In Memoriam: Harold Bloom

The faculty lost a number of distinguished emeriti in 2019-2020: Harold Bloom, Marie Borroff, Michael Coe, David Brion Davis, Stanley Insler, Brian Skinner, and George Veronis. All of them received tributes from the faculty on their retirement, with the exception of Harold Bloom, who did not retire before he died and is recognized here. 

Harold Bloom, B.A. Cornell University, Ph.D. Yale, faculty member at Yale since 1951: The presence of an obituary note on the front page of the New York Times after his death is appropriate indication of Harold Bloom’s place in American literary criticism during the second part of the twentieth century. Widely published, influential, opinionated, controversial, he was by far the most recognized literary critic of his day. He was born on the Lower East Side of New York to immigrant parents. His father was a garment worker, his first language was Yiddish, and he spoke no English until he was six. At the local library where his sisters took him, he became mesmerized by the poems of Hart Crane and William Blake, and from that moment on poetry and poets became his life. A less than mediocre student in high school, his guidance counselor directed him to teacher’s college, but a surprise first place in the aggregated subjects of the New York Regent examinations won him a scholarship to Cornell instead, and offered him the mentorship of the critic M. H. Abrams, the brilliant, kind, genial spirit who recognized his genius and helped him on. 

Bloom’s originality was four-fold: First, at a moment when Romantic poets were out of fashion, devalued by the formalism of T. S. Eliot and the New Critics, he championed the Romantics through his pathbreaking books on Shelley and Blake and his more comprehensive book, The Visionary Company. In the seventies, in a book that galvanized the critical world, The Anxiety of Influence, he theorized that all literary texts incorporate the influence of the past and are a response to works that have preceded them. In his middle career, his fame and influence elevated and made reputations: by highlighting such poets as Whitman, Emerson, and Crane, and bringing to the eye of his students the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, he helped win for them greater attention in the Academy, the literary world, and a much larger public. Finally, in his later years, in an age dominated by theory and by new forms of criticism, he stood fast for Shakespeare, for the poets he valued, and for the pleasures of reading and the worlds it opened. 

Whatever his accomplishments as a critic, Bloom always insisted that above all he was a teacher—and year after year he taught seminars to scores of undergraduates and auditors who learned from him, loved him, remembered him, visited him, and carried his literary values and tastes with them into the wider world. His fierce views could make him challenging as a colleague—hence his special title as Sterling Professor of the Humanities and his place in a department of one—but he loved Yale, his students and faculty friends, and the world of poetry he inhabited within it. He insisted he would teach until the end, and he did; he held his last class four days before he died. 

At his passing the Yale faculty honors a colossus of poetry, who bestrode its world with fiery intensity. Exuberantly knowledgeable, champion of reading, grand explicator of a canon of which he was the zealous expositor, foe to isms, stubborn guardian of aesthetic and cognitive standards, he stood fast for the sublimity that literature and the act of reading offer. 

Tribute editor: Penelope Laurans