Something funny happens when you bring up the name Harold Bloom in an academic setting. I’ve seen it happen many times: the rolled or averted eyes, maybe even a little scoff, a look that says Jesus, him again? “Write about his ideas,” a professor once told me, “and no one will take your work seriously.” If Bloom’s name ever does come up in the classroom these days, it’s usually to mock his most infamous hyperbole: Shakespeare’s supposed “invention of the human,” subject of Bloom’s best-selling 1998 book of the same name. That work, along with the tomes Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002) and The Best Poems of the English Language (2004), formed the apotheosis of the old scholar’s final turn away from academia toward openly didactic, explanatory writing for a mass popular audience—and there were very large audiences for those books back then.
Since his self-described “divorce” from the rest of the Yale English department in the 1970s, Bloom had already been torpedoing in this direction. By the time he released his best major polemic, The Western Canon, in 1994, he’d become the figurehead for discontent with university English programs, and with the many strands of critical theory and historicism in vogue there (which he referred to indiscriminately as the “school of resentment”). In print, in television interviews, in lectures, the old sad-eyed pontifical critic decried and deplored the state of literary studies across America and the U.K., never tiring of railing against it. Academics have never really forgiven him for it—nor, I suspect, have they forgiven him for having a public audience.
Now, should you bring up Harold Bloom outside the walls of academe, with someone who has managed to keep something of a private literary passion intact, you’re far more likely to find that they share some warm feelings for the man. “Oh, that Shakespeare book changed my life,” a postgrad Shakespearean once admitted to me in a pub—a sentiment I doubt she ever shared with her famous Columbia professor, who himself joined many other reviewers in trouncing Bloom’s Shakespeare back in the 1990s. Like her professional colleagues, this woman understood that despite any personal interests she might have had, to be really up to date always means consenting to the current fashion. And that fashion is (as perhaps it has always been) to say that only now has academic study even begun to figure out the right ways to study the literature of the past.
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My own favorite portrait of Bloom comes from the last years of his life (he passed away in 2019), in a 2018 interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books with the novelist Joshua Cohen, whose brief friendship with Bloom gave Cohen the stories that became the basis for his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Netanyahus. In the interview, Cohen recounts the same biographical details that always clung to Bloom (that Bloom himself clung to): a childhood speaking only Yiddish in a family of shtetl immigrants settled in the Bronx; an obscene reading speed and a prodigious memory, which apparently left him able to recall most of what he’d read verbally; and many powerful, formative boyhood experiences with poetry (most famously, in reading William Blake and Hart Crane). The interview ranges over writers from Kafka to Proust to Cohen himself, and on to many great Jewish-American writers (Philip Roth, Nathanael West, Cynthia Ozick). But what’s most striking about their conversation is that, in speaking with the critic, Cohen knows precisely how to match Bloom’s manner of discussing literary pasts. That is—as always, with Bloom—in terms of influence, a loaded word that was practically glued to the critic throughout much of his life. Addressing Cohen’s own work, Bloom at one point asks him: “But why is D.H. Lawrence missing in you? I would have thought that his vitalism would appeal to you.” Cohen counters: “I don’t know. Probably because Bellow, Malamud, and Roth are too present in me?”
If this strikes you as a fairly mystifying exchange—well, this is the literary mode of Harold Bloom. As originally laid out in his 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, “influence” for Bloom is the water in which all great writers—but especially poets—are forever swimming. To become a serious author of any real enduring merit, one must necessarily take on certain literary precursors, writers who have spurred one to write for oneself. But for Bloom this is no simple craft tradition, passed down benevolently from generation to generation. For Bloom, what begins as literary inspiration ends up as sublimated agon, as endless conflict, manifesting in the work as the buried tensions of an intergenerational competition for literary immortality.
Because each new generation of writers is in competition with all others, living or dead, for inclusion in the halls of worldly memory, each artist must develop ways of strategically, even unconsciously, “misreading” the work of the precursor. So T.S. Eliot’s poetry becomes a struggle with Alfred Lord Tennyson and, more covertly, Walt Whitman. Whitman himself is always tussling with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poetry of the King James Bible. William Wordsworth has to fend off the over-influence of John Milton and Shakespeare to achieve a comparable Romantic success. The young Shakespeare himself engages in a brief agon with his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, before becoming one of the few writers in the Bloomian cosmology to rise out of the field of influence entirely. Shakespeare, according to Bloom’s appraisal, owes nothing to anybody. In fact, all of us now owe most of ourselves to Shakespeare—so much so that any academic or critical attempts to destabilize the Bard’s preeminence only prove how embarrassing the debt has become. As the history of the written word goes on, the burden of influence accumulates, until finally young writers feel such a pang at their own belatedness, they wonder whether they’ll ever be able to add a single thing to their scandalously rich inheritance.
It’s easy to see the effect this idea might have on a young writer, already predisposed to a certain anxious and depressive temperament, and I was more than a bit destabilized and stress-ridden by the time I’d imbibed the Bloomian philosophy myself. It’s also easy to see the controversial side of his theory. It is, after all, a fairly unforgiving—even despairing—philosophy. Where is the ecstasy of influence? Where is the joy of borrowing? Where is the classical ideal, held from Aristotle to the Renaissance, of the artist as artificer, as an imitator of nature, employer of all fittest forms? All well and good, says Bloom. Yet all must be laid, finally, on the altar of Memory. Life is short, our memories are shorter, and what lasts is whatever matters most, for the condition of our minds and souls. This position is exactly what it sounds like: an essentially religious one, befitting a critic fond of saying that there is no real difference between secular and sacred literature.
The Anxiety of Influence is a somewhat insane book—insane like certain parts of the Bible, or the visionary writings of Blake, or Thus Spake Zarathustra. There’s no consolation to be had anywhere in its pages. What is present is an abundance of apocalyptic insight and poetic utterance. Though he’d begun his career as a reviver of the great Romantic poets in the 1950s and Sixties, by the time he wrote Anxiety Bloom had uncovered his deeper obsessions, and now he gave them a troubling, prophetic voice. Approaching the book almost requires a strong misreading itself. Bloom’s picture of poetry is exhausting. He’s always overhearing poets speaking to other poets, detecting subterranean allusions and echoes, uncovering endless rhetorical strategies of evasion and revision. Bloom had presumably read and remembered a substantial majority of the great literature of the West—the way forgotten Victorians like George Saintsbury used to—and you can hear the reverberations of it all, clanging and combining in his mind, spilling out onto the page.
Yet though it’s somewhat insane, Bloom’s Anxiety is arguably necessary. Encountering it is like encountering a painful but ultimately fortifying truth, a kind of proving ground for other, happier theories of authorship. To use the Bloomian language, it’s also the work of his that best sustains rereading—that has the most authentic aesthetic value. It is itself powerful literature.
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My introduction to Bloom came at a deadly age: early in undergrad, when a good friend’s mother (an English teacher) gave me a copy of Bloom’s Genius. I’ve still never read the whole thing. Over the years, as I began to read more intently and dream of becoming a writer, I’d open its pages sometimes just to see what he had to say about whoever I was reading at that moment. This practice became more and more common. By the time of the COVID pandemic, as I was living and studying on my own in a minor mid-American city, I’d come to compulsively refer almost everything I read to that voice—to Bloom’s voice—searching constantly for its approval, wary of its admonishment. I began to use his Best Poems as a guide to my own chronological reading of the major English poets; it was then that I first read The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon and several other books. Much of this time was well spent: there was always new inspiration to be discovered meditating on the burdens of Bloom. And yet those burdens—above all, the apparent impossibility of genuine literary freedom—had begun to transfer to me as well.
Few critical pictures of Bloom have quite captured this. Even at his death, obituaries in major papers were often punishingly equivocal. Yet through his enormous guidebooks, through his televised interviews and recorded lectures, Bloom’s ideal of a visionary kind of reading was exactly the inspiration I needed to steel myself against a world that seemed to be losing touch with the history of its greatest art forms. For all his bluster, what endeared Bloom to me (and to tens of thousands of other readers), was the sense that I had finally found a teacher. Not someone who only wished to historicize, or to speak elliptically about the sociopolitical context of the literature in question, but someone who saw books and their authors as sustenance, as a genuine bulwark against death and loss in a world bereft of organized meaning. Who spoke, in oracular incantations, about the hidden resonances of the best of human language.
In other words, I was looking for some understanding of literature as an essentially spiritual vocation—and Bloom was the perfect priest for this. He was like some dedicated monk or Kabbalist of the Middle Ages, scribbling away at his sacred commentaries and apologia, while the rest of the world got on with the bloody business of forgetting. He taught a way of thinking about cognition and memory that involved arguing for, preserving and above all loving the products of that long tradition of Western literature. For Bloom, the tremulous, inward-facing Western self—however anxious and depressive it had made us—was a beautiful wound. It required constant healing and nourishing, which only intense, solitary reading could yield.
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Following the patently religious trajectory of his vocation, the later Bloom had become nothing short of an evangelist. And his most exquisite and exhausting sermon was The Western Canon, the book that sealed his public image and reputation. Revisiting it now only strengthens my sense that Bloom is largely mischaracterized: in the end, he is essentially a mystical thinker, and we ought to read him as such.
As manifestations of this literary ideal The Western Canon offers up 26 exemplary individuals, whom Bloom divides according to the system of historical periods elaborated by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. Skipping past Vico’s “Theocratic Age,” Bloom leaps at once into the “Aristocratic Age,” whose greatest names for him are Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe and Dr. Johnson. For the “Democratic Age” there is Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Whitman, Dickinson, George Eliot, Ibsen and Tolstoy. The “Chaotic Age” (Bloom’s own invention) brings us up to Freud, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Pessoa, Borges, Neruda and Beckett. The essays on these figures are preceded by Bloom’s “Elegy for the Canon,” then briefly postscripted with an “Elegiac Conclusion” and a series of appendices (apparently forced on him by his publisher), containing hundreds of recommendations for a “full” canon, from Homer to Toni Morrison.
Many contemporary readers will have plenty of misgivings to overcome while reading The Western Canon. Though he isn’t always right, Bloom proceeds with a steamrolling certainty. The reader must accept that Bloom will repeat himself constantly; must accept, too, that Bloom is waging a pyrrhic rhetorical war he believes he has already lost. And yet, these are legitimate (if old-fashioned) literary modes: they only add to the gloriously fraught pathos that thrums through the whole book. When seen this way—as the hortatory orations of a beautiful, sad dinosaur—the book takes on its own decaying and tragic grandeur, like a ruined Gothic cathedral. And the sermon most often takes the form of a lamentation, the center of which lies in a passage from the opening prelude to the elegy:
It is a mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. That depth of inwardness in a strong writer constitutes the strength that wards off the massive weight of past achievement, lest every originality be crushed before it becomes manifest.
From there, the reader is launched into the elegy proper—a true jeremiad on the loss of canonical standards. As Bloom insists, the purpose of the canon is, quite simply, to preserve certain works for teaching. Because there is only so much life and only so much time, because all that has been written can’t be read, there has to be at least some mechanism for selecting and bequeathing the products of any particular tradition. “Nothing is so essential to the Western Canon as its principles of selectivity, which are elitist only to the extent that they are founded upon severely artistic criteria,” he writes. And what are those criteria? Again, Bloom is most interested in those writers who continue to influence other writers. It is the artists themselves, he argues, who determine the canon. Writers continue to be inspired by other writers, so the old influences stick around.
He knows that many critics and academics will take issue with his complete dismissal of historical consciousness and sociopolitical context: “The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom,” he says. “There is always guilt in achieved individuality; it is a version of the guilt of being a survivor and is not productive of aesthetic value.” In these passages, Bloom’s arguments against the legacy of late-twentieth-century literary study are the most lucid they would ever be:
Our legions who have deserted represent a strand in our traditions that has always been in flight from the aesthetic: Platonic moralism and Aristotelian social science. The attack on poetry either exiles it for being destructive of social well-being or allows it sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism.
We don’t have to be opposed to multiculturalism in general to appreciate Bloom’s ability to concisely contextualize what he is opposed to. If you can wade into the polemic of The Western Canon keeping your own discretion intact, allowing its cant to wash over you and looking for the actual sustenance Bloom was always talking about, you will find it. The individual chapters are among the richest things Bloom wrote about the authors in question. Where else could you find a critic so blithely abolishing the distinction between Dante’s Christianity and his secularity? Or declaring that the great Florentine and Milton were each ultimately a “sect of one”? Where else could you hear that Virginia Woolf’s “religion” was pure “Paterian aestheticism,” or perceive the ways in which Chaucer’s pioneering characters gave Shakespeare the start he needed to place a new kind of personhood on the stage? In Bloom’s historical pageant, the reader plays the greatest role imaginable: every reading is a resurrection. And it’s this—the grandest of Bloom’s claims for the power of literature—that I found most personally inspiring. That sacred charge, that weighty importance given to the mission of understanding and preserving this tradition, had its intended effect on me. I was transported, and inspired, and all I wanted to do was write.
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And yet: anxiety. Always that anxiety, ever-present. What had begun in inspiration and excitement had gone beyond that—gone even beyond the anxiety Bloom found embodied in the texts of the poets, becoming an entirely conscious, nagging worry over the contamination of any influence whatsoever. As I read Bloom’s work, playing and replaying his interviews and lectures just to hear his creaky voice intone the sacred charge again, I kept finding that for all the strength and sustenance I gathered as a reader, as a writer I only suffered more and more acute, painful blocks. Paralyzed, in the face of influence and history. Bloom’s ideas had first struck me as sensible: when I received his book, I was training as a classical musician, and I had already seen in the music I was studying the same operations he described. Only there, they were even more overt. Certain strains of melody, certain harmonic underpinnings, emerged across the works of composers as obvious debts to earlier ones. Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, for instance, is all over Rachmaninoff’s famous Third; moments in Beethoven have the same touch as his teacher Haydn, even if Beethoven ended up transcending his mentor so fully that the whole nineteenth century was filled with obvious attempts to surpass him. I already had my own aural evidence for the effects that Bloom discussed. I was easy to persuade.
I was also a prime candidate for anxiety. Or, really, for an anxiety about anxiety, which is what many anxieties eventually turn out to be. Bloom’s picture was convincing, yet profoundly troubling: behind each ostensible feeling of love, joy or excitement there lurked only more ambivalence, more repression. Nothing in art could be simply good or healthy. In fact, literature seemed so caught up in an essential unhealthiness, it amounted to disease—one self-deception after another, only resolvable by more strategies of evasion. The Bloomian poet was, in many respects, like one of Freud’s patients: a set of fragile structures desperately trying to evade collision with its own deep suspicions about itself. And every attempt to stare into that abyss—as Bloom claimed to do, as did Freud—could always be further reduced to yet another evasion, yet another way of coping with the anxiety the abyss provoked.
It became relentless: that critical voice, and the burden of thousands of years of literary accomplishment. My relationship to the world was embroiled in this anxiety, too, and it struck me that the current century’s relentless presentism was a clear defense against the very same kind of anxiety. Overwhelmingly, contemporary literature and media seemed incapable of admitting to the power of the past. True, young people have always resented being told what to read, but the current fashion was to say they were right—right to bristle at the idea that there were works and histories they would have to live up to if they wanted to be great. It seemed obvious that this mass inability to square up to the inheritance and influence of the past was what really lay behind the sterility of contemporary arts and letters—a sterility many contemporary writers and artists would not even acknowledge.
It was the same ethos I’d observed driving those academics to historicize or “complicate” the image of Shakespeare as the ultimate modern genius. Indeed, the academy’s general rejection of Bloom himself seemed little different from its need to limit the preeminence of the Bard, or even the idea of a Western canon itself. Certainly, that nebulous web that made up the aftermath of modernism—from poststructuralism to deconstruction, feminist and postcolonial theory and the New Historicism—had plenty of reasonable claims to updating what had been a mostly white, Christian, male field. And yet they all seemed too late, left exhuming a corpse the modern era had already carved up and killed. These disciplines weren’t producing anything new. They’d developed many refined and philosophically dense ways of dissecting their subjects—often to the point of undermining their own initial reasons for studying them. But the proliferation of all these exhaustive interpretative methods appeared like nothing so much as the deeply anxious work of professionals who could never quite admit to their own essential belatedness.
Artists have always had to contend with influence; every generation has always wished it could birth itself, instead of being born. But the contemporary world is burdened with the biggest glut of influences and models ever available to any people in history. It may seem paradoxical to claim, but nothing proves this essential paralysis more clearly than our era’s massive cultural overproduction, than those creative industries that churn out books and television shows and movies yet always remain fixated on contemporary trends, on context-free content, with little or no connection to any deep tradition. The paradox makes some sense psychologically: one symptom of paralyzing anxiety is compensatory overactivity. Bloom himself had suggested that artists deal with this overabundance by choosing the right influences (or being chosen by them), then redescribing, misreading them creatively—hoping to come up with a radical enough revision to push forward with their own transformed material.
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Of course, at first, it seems beyond foolish to believe that a person can transcend anxiety at all. Yet at some point in my own struggle with the idea, I perceived that foolishness was the only way out. That whatever method I might find that could get me to that place of belief would be something I would have to adopt without questioning, or else suffer forever. So my method had to become literary in and of itself. I must allegorize, I thought. I must make the anxiety and my attempts to defeat it into a part of the work itself. I asked questions of Anxiety; I demanded answers from Anxiety—and slowly, over years, I began to find some. Even if Bloom or Freud, in all their philosophical pessimism, might have called these illusions, or evasions, or sublimations.
Bloom himself was haunted by the possibility that self-creation and self-belief were fundamentally impossible—that the “deep inwardness” he valued so much in the great writers could only ever be mediated by that constant, sublimated anxiety of influence. Perhaps it’s telling that Bloom himself never became a poet or a serious writer of fiction (he wrote one highly Gnostic fantasy novel which he later disavowed). Still, the authors he idolized most—whose works he felt were most inexhaustible and life-giving—all shared at least this much: they were fiercely, zealously dedicated to protecting and listening to their own voice. And if it is indeed a spiritual issue, as for Bloom it obviously was, then the paralyzing anxiety of influence is all too like our deepest anxieties in this chaotic era: our religious doubt, our pessimism about romantic love, our slack belief in the possibility of a better world. The noise of our fears and worries keeps us from hearing the voice we ought to hear—keeps us from believing that it’s possible to hear that voice to begin with. And the same anxiety sits at the heart of all contemporary forms, just as surely as it sat at the heart of my own practice for so many years.
As we spin around madly in this century, trying to figure out how to survive a possible apocalypse of language and human expression, we must all learn the secrets of anxiety. We have to understand what its initial use to us was when it happened, why we need worry, why we need doubt about the burdens of history. Yet after that, we have also to learn how to let it pass; when to rest on faith. We may never be free of our influences. Our precursors may embarrass us with their brilliance, and we may sometimes feel ashamed to consider the extraordinary things they created, often with far fewer means than we ourselves possess. Yet we should always remember that these things were created for us, the same as we make things to pass down to our own successors. They are a memory we can’t afford to opt out of.
The lesson is this: the greatest part of humanity is always at risk of forgetting the best of its inheritance. Only a sustained and practiced art of memory prevents this from happening. And that is the responsibility we can’t fail to choose, if we want to keep the world from losing itself in forgetting. If we genuinely wish to see art in our own lifetimes that is really worthy of our history, then we can’t afford to pretend it isn’t immensely difficult—perhaps harder than ever—to make something truly new. But we cannot stop at anxiety. Only by going through anxiety, only by naming it, learning from it, and letting it pass into and out of us, can we survive the crushing pressure of our own traditions.
Bloom himself may not have given us a guide out of this labyrinth, yet neither did he lie about the difficulty. He spoke passionately and beautifully about the necessity of trying. No modern teacher has given us a greater exhortation to remember that vocation. It is our burden—and yet, finally, our pleasure—to discover for ourselves that our anxiety is not (and never has been) the end it pretends to be.