SOURCE: "'Armed for War': Notes on The Antithetical Criticism of Harold Bloom," in The Southern Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 554-66.

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 criticism is a war, against a work of art—either the critic defeats the work or the work defeats the critic.

                                —Jacob Glatstein

It is a duty of critics, as Harold Bloom has recently defined it, to make a good poet's work harder for him to perform, for it is only in the overcoming of genuine difficulties that strong poetry emerges. A corollary of this view—never stated as such but clearly implicit in Bloom's writings—is that a critic should do his work in such a way as to make a reader's work also more difficult for him to...