Harold Bloom Biography
Harold Bloom is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Bloom has written more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. His first book was published in 1959.
He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. He gained fame in the United States as a commentator during the literary canon wars of the early 1990s.
Harold Bloom Age
Harold Bloom was born in The Bronx, New York on July 11, 1930. As of 2018, he is
Harold Bloom Family
Bloom was born in New York City, on July 11, 1930, to Paula (Lev) and William Bloom a garment worker. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew in a Yiddish-speaking household, where he learned literary Hebrew. He learned English at the age of six.
He had an older brother and three older sisters of whom he is the sole survivor. At his younger age, he read Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, a collection that inspired his lifelong fascination with poetry.
Harold Bloom Education
He went to the Bronx High School of Science. In 1951, he received a B.A. in Classics from Cornell, where he was a student of English literary critic M. H. Abrams. In 1954-55 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1955, he got a Ph.D. from Yale University.
At Yale, he was a standout student, where he clashed with the faculty of New Critics including William K. Wimsatt. A few years later, Bloom dedicated his first major book, The Anxiety of Influence, to Wimsatt.
Harold Bloom Wife
In 1958, he tied the knot with Jeanne Gould. In a 2005 interview, his wife said that she regarded him and herself as both atheists while he denied being an atheist saying “No, no I’m not an atheist. It’s no fun being an atheist.”
Currently, he lives with his wife in New Haven, Connecticut.
Harold Bloom Career
Teaching career
Since 1955, Bloom has been a member of the Yale English Department. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985. From 1988 to 2004, he was Berg Professor of English at New York University while maintaining his position at Yale. In 2010, he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, that focuses on primary texts.
Writing career
Defense of Romanticism
Bloom’s writing career debuted with a sequence of highly regarded monographs on Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley’s Myth-making, Yale University Press, originally Bloom’s doctoral dissertation), W. B. Yeats, (Yeats, Oxford University Press), and Wallace Stevens, (Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press).
In these, he defended the High Romantics against neo-Christian critics influenced by such writers as T. S. Eliot, who became a recurring intellectual foil. Bloom had a contentious approach: his first book, Shelley’s Myth-making, charged many contemporary critics with sheer carelessness in their reading of the poet.
Influence theory
After a personal crisis in the late sixties, he became deeply interested in Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham, the book editor for The Baltimore Sun, wrote that Bloom has long referred to himself as a “Jewish Gnostic”.
Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write.
The first of these books, Yeats, a magisterial examination of the poet, challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, he set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: “Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle.” A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets, but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say.
The poet becomes disappointed because he “cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything.”
Novel experiment
His fascination with the fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay led him to take a brief break from criticism in order to compose a sequel to Lindsay’s novel. His only work of fiction remains to be the novel, The Flight to Lucifer.
Religious criticism
In 1989, he entered into a phase of what he called “religious criticism”, beginning with Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present.
In The Book of J of 1990, he and David Rosenberg (who translated the Biblical texts) portrayed one of the posited ancient documents that formed the basis of the first five books of the Bible (see documentary hypothesis) as the work of a great literary artist who had no intention of composing a dogmatically religious work.
They further anticipated this anonymous writer as a woman attached to the court of the successors of the Israelite kings David and Solomon—a piece of speculation which drew much attention. Later, he said that the speculations didn’t go far enough, and perhaps he should have identified J with the Biblical Bathsheba.
