In the following essay, Altevers argues that Bloom's "psychopoetic model" does not constitute "a fundamentally historical mode of interpretation."

In the following essay, Rosenfeld explores the various influences involved in the development of Bloom's antithetical criticism of poetry.

In the following essay, Horstmann takes issue with various elements of Bloom's work.

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

In the following review of Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Donoghue provides a brief synopsis of Bloom's theory of poetry and how it applies to Wallace Stevens's poetry.

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 continuing contests of literary criticism."

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 literature.

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 present as a single movement, calls it Romanticism, and even while making it exemplary of the burdens of Freudian or psychological man, dooms it to a precession which looks toward the death of poetry more firmly than Hegel does. For there is, in his augury, no compensation arising from the side of Science, Religion or Criticism. "The strong ima...

In the following review, Donoghue questions Bloom's choices and methods in the formation of a literary "canon".

In the following essay, Eiland discusses Bloom's theory of repression and revisionism as creative forces for poets.

In the following review, Dooley notes that The Western Canon marks a "significant change of direction" for Bloom.

Like most good books, Harold Bloom's latest essay is by no means what it pretends to be. [The Anxiety of Influence] calls itself, in subtitle, "a theory of poetry" and claims to be corrective in at least three ways: by debunking the humanistic view of literary influence as the productive integration of individual talent within tradition; by contributing, through a refinement of the techniques of reading, to a more rigorous practical criticism; and by enriching the taken-for-granted patt...

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 or changes various traditional forms of thought and order. To do so, of course, implies a deep consciousness of the past, which in fact all Romantics have. Antiquarianism is a very Romantic activity. But a Romantic consciousness recovers only to transform. Though Harold Bloom has his own unmistakable way of speaking of these matters, they represen...

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 author seems to have moved from "precocious and prolific youth to decadent and despairing ancientness without ever having attained critical maturity."

In the following review, Alter discusses Agon, "the latest installment in Harold Bloom's elaborate theory of poetic creation."

[Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism] was not conceived as a book, it does not read like a book, and there is no need to defend it as a book. Any collection of essays and addresses composed in the span of a few years by a single powerful mind will tend to return to the same questions, and to urge (even covertly) the same views; only in that sense is this a book. I have no objection to Bloom's calling his central subject to our attention by his one-word title; and his preface does remind us that, al...

In the following essay, Molesworth discusses the roles of Freudianism and theology in Bloom's criticism.

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 largely uncomprehended. This is partly Bloom's fault. If some of the more militant phrases from The Anxiety of Influence are often heard flying among the martinis, it is because he wrote them intending to provoke us…. Bloom constantly writes as if he were simultaneously inventing gunpowder and telling us a particularly bloodcurdlin...

His theory of poetic influence has been the leitmotif of Bloom's writings for many years, but it is only recently that he has presented it in full-blown theoretical fashion. He is indefatigable. In 1973 he published The Anxiety of Influence, a frantically allusive and aphoristic manifesto which ran through the "ratios of revision" in a rather exasperating way. Shortly afterward came A Map of Misreading, in which Bloom expounded his views more congenially, and adorned them with some extr...

A Map of Misreading continues Bloom's determined attempt to incarnate and prolong Romanticism, to convince us that literature is essentially a heroic daemonization, centered on "the fearsome process by which a person is reborn a poet." The poet, or at least the post-Miltonic poet, is an indomitable Spirit who feels the curse of belatedness and takes arms against his predecessors, slays them by misreading, so as to create a space in which his own poetry can take place, as an antithetical...

[Brackets in the following excerpt do not signify editorial changes.—Ed.] Harold Bloom's terminal case of transumption has been brought on by too much "strong reading," a morose exercise for which according to his statement Emerson and Freud bear part of the blame, and which Bloom doesn't scruple to characterize as "not less aggressive than sexual desire." Reading. Wow. Tell it to your local librarian. (Academic criticism is dead, of which Professor Bloom is ...

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 what has become a juggernaut-bandwagon, [in "Poetry and Repression" he] has nothing left to do but to say the same things about new contests and with more decibels. He is running out of prize-fights. Blake vs. Ezekiel; Wordsworth vs. Milton; Shelley vs. Milton; Keats vs. Milton (the Muhammad Ali of it all); Tennyson vs. Keats; Browning...