BLOOM, HAROLD

BLOOM, HAROLD (1930– ), U.S. literary critic. Born to Yiddish-speaking parents in New York City, Bloom taught at Yale from 1955. An authority on Romantic and Victorian poetry, he wrote lengthy studies of Shelley, Blake, and Yeats. Bloom's most significant critical works, including The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982), explore the issue of influence, asserting that poetic creativity involves an Oedipal struggle between a writer and the great poetic figures of the past. All would-be artists, Bloom asserts, experience the anxiety that the great works have already been written; to deal with this anxiety of belatedness, they misread their precursor's work in order to find space at the poetic table. Bloom has applied this model to religious and Jewish texts. In Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (1989), he argues that the Hebrew Bible contains a power and sublimity that permeates all of the best of Western literature. In The Book of J (1990), for which he wrote the introduction and commentary, Bloom argues that the J or Yahwist author of earliest elements of the Torah – actually a woman attached to the court of the Israelite successor king to Solomon – was writing an ironic literary critique of the dogmatic, patriarchal religion of her time. Bloom spoke of himself as a "Jewish Gnostic." He delved into Gnosticism and Kabbalah's influences on American spiritual practices in The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992) and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996), and in Kabbalah and Criticism (1975) he uses Kabbalah as a model for contemporary literary criticism. With The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), Bloom aroused widespread interest and controversy, entering into the heart of the American culture wars occurring between those arguing for a multicultural curriculum and those arguing for a return to the Western canon. Many in the press viewed Bloom as the keeper of the canon, asking for his opinions about which contemporary authors did or did not belong in the canon. The more interesting aspect of the work was Bloom's adoption of an organizing principle for literary history based on the 18th-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico's cyclical theory of history. Bloom went on to predict the imminent arrival of a new Theocratic Age, possibly Islamic. Mourning the death of reading and attacking what he coined the School of Resentment – the Marxist, feminist, multiculturalist, and historicist schools of criticism, which he characterizes as too focused on a social agenda – for diminishing literature, he argued for the primacy of Shakespeare and Dante, arguing that "the Western Canon is Shakespeare and Dante. Beyond them, it is what they absorbed and what absorbed them." Bloom's celebration of Shakespeare, the J author of the Bible, and other canonical writers continued in later works of popular criticism, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), in which he argues that our modern sense of the psychologically complex human originated with Shakespeare, How to Read and Why (2000), and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004). (Craig Svonkin (2nd ed.)