On October 14, esteemed literary critic Dr. Harold Bloom passed away in a hospital in New Haven at the age of 89. A longtime professor at Yale University, he continued to hold classes until the week he passed away. He also taught Choate English teacher Mr. David Loeb while Mr. Loeb was earning his graduate degree at Yale. Bloom’s legacy shaped the world of literary criticism and education.
Born into a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking family in 1930, Bloom received a B.A. in Classics from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in English from Yale. In 1955, he became a professor of English at Yale and continued to teach English there for the next six decades. Throughout his career, Bloom received many accolades for his contributions to the field of English literature. In 1985, he received a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and in 1999, he received a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also awarded the title of Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale.
As a literary critic, Bloom passionately defended the western canon, a body of classic works of literature written by Western authors. These include Joyce’s Ulysses, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, many of which remain staples of high-school and college syllabuses. Choate, for example, teaches The Odyssey to third formers and frequently includes many of Shakespeare’s works in higher-level English courses.
In 1994, Bloom published his magnum opus The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. In this book, he defines certain standards for a work to be regarded as a classic and asserts the importance of 26 authors whom he deemed the core of Western Canon. His book was met with resistance due to the lack of diversity within the list of selected authors, which was largely composed of white men.
Bloom defended the Western Canon from a literary movement which he termed “literature of resentment.” He claimed college professors taught works of literature that were inferior to Western Canon in an effort to promote their own political beliefs. He argued that literary analysis and education should focus on the merit of a text rather than push a political agenda.
Bloom’s controversial legacy lies beyond his critical perspectives regarding texts outside of the Western Canon. As a literary critic, he also discussed the concept of literary influence. In his book The Anxiety of Influence, which he published in 1973, Bloom argues that poets write “weak” poems because they feel pressure to live up to the legacy of the poets that came before them. He claims that this problem stems from a misunderstanding of the purpose of poems. As Bloom saw it, when poems become a form of retaliation or response, they lose originality.
In 1986, Mr. Loeb took a class on Victorian prose that was taught by Bloom. According to Mr. Loeb, Bloom “was this enormous personality, and he talked and asked questions just to the universe. And he tended to answer them himself, and it was a little intimidating and also very exciting.”
On Bloom’s controversial views on literature, Mr. Loeb said, “Professor Bloom was often trying to provoke, so I think that he was probably a little less dogmatic about things than he pretended to be.” As it happened, Bloom taught both Mr. Loeb and Mr. Loeb’s daughter, Hannah, now a graduate student in literature at the University of Virginia. “She was a much better student for him,” said Mr. Loeb. “They were closer than he and I were. He was kind enough to pretend to remember me when I went over one day with her to visit.”
Although Bloom gained much success and admiration as a literary critic, his reputation was marred in 2004 when Dr. Naomi Wolf, one of his former students, accused him of “sexual encroachment” in an article in New York. Dr. Wolf, now a best-selling author, claimed that at a dinner the two had together in 1983, Bloom made sexual advances toward her, including touching her inner thigh. Dr. Wolf asserted that Bloom’s actions did not reach the level of sexual harassment. In her article, she said that she was bringing up the event after 21 years because “every year, I wonder about the young women who might have suffered because I was too scared to tell the truth to the people whose job it is to make sure the institution is clean.”
Bloom adamantly denied the allegations.
