The influence of anxiety: Harold Bloom and literary inheritance

Bloom was a rare exception to Lem's law: nobody reads anything and even if they read they don't understand, and even if they understand they immediately forget

You don't have to agree with Bloom's 'The Western Canon' but one's appreciation (either way) of the authors he mentions will likely be enhanced.

I wonder if some of the sneering/eye-rolling over Bloom mentioned in the article was due to his political stance which went against the current grain. For example he talks of 'the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others).'

Guardian obituary https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/15/harold-bloom-o...

'His targets encompassed Michel Foucault, multiculturalism and a miscellaneous horde of “camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists”. He reserved more than a little scorn (richly reciprocated) for the “wretched” Terry Eagleton, leader of the “rabblement of lemmings” and the “School of Resentment”.

'“The Resenters prate of power,” he wrote (in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997), “as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed. Our schools as much as our universities are given away to these absurdities.”'