are too immense for the play, which is often read as a revenge tragedy. Bloom argued that Hamlet is more 'theatre of the world' than a revenge tragedy.
How many languages did Harold Bloom speak?
Harold Bloom knew three languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, and English
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