Colossus of American letters defended the primacy of literature’s ‘great’ writers

He saw himself as a Shakespearean character. Rumpled, snow-haired, jowly and ebullient, with a huge, bulbous stomach, he impersonated Falstaff on the stage.

Harold Bloom literary critic b July 11, 1930 d October 14, 2019

Harold Bloom, who has died aged 89, was regarded by some as the English-speaking world’s greatest literary critic, and by others as a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, the ‘‘Eeyore of academia’’, with nothing new to say.

A colossal figure in American academic life, Bloom was impossible to ignore. During his long teaching career at Yale, he could extemporise lectures on Kafka, Dostoevsky, Proust or Cervantes, quoting huge chunks off the cuff and discovering numerous hitherto unimagined connections between them.

He wrote dozens of books, on Shelley, Blake, Yeats, the early books of the Hebrew Bible, and

Shakespeare. In addition, he edited and wrote separate introductions for more than 500 books in the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views series.

The work that made his name was The Anxiety of Influence, published in 1973. Following Freudian theory, he argued that the history of great writing is an Oedipal struggle, between writers driven to shake off the influence of some mighty predecessor by – in effect – rewriting their work. Wordsworth tried to kill off Milton, as Keats did Wordsworth, and Shelley had it in for Shakespeare.

The ‘‘great’’ writers were those who most successfully repress the influence of the ‘‘precursor’’ from their own work. This theory provided Bloom with the intellectual framework for his belief in literary genius, but it also plunged him into the thick of the debate about the role of literary criticism, a debate sparked by younger ideologically driven academics such as Jacques Derrida and the Yale ‘‘school of deconstruction’’, who sought to interpret literary texts in the light of social, economic and political structures of the time.

A corollary of this approach was the insistence that the central literary canon was restrictive and lacking in ‘‘relevance’’, and that the work of the cultural margins – comics or rap lyrics, for example – was as worthy of academic study as Milton and Shakespeare. Bloom would have none of this. To him, this was the ‘‘School of Resentment’’, and its adherents were responsible for the ‘‘Balkanisation of literary studies’’.

He threw himself into the fray with fists flailing, most notably the provocatively named The Western Canon (1994), which asserted the claims of the traditional greats of English literature – Shakespeare, Dickens, George Eliot et al – over ‘‘Eskimo lesbian fiction’’, ‘‘sadly inadequate women writers of the 19th century’’ or the ‘‘rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans’’.

The fact that this book and its sequels, How to Read and Why (2000) and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), were runaway bestsellers merely served to aggravate the hostilities. Even those who shared his views sometimes found him hard to take. His generalisations about western literature were full of whimsical, unsupported assertions and subjective lurchings.

Bloom was widely considered the world’s leading authority on Shakespeare; he could quote from any Shakespeare play, and frequently did so. Alone of all writers, in his view, Shakespeare escaped the demeaning clutches of the Anxiety of Influence.

Nowhere was Bloom’s eccentric egotism more obvious than in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999), a gambol through the Complete Works, in which he advanced the claim that the Bard had effectively ‘‘invented’’ modern consciousness, or ‘‘the inauguration of personality as we have come to recognise it’’.

The book immediately made the American bestseller list, almost unheard of for a work of literary criticism. The critics were less easily impressed. ‘‘Bloom may idolise Shakespeare with all the sticky sentiment of a teenage groupie,’’ wrote the Oxford Marxist Terry Eagleton, ‘‘but his own language can be as cheap and threadbare as Jimmy Swaggart’s.’’

Even Shakespeare’s greatest fans felt that Bloom might be pushing things a bit far and were disconcerted by his insistence on establishing a very personal rapport with Shakespeare’s characters, treating them as old friends who exist almost independently of the historical context, the play’s action or of its other characters.

He saw himself as a Shakespearean character. Rumpled, snow-haired, jowly and ebullient, with a huge, bulbous stomach, he impersonated Falstaff on the stage, referred to himself as ‘‘Sir John Bloomstaff’’ and, in many ways, became the fat knight.

He was a living embodiment of Falstaffian exuberance, generosity, boisterous pugnacity, pathos and, it would seem, lechery. A shocking flirt, he was said in a profile in The New Yorker to be ‘‘overwhelmingly, destructively seductive’’ for female undergraduates. In 2004 the feminist author Naomi Wolf claimed Bloom had made a pass at her during a tutorial to discuss her poetry.

Harold Bloom was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Bronx. His parents spoke Yiddish all their lives and Harold claimed to have taught himself to read it at the age of 3, Hebrew at 4 and English at 5. Bloom got his education at the local public library.

At Cornell University, his teacher, M H Abrams, once lost his place in Paradise Lost and was put right by the young Bloom, who knew the entire poem by heart.

After reading English Literature at Cornell he finished his doctorate at Yale in 1951 and, four years later, aged 25, joined the English department, remaining there for 22 years before acquiring the title of Sterling Professor of Humanities. He loved teaching – latterly via Skype – and was a brilliant, if eccentric lecturer. His students (who included Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading neoconservatives in the George W Bush administration) adored him, even though many of them, including presumably Wolf, rejected much of what he stood for.

Harold Bloom married, in 1958, Jeanne Gould, a former school psychologist; they had two sons.