Harold Bloom, described by the New York Times as “the most notorious literary critic in America”, died on October 14 at the age of eighty-nine. In this artfully edited patchwork of five decades’ worth of his writings on American literature, most of his familiar tropes, tricks and tics are visible, beginning with the theory that made his name. For Bloom, literary creation is a species of Oedipal struggle. Strong writers – what Wallace Stevens calls “figures of capable imagination” – are not so much inspired by the works of their strong predecessors as intimidated or inhibited by them. In response, they misread or “correct” their predecessors or precursors “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves”, becoming blocking figures in their turn. This theory, first propounded in The Anxiety of Influence, grew out of Bloom’s earlier, non-theoretical books on Shelley, Blake, Yeats and Romanticism in general, while also owing something to Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970) and T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). It was then quickly expanded and complicated in a succession of increasingly opaque publications: A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Poetry and Repression (1976) and Agon (1982). Since its appearance in 1973, The Anxiety of Influence has been translated into forty-five languages.

The theory of influence anxiety underlies almost all the chapters in The American Canon: Literary genius from Emerson to Pynchon. What is missing, mercifully, is the esoteric terminology of the later expansions. The ways strong writers “appropriate” (rather than identify with) their strong predecessors are equivalents of Freudian defence mechanisms. Bloom calls these ways “revisionary ratios”, being reductive revisions or alterations of the predecessor’s work (“ratio” as reduction comes from Blake). Of the fancy names Bloom gives to the six “revisionary ratios”, also called “poetic misprisions” (clinamen, tessera, kenosis, askesis, apophrades, daemonization – swerving, completing, emptying, truncating, returning to/opening up, displacing), only the last features prominently in the new book, as daemon. It is the daemon, an internal yet also somehow alien imaginative capacity, which confers strength on writers, connecting them both to their truest or most individual selves, and to divinity. Bloom’s daemon is, like Blake’s “Poetic Genius”, the source both of “All religions” and of “the true Man”.

In recent times, Bloom’s notoriety has derived less from this theory than from his fierce defence of the canon, notably in The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages (1994). This defence, with accompanying bestselling fame, earned him the enmity of many academic critics. The Western canon has been seen as an instrument of oppression in English departments in recent years, denying access to the work of writers of colour, women writers, and those outside the Western tradition. Bloom’s response to this view was combative in the extreme. In the “Preface and Prelude” to The Western Canon, he attributed it to “the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed The School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and non-existent) programs for social change”. The only hope for literary study, which he saw as under threat from anti-canonical resentment, is that “at some point there will be a reversal, and the rabblement of lemmings will cease to hurl themselves over the cliffs”.

Bloom’s belief that some works and writers are greater or stronger than others (“strong” is preferred to “great” because it suggests struggle or agon) is what determines his sense of the critic’s role: to sort the wheat from the chaff, explaining and defending literary strength on literary or aesthetic grounds. Bloom came from an Orthodox Jewish family in the Bronx. His father was a garment worker from Odessa; his mother, the daughter of a carpenter, came from Brest-Litovsk. Yiddish was spoken in the home and was Bloom’s first language. When charged with elitism he responded with characteristic hyperbole: “I am a proletarian; they are not. I’m also the only person I know at Yale University who was born and raised in a working-class family”. When academics “prate of power as they do of race and gender … these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert they are the oppressed”.

The American Canon is not the first book-length study of American literature written by Bloom. In 2015 he published The Daemon Knows: Literary greatness and the American sublime, which focuses on twelve American writers widely regarded as canonical (Hart Crane is the possible exception). These twelve are discussed in pairs: Emerson and Dickinson; Whitman and Melville; Hawthorne and Henry James; Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot; Mark Twain and Robert Frost; William Faulkner and Crane. The pairings, some more obvious than others, trace the relations between earlier writer and later writer. When affiliation is flatly denied (Stevens said he and Eliot were “dead opposites”), denial is read either in Freudian terms, as defence, or brushed aside, since the relation Bloom claims to be concerned with is “achieved in the literary work, whether or not its author ever felt it”. Dickinson is paired with Emerson not despite the fact that her darkness or pessimism repudiates Emerson’s optimism but because it does so, since, according to Bloom, she has Emerson clearly in her sights.

The most glaring of the omissions Bloom acknowledges in The Daemon Knows (Poe, Cather, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway) are writers deemed deficient in “sublimity”, an aesthetic value derived from the daemon. All other standards and values are secondary, including those that produce writing of social or political influence. Hence, in the chapter on Edith Wharton in The American Canon, the preference is for James’s Portrait of a Lady over Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Both novels involve renunciations on the part of their main characters, but Isabel Archer’s renunciation, unlike Newland Archer’s, “has a transcendental element. Wharton, shrewder if less sublime than her friend James, gives us a more realistic yet a less consequential Archer”. Zora Neale Hurston, in a later chapter, is praised for being “refreshingly free of all the ideologies that currently obscure the reception of her best book [Their Eyes Were Watching God]. Her sense of power has nothing in common with politics of any persuasion, with contemporary modes of feminism, or even with those questers who search for a black aesthetic”.

Nor has it anything to do with French theory. Marianne Moore’s best poems restore “my faith, as a critic, in what the language of the poets truly is: diction, or choice of words, playing endlessly upon the dialectic of denotation and connotation, a dialectic that simply vanishes in all Structuralist and post-Structuralist ruminations upon the supposed priority of ‘language’ over meaning … The belated Modernism of the Gallic proclamation of the death of the author was no less premature than it was, always already, belated”. Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in The Daemon Knows was Poe; the chapter on him in The American Canon begins with “the scandal of what might be called ‘French Poe,’ perhaps as much a Gallic mystification as ‘French Freud.’ French Poe is less bizarre than French Freud, but more puzzling, because its literary authority ought to be overwhelming, and yet vanishes utterly when confronted by what Poe actually wrote”.

The breadth and depth of Bloom’s reading, here as in all his books, is astonishing. He claims to have learned to read Yiddish at the age of three, Hebrew at four, and English at five, and to have been a serious reader of English poetry at ten, when in 1940 he paid his first visit to the Melrose Road branch of the Bronx Public Library and fell in love with Blake and Hart Crane. He then read Moby-Dick, also at ten. Such claims are not always consistent (sometimes the first library visit was at “seven or eight”, at other times “ten or eleven”). After mentioning his pre-adolescent infatuation with Blake, he told an interviewer from the New York Times Magazine, “I memorized almost instinctively all of the long poems. I went from Blake to Milton and from Milton to Shakespeare. I read my way through the Melrose Library … I can read at a shocking rate and I remember everything”. At the time of his death, writers of tributes wondered at the number of poems and passages he knew by heart. “When he could still walk”, recalled his friend Graeme Wood, “he would allow bystanders on Yale quads to quote random lines of Milton to him, and he would pick up the line and keep reciting until he reached the other end of the quad.”

In adolescence, Bloom fell under the spell of Faulkner, described in the new book as “the canonical American writer of prose fiction since the death of Henry James”. At Cornell, under M. H. Abrams, he became what used to be called a Romanticist. When he graduated in 1951, according to Abrams, a friend as well as a mentor, “we insisted that he go to another university for graduate school. We couldn’t teach him anything more”. At Yale, where Bloom took his PhD and never left, he outfaced or outlasted the anti-Romanticist bias of the New Critics who dominated the English department in the 1950s, very briefly allowed himself to be allied with the Yale deconstructionists in the 1970s (partly through assertions like “the meaning of a poem can only be another poem”, partly through such meanings being hidden or unintended). In 1977, Bloom split with English completely, to become Sterling Professor of the Humanities, in a department of one. He reported directly to the provost, which is said to have suited colleagues and Bloom alike. As high-handed and theatrical in life as on the page, he attracted many devoted students, some of whom he flirted with outrageously. (In the case of Naomi Wolf, she claims, too outrageously.) In later years, he taught from home, and gave his last lecture a week before his death.

The American Canon is different in several respects from The Daemon Knows, though parts of it are taken from the earlier book. To begin with, it has been put together by someone other than Bloom. David Mikics, an ex-pupil, himself a gifted critic, has lightly edited, abridged, and sometimes combined passages from different sources in order to produce “a single coherent work”. Mikics writes in the preface of having to iron out “small inconsistencies”, cut and update references, and make other minor changes. “In the very few instances where something more substantive seemed desirable I have consulted with Bloom and worked with him to come up with new wording.” It is hard to trace these alterations, since bibliographical details for individual chapters are not given. The chapter on Emerson, for example, combines two essays or essay parts: “Emerson: Power at the crossing”, from Poetics of Influence: New and selected criticism (1988) and “Bacchus and Merlin” from The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in the Romantic tradition (1971). In other cases, the make-up of chapters is more complex, though only occasionally does the stitching show. The absence of provenances, of dates in particular, either at the ends of chapters or on a page of sources and acknowledgements, is nonetheless regrettable, as is the lack of an index.

The American Canon discusses forty-seven writers, almost four times the number discussed in The Daemon Knows. The chapters are ordered chronologically, by the authors’ birth dates, from Emerson (b. 1803) to Pynchon (b. 1937). Mikics explains: “I have chosen to represent figures about whom Bloom has made his strongest, most memorable arguments, and have omitted some well-known figures toward whom he has displayed mixed feelings”. Roughly a quarter of the chapters are devoted to writers who wrote primarily in the nineteenth century; the rest come from the twentieth. Twelve chapters are devoted to women writers, six to African Americans. Bloom seems to have had no strong or memorable arguments about Puritan or colonial writers, or any writer from the eighteenth century. Nor does he seem to have had much interest in genre fiction, comedy (though he himself can be very funny, especially in derogation), or non-fictional prose, including slave narratives, political writing, reportage, or criticism. When in passing he discusses critics, he can be as rhapsodic or dismissive as he is when discussing poets or novelists. In an interview in 1986 he confessed that on first reading Fearful Symmetry (1946), Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, it “ravished my heart away. I thought it was the best book I ever read about anything. I must have read it a hundred times between 1947 and 1950, probably intuitively memorised it”.

According to the flyleaf of The American Canon, Bloom published over forty books, among them bestselling studies of the Bible, religion and Shakespeare, which, together with his Yale salary, must have earned him a good deal. (He received an advance of $600,000 for The Western Canon, and roughly twice as much in 2002 for Genius: A mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds.) He needed the money in part because one of his two sons has a chronic disability, and in his mid-sixties Bloom began to worry about covering the costs of future care and treatment. He took on a second professorship, at New York University, and embarked on a lucrative arrangement with Chelsea House Publishers. This involved writing introductions to hundreds of volumes of critical essays by other academics on a range of literary topics, writers, works and characters. In 2011, the critic Carlin Romano wrote of keying in “Bloom, Harold” under “author” in the University of Pennsylvania’s main library catalogue and finding 846 entries, most of which were for Chelsea House volumes. At one point, Bloom employed sixteen full-time staffers in New Haven to help in the production of these volumes.

His introductions to the Chelsea House collections are as idiosyncratic and demanding – and often as interesting, judging by those reprinted here – as his full-length books. Hardly introductions, they presuppose familiarity with the writer or topic discussed and display a characteristically wide range of reference. Whether the publishers objected to their difficulty is not known. If they did, Bloom was unlikely to have changed anything. “No one edits. I edit”, he told the Paris Review. “I refuse to be edited.” Romano suspects that what mattered to Chelsea House was Bloom’s name on the spine, a guarantee of library sales. The shorter chapters in The American Canon, in particular those that appear to be about single works rather than authors, are likely to have appeared first in introductions to Chelsea House volumes, or been reworked from them. Although some are short – ten pages, even five – they are among the best and least expected in the book.

For the most part, Bloom as critic is an enthusiast — unlike his “resentnik” enemies, avid for failings (absences, bias, naivety). “Poets influence us”, the chapter on Wallace Stevens begins, “because we fall in love with their poems.” Flannery O’Connor is “the most original tale-teller among Americans since Hemingway”. Ursula Le Guin “seems never to have written a wrong or bad sentence”. A. R. Ammons is “the wisest and I prophesy most enduring poet of his generation”. In the chapter on Philip Roth, the only “Great Male Narcissist” to make the cut (no Mailer, Updike or Bellow), the difference between Alex Portnoy and Micky Sabbath is “the shadow of Shakespeare, of King Lear’s madness, and of Falstaff’s refusal of embitterment and estrangement … Sabbath’s Theater is a tragicomedy, and its Shakespearean reverberations are legitimate and persuasive”. In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the dialogue between Judge Holden and the Kid “is the finest achievement in this book of augmenting wonders … I read it perpetually and cannot persuade myself that I have come to the end of it”.

Here and throughout, a confiding, table-talk informality marks Bloom’s criticism. “After rereading virtually all of Wharton”, he writes, “I have to settle for The Custom of the Country as her best book, and the disturbing Undine Spragg as her strongest character. Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair makes me fall in love with her again, but you have to be coldly depraved to lose your soul to Undine”. In the chapter on Willa Cather (mostly on My Antonia), Bloom recalls how Wallace Stevens “startled me by asserting, the one time I met him, that Cather was the best we had”. After calling Gershom Scholem’s The Messianic Idea in Judaism “the best commentary I know on Miss Lonelyhearts”, he reveals that he “once attempted to convey this to Scholem, who shrugged Nathanael West off” (mistakenly, Bloom adds, “from the stance of literary criticism”). “When I was a child, my ear had been ravished by Eliot’s poetry”, he confesses in the Eliot chapter (what a strange child Bloom must have been), “but his criticism – literary and cultural – dismayed me. In my old age I have calmed down. My warfare is accomplished, my grudge ebbing with the ocean of life.”

Such moments in The American Canon nestle cheek by jowl with obscurity, frequently a product of arcane allusion. “I recite these three final stanzas to myself several times a day”, Bloom writes of the close of Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge”, “because they capture so well the theurgy of Gnostic traditions: Hermetic, neo-Platonic, Kabbalistic.” In discussing Tender Is the Night, he says of Dick Diver: “his character is his fate, and his relationship with Nicole is not so much a failed counter-transference as it is another pathetic version of the sublime Romantic vision of sexual entropy set forth overtly in Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’ and implicitly in James’s The Sacred Fount”. Right. John Ashbery’s “forerunners”, “the makers of ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’”, were “primary Emersonians, involuntary as Stevens was in this identity. Ashbery is that American anomaly, an antithetical Transcendentalist, bearer of an influx of Newness that he cannot know himself”.

Emerson is everywhere in the book, the fons et origo of the American sublime. “He is the inescapable theorist of all subsequent American writing. From his moment to ours, American authors are either in his tradition, or else in a counter-tradition originating in opposition to him.” Counter-traditionalists believe in “sin, error, time, history, a God external to the self, the visiting of the crimes of the fathers upon the sons”. Emersonians believe in freedom, impulse, transport, the private self. In some contexts, Bloom admits, Emerson’s influence can be damaging. “Self-reliance translated out of the inner life and into the marketplace is difficult to distinguish from our current religion of selfishness.” Emerson “has the peculiar dialectical gift of being precursor both of the perpetual New Left of student non-students and the perpetual New Right of preacher non-preachers”. To the extent that Emerson’s notions of individualism underlie public life in the United States, “whether manifested Left or Right”, they “have helped place us in a country where literary satire of politics is impossible, since the real thing is far more outrageous than even a satirist of genius could invent”.

Only in literature, where the daemon rules, is self-reliance an unmixed blessing, the source of writing touched by sublimity, “like those utterances of Macbeth’s that break into him from a higher realm of eloquence”. In The American Canon Bloom does his best to identify and interpret utterances like Macbeth’s. When he succeeds, his criticism resembles that of his strong predecessors. Here is a passage from the chapter on Robert Frost, which contains a reading of Frost’s poem “Directive” (1946):

I am an experiential and personalizing literary critic, which certainly rouses up enmity, but I go on believing poems matter only if we matter. All criticism of a man’s self, said my hero Samuel Johnson, is really oblique praise; it is to show how much he can spare. Frost in “Directive” criticises himself and his elite readers but only to show how much he and they can spare.

Once one recognizes that Johnson’s “criticism of a man’s self” means “self-criticism”, Bloom’s point registers as both fair and wise, as in the best of Samuel Johnson’s criticism. Christopher Ricks has often been quoted as saying of Bloom that he once “had an idea; now the idea has him”. But Ricks also said, in a review of The Western Canon, that Bloom’s criticism “has many of the virtues that it sees and shows in the work [Bloom] so fiercely admires. I can’t imagine a reader who would not learn something from every page”.