![]() ![]() It might be stable, but it’s not unchangeable. His descriptive account is that the canon is fluid, not fixed-open, not closed. His stalwart defense of the Western canon is well known but widely misunderstood. Bloom reminds us that to be faithful to tradition is to rework it, to keep it alive, and that tradition and innovation are yoked pairs, necessarily dependent on one another.īloom has been cultivating the image and reputation of a prophet or mystic for decades. He is a discerning Romantic in an age of banality and distraction, in a culture of proud illiteracy and historical unawareness. He demonstrates what is manifestly true about the best literary critics: they are as much artists as the subjects they undertake.īloom’s criticism is characterized by sonorous, cadenced, almost haunting prose, by an exacting judgment and expansive imagination, and by a painful, sagacious sensitivity to the complexities of human behavior and psychology. What can be said about Harold Bloom that hasn’t been said already? The Yale professor is a controversial visionary, a polarizing seer who has been recycling and reformulating parallel theories of creativity and influence, with slightly different foci and inflections, for his entire career, never seeming tiresome or repetitive. ![]()
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