Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the
Sterling Professor
Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a Academic tenure in North America, tenured faculty member considered the best in their field. It is akin to the rank of distinguished professor at other universities. ...
of
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including Philosophy, certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature a ...
at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world". After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of
literary criticism
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's ...
, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the
Chelsea House publishing firm.
Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional
Western canon
The Western canon is the embodiment of High culture, high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western culture, Western world, such works having achieved the status of classics.
Recent ...
at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "
School of Resentment" (which included
multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the coexistence of multiple cultures. The word is used in sociology, in political philosophy, and colloquially. In sociology and everyday usage, it is usually a synonym for ''Pluralism (political theory), ethnic'' or cultura ...
,
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
, and
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...
).
He was educated at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
, the
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...
, and
Cornell University
Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
.
Early life and education
Bloom was born in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
on July 11, 1930,
to Paula (née Lev) and William Bloom. He lived in the
Bronx
The Bronx ( ) is the northernmost of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. It shares a land border with Westchester County, New York, West ...
at 1410
Grand Concourse. He was raised as an
Orthodox Jew in a
Yiddish
Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...
-speaking household, where he learned literary
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
;
he learned English at the age of six. Bloom's father, a garment worker, was born in
Odesa
Odesa, also spelled Odessa, is the third most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern ...
and his
Lithuanian Jewish mother, a homemaker, near
Brest Litovsk in what is today
Belarus
Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an a ...
.
Harold had three older sisters and an older brother. He was the last living sibling.
As a boy, Bloom read
Hart Crane's ''Collected Poems'', a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry. Bloom went to the
Bronx High School of Science
The Bronx High School of Science is a State school, public Specialized high schools in New York City, specialized high school in the Bronx in New York City. It is operated by the New York City Department of Education. Admission to Bronx Science ...
, where his grades were poor but his standardized-test scores were high. In 1951 he received a B.A. degree in
classics
Classics, also classical studies or Ancient Greek and Roman studies, is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, ''classics'' traditionally refers to the study of Ancient Greek literature, Ancient Greek and Roman literature and ...
from Cornell, where he was a student of literary critic
M. H. Abrams, and in 1955 a Ph.D. from Yale. In 1954–55 Bloom was a
Fulbright Scholar at
Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Bloom was a standout student at Yale, where he clashed with the faculty of
New Critics
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned a ...
, including
William K. Wimsatt. Several years later Bloom dedicated his book ''
The Anxiety of Influence'' to Wimsatt''.''
Teaching career
Bloom was a member of the Yale English Department from 1955 to 2019, teaching his final class four days before his death.
He received a
MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, Bloom was Berg Professor of English at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of
Ralston College, a new institution in
Savannah, Georgia
Savannah ( ) is the oldest city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia and the county seat of Chatham County, Georgia, Chatham County. Established in 1733 on the Savannah River, the city of Savannah became the Kingdom of Great Brita ...
, that focuses on primary texts. Fond of
endearments, Bloom addressed both male and female students and friends as "my dear".
Personal life and death
Bloom married Jeanne Gould in 1958. They had two children.
In a 2005 interview, Jeanne said that she and Harold were both
atheists, which he denied: "No, no, I'm not an atheist. It's no fun being an atheist."
Bloom was the subject of a 1990 article in ''
GQ'' titled "Bloom in Love", which accused him of having affairs with female graduate students. He called the article a "disgusting piece of character assassination". Bloom's friend and colleague the biographer
R. W. B. Lewis said in 1994 that Bloom's "wandering, I gather is a thing of the past. I hate to say it, but he rather bragged about it, so that wasn't very secret for a number of years." In a 2004 article for ''
New York'' magazine,
Naomi Wolf wrote that while she was an undergraduate student at Yale University in 1983, Bloom attended a dinner with her, saying he would discuss her writing. Instead, she claims that he came on to her, placing his hand on her inner thigh.
Bloom "vigorously denied" the allegation.
Bloom never retired from teaching, swearing that he would need to be removed from the classroom "in a great big body bag". He had open heart surgery in 2002 and broke his back after a fall in 2008.
[ He died at a hospital in ]New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is a city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 135,081 as determined by the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, New Haven is List ...
, on October 14, 2019. He was 89 years old.
Writing career
Defense of Romanticism
Bloom began his career with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on Percy Bysshe Shelley (''Shelley's Myth-making'', Yale University Press
Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and ope ...
, originally Bloom's doctoral dissertation), William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the Romantic poetry, poetry and visual art of the Roma ...
(''Blake's Apocalypse'', Doubleday), W. B. Yeats (''Yeats'', Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...
), and Wallace Stevens (''Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate'', Cornell University Press
The Cornell University Press is the university press of Cornell University, an Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York. It is currently housed in Sage House, the former residence of Henry William Sage. It was first established in 1869, maki ...
). In these, he defended the High Romantics against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, ''Shelley's Myth-making'', charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.
Influence theory
After a personal crisis during the late 1960s, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionism, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalism, Transcendentalist movement of th ...
, Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies seen as originating fro ...
, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism
Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek language, Ancient Greek: , Romanization of Ancient Greek, romanized: ''gnōstikós'', Koine Greek: Help:IPA/Greek, �nostiˈkos 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced ...
, Kabbalah
Kabbalah or Qabalah ( ; , ; ) is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. It forms the foundation of Mysticism, mystical religious interpretations within Judaism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal ...
, and Hermeticism
Hermeticism, or Hermetism, is a philosophical and religious tradition rooted in the teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a syncretism, syncretic figure combining elements of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. This system e ...
. In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham, the book editor for '' The Baltimore Sun'', noted that Bloom had long called himself a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom responded: "I am using 'Gnostic' in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand a Yahweh
Yahweh was an Ancient Semitic religion, ancient Semitic deity of Weather god, weather and List of war deities, war in the History of the ancient Levant, ancient Levant, the national god of the kingdoms of Kingdom of Judah, Judah and Kingdom ...
, or a God
In monotheistic belief systems, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic belief systems, a god is "a spirit or being believed to have created, or for controlling some part of the un ...
, who could be all-powerful and all-knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia
Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...
." Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggle to create their individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the poets who inspired them to write.
The first of these books, ''Yeats'', challenged the conventional critical view of William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th century in literature, 20th-century literature. He was ...
's poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." New poets become inspired to write because they have read and admired previous poets, but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poets discover that the poets they idolized have already said everything they wish to say. The poets become disappointed because they "cannot be Adam
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1–5 to the first human. Adam is the first human-being aware of God, and features as such in various belief systems (including Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Islam).
According to Christianity, Adam ...
early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."
In order to evade this psychological obstacle, according to Bloom, poets must be convinced that earlier poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that they have something to add to the tradition. Poets' love for their heroes turns into antagonism toward them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." The book that followed ''Yeats'', '' The Anxiety of Influence'', which Bloom started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of Walter Jackson Bate's ''The Burden of the Past and The English Poet'' and recast in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair 17th- and 18th-century poets felt about their inability to equal their predecessors. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which poets broke free from their precursors to achieve their own poetic visions. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets", who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets", who merely repeat their precursors' ideas as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios" through which strong poets pass in the course of their careers.
Addenda and developments of his theory
''A Map of Misreading'' picks up where ''The Anxiety of Influence'' left off, making several adjustments to Bloom's system of revisionary ratios. ''Kabbalah and Criticism'' attempts to invoke the esoteric interpretive system of the Lurianic Kabbalah, as explicated by scholar Gershom Scholem, as an alternate system of mapping the path of poetic influence. ''Figures of Capable Imagination'' collected odd pieces Bloom had written in the process of composing his "influence" books.
Bloom continued to write about influence theory throughout the 1970s and '80s, and penned little thereafter that did not invoke his ideas about influence.
Novel experiment
Bloom's fascination with David Lindsay's fantasy novel '' A Voyage to Arcturus'' led him to take a brief break from criticism to compose a sequel to it. This novel, '' The Flight to Lucifer'', was Bloom's only work of fiction.
Religious criticism
Bloom then entered a phase of what he called "religious criticism", beginning with ''Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present'' (1989). In ''The Book of J'' (1990), he and David Rosenberg (who translated the biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the Bible (see documentary hypothesis
The documentary hypothesis (DH) is one of the models used by biblical scholars to explain the origins and composition of the Torah (or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible: Book of Genesis, Genesis, Book of Exodus, Exodus, Leviticus, Bo ...
) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatic
Dogma, in its broadest sense, is any belief held definitively and without the possibility of reform. It may be in the form of an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Judaism, Catholic Church, Roman Catholicism, Protes ...
ally religious work (see Jahwist). They envisaged this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David
David (; , "beloved one") was a king of ancient Israel and Judah and the third king of the United Monarchy, according to the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.
The Tel Dan stele, an Aramaic-inscribed stone erected by a king of Aram-Dam ...
and Solomon
Solomon (), also called Jedidiah, was the fourth monarch of the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy), Kingdom of Israel and Judah, according to the Hebrew Bible. The successor of his father David, he is described as having been the penultimate ...
a piece of speculation that drew much attention. Later, Bloom said that the speculations did not go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the biblical Bathsheba
Bathsheba (; , ) was an Kings of Israel and Judah, Israelite queen consort. According to the Hebrew Bible, she was the wife of Uriah the Hittite and later of David, with whom she had all of her five children. Her status as the mother of Solomon ...
. In ''Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine'' (2004), he revisits some of the territory covered in ''The Book of J'' in discussing the significance of Yahweh
Yahweh was an Ancient Semitic religion, ancient Semitic deity of Weather god, weather and List of war deities, war in the History of the ancient Levant, ancient Levant, the national god of the kingdoms of Kingdom of Judah, Judah and Kingdom ...
and Jesus of Nazareth as literary characters, while casting a critical eye on historical approaches and asserting the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism.
In '' The American Religion'' (1992), Bloom surveyed the major varieties of Protestant
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that emphasizes Justification (theology), justification of sinners Sola fide, through faith alone, the teaching that Salvation in Christianity, salvation comes by unmerited Grace in Christianity, divin ...
and post-Protestant religious faiths that originated in the United States and argued that, in terms of their psychological hold on their adherents, most had more in common with gnosticism
Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek language, Ancient Greek: , Romanization of Ancient Greek, romanized: ''gnōstikós'', Koine Greek: Help:IPA/Greek, �nostiˈkos 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced ...
than with historical Christianity. The exception was the Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses is a Christian denomination that is an outgrowth of the Bible Student movement founded by Charles Taze Russell in the nineteenth century. The denomination is nontrinitarian, millenarian, and restorationist. Russell co-fou ...
, whom Bloom regards as non-Gnostic. He elsewhere predicted that the Mormon and Pentecostal
Pentecostalism or classical Pentecostalism is a movement within the broader Evangelical wing of Protestantism, Protestant Christianity that emphasizes direct personal experience of God in Christianity, God through Baptism with the Holy Spirit#Cl ...
strains of American Christianity would overtake mainstream Protestant divisions in popularity in the next few decades. In ''Omens of Millennium'' (1996), Bloom identifies these American religious elements as on the periphery of an old – and not inherently Christian – gnostic, religious tradition that invokes a complex of ideas and experiences concerning angelology, interpretation of dreams as prophecy
In religion, mythology, and fiction, a prophecy is a message that has been communicated to a person (typically called a ''prophet'') by a supernatural entity. Prophecies are a feature of many cultures and belief systems and usually contain di ...
, near-death experiences, and millennialism
Millennialism () or chiliasm (from the Greek equivalent) is a belief which is held by some religious denominations. According to this belief, a Messianic Age will be established on Earth prior to the Last Judgment and the future permanent s ...
.
In his essay in ''The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Thomas (also known as the Coptic Gospel of Thomas) is a non-canonical Logia, sayings gospel. It was discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 among a group of books known as the Nag Hammadi library. Scholars speculate the works ...
'', Bloom writes that none of Thomas's Aramaic
Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...
sayings have survived in the original language. Marvin Meyer generally agreed and further confirmed that the earlier versions of that text were likely written in either Aramaic or Greek. Meyer ends his introduction with an endorsement of much of Bloom's essay. Bloom notes the otherworldliness of the Jesus in Thomas's sayings by making reference to "the paradox also of the American Jesus".
''The Western Canon''
'' The Western Canon'' (1994), a survey of the major literary works of Europe and the Americas since the 14th century, focuses on 26 works Bloom considers sublime and representative of their nations and of the Western canon
The Western canon is the embodiment of High culture, high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western culture, Western world, such works having achieved the status of classics.
Recent ...
. Besides analyses of the canon's various representative works, Bloom's major concern in the volume was to reclaim literature from what he called the " School of Resentment", the mostly academic critics who espoused a social purpose in their work. Bloom asserted that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic
Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,'' , acces ...
pleasure and self-insight rather than the goal of improving one's society held by "forces of resentment". He cast the latter as absurd, writing: "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position was that politics had no place in literary criticism: that a feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
or Marxist
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
reading of ''Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark, the play (the ...
'' would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but probably nothing about ''Hamlet''.
In addition to considering how much influence a writer had had on later writers, Bloom proposed the concept of "canonical strangeness" (cf. uncanny) as a benchmark of a literary work's merit. ''The Western Canon'' also included a listnoted by the general public with widespread interestof the Western works from antiquity to the present that Bloom considered either permanent members of the canon of literary classics, or candidates for that status. Bloom said that he made the list off the top of his head at his editor's request, and that he did not stand by it.
Work on Shakespeare
Bloom had a deep appreciation for William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
, considering him the supreme center of the Western canon. The first edition of ''The Anxiety of Influence'' almost completely avoided Shakespeare, whom Bloom then considered barely touched by the psychological drama of anxiety. The second edition, published in 1997, added a long preface that mostly expounded Shakespeare's debt to Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso (; 20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he i ...
and Chaucer, and his agon with Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe ( ; Baptism, baptised 26 February 156430 May 1593), also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the English Renaissance theatre, Eli ...
, who set the stage for him by breaking free of ecclesiastical and moralizing overtones.
In his later survey, '' Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'' (1998), Bloom provided an analysis of each of Shakespeare's 38 plays, "twenty-four of which are masterpieces". Written as a companion to the general reader and theater-goer, Bloom declared that bardolatry "ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is". He also contended in the work that Shakespeare "invented" humanity, in that he prescribed the now-common practice of "overhearing" ourselves, which drives our changes. The two paragons of his theory were Sir John Falstaff of '' Henry IV'' and Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark, the play (the ...
, whom Bloom saw as representing self-satisfaction and self-loathing, respectively. These two characters, Iago, and Cleopatra
Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (; The name Cleopatra is pronounced , or sometimes in both British and American English, see and respectively. Her name was pronounced in the Greek dialect of Egypt (see Koine Greek phonology). She was ...
Bloom believed (citing A. C. Bradley) are "the four Shakespearean characters most inexhaustible to meditation".
Throughout ''Shakespeare'', characters from disparate plays are imagined alongside and interacting with each other. Contemporary academics and critics decried this as harking back to the out-of-fashion character criticism of Bradley (and others), who are explicitly praised in the book. As in ''The Western Canon'', Bloom criticizes what he calls the "School of Resentment" for its failure to live up to the challenge of Shakespeare's universality and for balkanizing the study of literature through multicultural and historicist departments. Asserting Shakespeare's singular popularity throughout the world, Bloom proclaims him the only truly multicultural author. Repudiating the "social energies" to which historicists ascribed Shakespeare's authorship, Bloom pronounced his modern academic foes – and all of society – to be but "a parody of Shakespearean energies".
2000s and 2010s
Bloom consolidated his work on the Western canon with the publication of ''How to Read and Why'' (2000) and ''Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds'' (2003). ''Hamlet: Poem Unlimited'' (also 2003) is an amendment to ''Shakespeare: Invention of the Human'' written after Bloom decided the chapter on ''Hamlet'' in the earlier book had been too focused on the textual question of the '' Ur-Hamlet'' to cover his most central thoughts on the play itself. Some elements of religious criticism were combined with his secular criticism in ''Where Shall Wisdom Be Found'' (2004), and a more complete return to religious criticism was marked by the publication of ''Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine'' (2005). Throughout the decade he also compiled, edited and introduced several major anthologies of poetry.
Bloom took part in Paul Festa's 2006 documentary '' Apparition of the Eternal Church''. It centers on people's reactions to hearing for the first time Olivier Messiaen's organ piece '' Apparition de l'église éternelle''.
Bloom began a book under the working title ''Living Labyrinth'', centering on Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, which was published as ''The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life'' (2011).
In July 2011, after the publication of ''The Anatomy of Influence'' and after finishing work on ''The Shadow of a Great Rock'', Bloom was working on three further projects:
* ''Achievement in the Evening Land from Emerson to Faulkner'', a history of American literature following the canonical model, which ultimately developed into his book ''The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime'' (2015).
* ''The Hum of Thoughts Evaded in the Mind: A Literary Memoir'', which ultimately developed into his book ''Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism'' (2019), the last book Bloom published during his lifetime.
* a play with the working title ''Walt Whitman: A Musical Pageant''. By November 2011, Bloom had changed the title to ''To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman''. This work is unpublished and it is unknown how much of it was finished.
Influence
In 1986, Bloom credited Northrop Frye as his nearest precursor. He told Imre Salusinszky in 1986: "In terms of my own theorizations ... the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and read '' Fearful Symmetry'' a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. Kenneth Burke, who is a charming fellow and a very powerful critic, but I don't come from Burke, I come out of Frye."
But in ''Anatomy of Influence'' (2011), Bloom wrote, "I no longer have the patience to read anything by Frye" and nominated Angus Fletcher among his living contemporaries as his "critical guide and conscience". Elsewhere that year, he recommended Fletcher's ''Colors of the Mind'' and M. H. Abrams's ''The Mirror and the Lamp''. In this late phase, Bloom also emphasized the tradition of earlier critics such as William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt (10 April 177818 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary criticism, literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history ...
, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionism, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalism, Transcendentalist movement of th ...
, Walter Pater, A. C. Bradley, and Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson ( – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...
, describing Johnson in ''The Western Canon'' as "unmatched by any critic in any nation before or after him". In his 2012 foreword to ''The Fourth Dimension of a Poem'' (WW Norton, 2012), Bloom indicated the influence Abrams had upon him in his years at Cornell.
Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating them, but must make their own work different from their precursors'. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably "misread" their precursors to make room for fresh imaginings.
Observers often identified Bloom with deconstruction, but he never admitted to sharing more than a few ideas with deconstructionists. He told Robert Moynihan in 1983, "What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology ... There is no escape, there is simply the given, and there is nothing that we can do."
Bloom's association with the Western canon
The Western canon is the embodiment of High culture, high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western culture, Western world, such works having achieved the status of classics.
Recent ...
provoked a substantial interest in his opinion of the relative importance of contemporary writers. In the late 1980s, Bloom told an interviewer: "Probably the most powerful living Western writer is Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...
. He's certainly the most authentic."
Of British writers, Bloom said: " Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active" and "no other contemporary British novelist seems to me to be of Iris Murdoch's eminence". After Murdoch died, Bloom expressed admiration for the novelists Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William ...
, Will Self
William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Se ...
, John Banville
William John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, Literary adaptation, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Marcel Proust, Proust, via Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov", ...
, and A. S. Byatt.
In ''Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds'' (2003), he called the Portuguese writer José Saramago "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and "one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre".
Of American novelists, Bloom said in 2003, "there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise". Saying that "they write the Style of our Age" and that "each has composed canonical works", he identified them as Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo
Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, televi ...
. He named their respective masterpieces as '' The Crying of Lot 49'', '' Gravity's Rainbow'' and '' Mason & Dixon''; '' Sabbath's Theater'' and '' American Pastoral''; '' Blood Meridian''; and ''Underworld
The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld.
...
''. He added to this estimate the work of John Crowley, with special interest in his Aegypt Sequence and novel '' Little, Big'', saying, "only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets ... only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level". Bloom called Crowley's ''Little, Big'' "a neglected masterpiece" and "the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know". He wrote the afterword to a 40th-anniversary edition of the novel. Shortly before his death, Bloom expressed admiration for the works of Joshua Cohen, William Giraldi, and Nell Freudenberger.
In ''Kabbalah and Criticism'' (1975), Bloom identified Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic and professor at Yale University. He was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern ...
, James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important living American poets. By the 1990s, he regularly named A. R. Ammons along with Ashbery and Merrill, and he later identified Henri Cole as the crucial American poet of the generation following those three. He expressed great admiration for the Canadian poets Anne Carson, particularly her verse novel ''Autobiography of Red'', and A. F. Moritz, whom Bloom called "a true poet". Bloom also listed Jay Wright as one of only a handful of major living poets and the best living American poet after Ashbery's death.
Bloom's introduction to ''Modern Critical Interpretations: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow'' (1986) features his canon of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. Playwright Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert Kushner (born July 16, 1956) is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter. Among his stage work, he is most known for ''Angels in America'', which earned a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, as well as its subsequent acclaime ...
sees Bloom as an important influence on his work.
Reception
Bloom's work has drawn polarized responses, even among established literary scholars. Bloom was called "probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States" and "America's best-known man of letters". A 1994 ''New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' article said that many younger critics see Bloom as an "outdated oddity", whereas a 1998 ''New York Times'' article called him "one of the most gifted of contemporary critics".
James Wood wrote: "Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his owna kind of campiness, in factBloom as a literary critic in the last few years has been largely unimportant." Bloom responded to questions about Wood in an interview by saying: "There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away... There's nothing to the man... I don't want to talk about him".
In the early 21st century, Bloom often found himself at the center of literary controversy after criticizing popular writers such as Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou ( ; born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credi ...
, and David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his 1996 novel ''Infinite Jest'', which ''Time (magazine), Time'' magazine ...
. In the pages of ''The Paris Review
''The Paris Review'' is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, ''The Paris Review'' published new works by Jack Kerouac, ...
'', he criticized the populist-leaning poetry slam, saying: "It is the death of art." When Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he bemoaned the "pure political correctness" of the award to an author of "fourth-rate science fiction", while conceding his appreciation of Lessing's earlier work.
MormonVoices, a group associated with Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, included Bloom on its Top Ten Anti-Mormon Statements of 2011 list for saying, "The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as 'prophet, seer and revelator', is indistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy." This was despite Bloom's sympathy for Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith Jr. (December 23, 1805June 27, 1844) was an American religious and political leader and the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Publishing the Book of Mormon at the age of 24, Smith attracted tens of thou ...
, the founding prophet
In religion, a prophet or prophetess is an individual who is regarded as being in contact with a divinity, divine being and is said to speak on behalf of that being, serving as an intermediary with humanity by delivering messages or teachings ...
of Mormonism
Mormonism is the theology and religious tradition of the Latter Day Saint movement of Restorationism, Restorationist Christianity started by Joseph Smith in Western New York in the 1820s and 1830s. As a label, Mormonism has been applied to va ...
, whom he called a "religious genius".
Written works
Books
* ''Shelley's Mythmaking''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
* ''The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry''. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Revised and enlarged edn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
* ''Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument''. Anchor Books: New York: Doubleday and Co., 1963.
* ''The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin.''; edited with introduction. New York: DoubleDay, 1965.
* ''Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean''; edition with introduction. New York: New American Library, 1970.
* ''Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism.''; edited with introduction. New York: Norton, 1970.
* ''Yeats''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
* ''The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
* '' The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; 2nd edn, 1997.
* ''The Selected Writings of Walter Pater''; edition with introduction and notes. New York: New American Library, 1974.
* ''A Map of Misreading''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
* ''Kabbalah and Criticism''. New York : Seabury Press, 1975.
* ''Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
* ''Figures of Capable Imagination''. New York: Seabury Press, 1976.
* ''Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate''. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
* ''Deconstruction and Criticism''. New York: Seabury Press, 1980.
* '' The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy''. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
* ''Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
* ''The Breaking of the Vessels''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
* ''The strong light of the canonical: Kafka, Freud and Scholem as revisionists of Jewish culture and thought''. Published by New York: The City College, 1987.
* ''The Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism''. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988.
* ''Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present''. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
* ''The Book of J: Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg; Interpreted by Harold Bloom''. New York: Grove Press, 1990
* ''The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus''; translation with introduction, critical edition of the Coptic text and notes by Marvin Meyer, with an interpretation by Harold Bloom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.
* '' The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation''; Touchstone Books; (1992; August 1993)
* '' The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages''. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
* ''Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection''. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.
* '' Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human''. New York: 1998.
* ''How to Read and Why''. New York: Scribner, 2000.
* ''Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages''. New York: 2001.
* ''El futur de la imaginació (The Future of the Imagination)''. Barcelona: Anagrama / Empúries, 2002.
* '' Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds''. New York: 2003.
* ''Hamlet: Poem Unlimited''. New York: 2003.
* ''The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost''. New York: 2004.
* ''Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?'' New York: 2004.
* '' Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine''. 2005.
* ''American Religious Poems: An Anthology By Harold Bloom''. 2006.
* ''Fallen Angels'', illustrated by Mark Podwal. Yale University Press, 2007.
* ''Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems'' Harper, 2010.
* '' The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life''. Yale University Press, 2011.
* ''The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of The King James Bible''. Yale University Press, 2011.
* ''The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime''. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
* ''Falstaff: Give Me Life''. Scribner, 2017.
* ''Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air''. Scribner, 2017.
* ''Lear: The Great Image of Authority''. Scribner, 2018.
* ''Iago: The Strategies of Evil''. Scribner, 2018.
* ''Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind''. Scribner, 2019.
* ''Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism''. Knopf, 2019.
* ''Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death''. Yale, 2020.
* ''The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Re-read''. Knopf, 2020.
Articles
"On Extended Wings"
; Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. By Helen Hennessy Vendler, (Review), ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'', October 5, 1969.
* "Poets' meeting in the heyday of their youth; A Single Summer With Lord Byron", ''The New York Times'', February 15, 1970.
"An angel's spirit in a decaying (and active) body"
, ''The New York Times'', November 22, 1970.
, ''The New York Times'', November 12, 1975.
, ''The New York Times'', April 18, 1976.
, ''The New York Times'', August 4, 1977.
, ''The New York Times'', February 5, 1978.
, ''The New York Times'', July 22, 1979.
* "Straight Forth Out of Self", ''The New York Times'', June 22, 1980.
* "The Heavy Burden of the Past; Poets", ''The New York Times'', January 4, 1981.
* "The Pictures of the Poet; The Painting and Drawings of William Blake, by Martin Butlin. Vol. I, Text. Vol. II, Plates" (review), ''The New York Times'', January 3, 1982.
* "A Novelist's Bible; The Story of the Stories, The Chosen People and Its God. By Dan Jacobson" (review), ''The New York Times'', October 17, 1982.
* "Isaac Bashevis Singer's Jeremiad; The Penitent, By Isaac Bashevis Singer" (review), ''The New York Times'', September 25, 1983.
* "Domestic Derangements; A Late Divorce, By A. B. Yehoshua Translated by Hillel Halkin" (review), ''The New York Times'', February 19, 1984.
* "War Within the Walls; In the Freud Archives, By Janet Malcolm" (review), ''The New York Times'', May 27, 1984.
* "His Long Ordeal by Laughter; Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy and Epilogue. By Philip Roth" (review), ''The New York Times'', May 19, 1985.
* "A Comedy of Worldly Salvation; The Good Apprentice, By Iris Murdoch" (review), ''The New York Times'', January 12, 1986.
* "Freud, the Greatest Modern Writer" (review), ''The New York Times'', March 23, 1986.
* "Passionate Beholder of America in Trouble; Look Homeward, A Life of Thomas Wolfe. By David Herbert Donald" (review), ''The New York Times'', February 8, 1987.
* "The Book of the Father; The Messiah of Stockholm, By Cynthia Ozick" (review), ''The New York Times'', March 22, 1987.
*
Still Haunted by Covenant"
(review), ''The New York Times'', January 31, 1988.
, ''The New York Times'', April 26, 1992.
* "A Jew Among the Cossacks; The first English translation of Isaac Babel's journal about his service with the Russian cavalry. 1920 Diary, By Isaac Babel" (review), ''The New York Times'', June 4, 1995.
* "Kaddish; By Leon Wieseltier" (review), ''The New York Times'', October 4, 1998.
* "View; On First Looking into Gates's Crichton", ''The New York Times'', June 4, 2000.
*
'; The election, as Shakespeare might have seen it", ''The New York Times'', December 6, 2000.
* "Macbush" (play), ''Vanity Fair'', April 2004.
"The Lost Jewish Culture"
, ''The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of ...
'' 54/11 (June 28, 2007) : 44–47 eviews ''The Dreams of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492'', translated, edited, and with an introduction by Peter Cole
"The Glories of Yiddish"
''The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of ...
'' 55/17 (November 6, 2008) [reviews ''History of the Yiddish Language'', by Max Weinreich, edited by Paul Glasser, translated from the Yiddish by Shlomo Noble with the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman]
*
Yahweh Meets R. Crumb
", ''The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of ...
'', 56/19 (December 3, 2009) R. Crumb">Robert_Crumb.html" ;"title="eviews ''The Book of Genesis'', illustrated by Robert Crumb">R. Crumb
"Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?"
, ''The New York Times'', November 12, 2011.
"Richard III: Victim or Monster? Asks Harold Bloom"
, ''Newsweek'', February 11, 2013.
Introduction to ''The Invention of Influence'' by Peter Cole
, ''The Tablet'', January 21, 2014.
Reference Series
* Bloom's Bio Critiques Series, Bloom's Literary Criticism
* Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations Series, Bloom's Literary Criticism
* Bloom's Major Short Story Writers Series, Bloom's Literary Criticism
See also
References
Further reading
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* His famous criticism of the Harry Potter
''Harry Potter'' is a series of seven Fantasy literature, fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young Magician (fantasy), wizard, Harry Potter (character), Harry Potter, and his friends ...
series.
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* Burrow, Colin, "The Magic Bloomschtick" (review of Harold Bloom, ''The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon'', edited by David Mikics, Library of America, October 2019, 426 pp., ), ''London Review of Books
The ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published bimonthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews.
History
The ''London Review of Book ...
'', vol. 41, no. 22 (21 November 2019), pp. 21–25. "Harold Bloom will be remembered as a great provoker – of thought, of laughter, and of resistance. He didn't permanently reconfigure the literary landscape, but the idiosyncratic path he tracked across it is one few could follow." (Final two sentences of Burrow's review, p. 25.)
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External links
* at Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
*
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''In Depth'' interview with Bloom, May 4, 2003
C-SPAN
Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN ) is an American Cable television in the United States, cable and Satellite television in the United States, satellite television network, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a Non ...
*
Harold Bloom
at Stanford Presidential Lectures
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bloom, Harold
1930 births
2019 deaths
20th-century American educators
20th-century American writers
21st-century American academics
21st-century American writers
Alumni of Pembroke College, Cambridge
American academics of English literature
American literary critics
American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent
American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent
Cornell University alumni
Jewish American academics
Jewish scholars
Literary critics of English
MacArthur Fellows
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
New York University faculty
Shakespearean scholars
The Bronx High School of Science alumni
W. B. Yeats scholars
William Blake scholars
Writers from the Bronx
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Yale Sterling Professors
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Yale University faculty
Yiddish-speaking people