Harold Bloom Summary

In 1973 a small book was published under the title, The Anxiety of Influence. It was to mark Harold Bloom's dramatic entrance into literary theory and was to mark as well the theoretical discourse of ... Read more

Critical Essay by Jerome J. Mcgann One of the essential qualities of every Romantic aesthetic is revisionism. We say that Romanticism breaks certain rules, or alters them; or we say that it attacks o... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Wood Fame, Borges once wrote, is a form of incomprehension, and perhaps the worst. Harold Bloom's theory of poetry has a sort of fame, at least by hearsay, and is lar... Read more

Critical Essay by Geoffrey H. Hartman With an audacity and pathos hard to parallel in modern scholarship, [in The Anxiety of Influence] Bloom apprehends English literary history from Milton to the pr... Read more

Critical Essay by Christopher Ricks Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him. For, still asking himself what there is left for him to do, but unable to bring himself to leap off in full career from wh... Read more

Critical Essay by Marvin Mudrick [Brackets in the following excerpt do not signify editorial changes.—Ed.] Harold Bloom's terminal case of transumption has been brought on by too muc... Read more

In the following review of Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present, Donoghue explores Bloom's discussion of the influence of religious forms in Romantic literatu... Read more

In the following review, Donoghue questions Bloom's choices and methods in the formation of a literary "canon". In 1970, W. Jackson Bate published The Burden of the Past and th... Read more

In the following essay, Rosenfeld explores the various influences involved in the development of Bloom's antithetical criticism of poetry. A good critic … is armed for war. And criti... Read more

In the following essay, Arac examines Bloom's earlier works and traces the development of his theoretical stance in order to locate Bloom's "concerns and gestures in the continuin... Read more

In the following review, O'Hara contends that The Breaking of the Vessels is "both more extreme" and "more predictable" than Bloom's other works, and that the... Read more

In the following essay, Wyatt uses Bloom's own theoretical approach to examine the significance of Freud and American literature in Bloom's work. Harold Bloom's theory of poeti... Read more