“... some used to think, imitation merely operated as a sincere form of flattery. The American critic Harold Bloom annoyed many traditionalists in the Seventies by his psychoanalytic theory of literary influence, which proffers an aggressive account of how the new writer views his precursors: Bloom’s characteristically ...”

“... can be no individual author. Karel van der Toorn is the perfect – and bracing – antithesis to Harold Bloom. Bloom, whose point of departure as a critic is English Romantic poetry and in particular Blake’s relationship to Milton, has based much of his career on the conception of the writer as a bold individual ...”

“... them. What is in question is finding the suitable, the sufficient language for this conflict. When Harold Bloom writes with his useful (and usual) fervour about Eliot that ‘to have been born in 1888, and to have died in 1965, is to have flourished in the Age of Freud, hardly a time when Anglo-Catholic theology, social thought and morality were central ...”

“... 5s Od per annum for engraving lessons’). Now that Frye is dead, Blake’s best living critic is Harold Bloom. If Blake’s mental forms had a life before 1757, they also had one after 1827. Arthur Symons saw this: he was interested not only in the figures from the past whom Blake brought back to life, but also in those of the present ...”

“... romantic critics of the last twenty years, notably the ‘Teufelsdröckhian’ Harold Bloom – admittedly a leap that may strain the credulity of his English readers. But it is part of an analysis of the situation in criticism since the demise of the New Criticism that shows in a most illuminating way how the romantic inheritance has ...”

“... of Poundians at least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s ...”

“... and murderer of children, a figure of such demonic presence that he can only be compared, as Harold Bloom said, to the great Shakespearean villains. ‘It makes no difference what men think of war,’ the Judge declares. ‘War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate ...”

“... become themselves ... out of failure comes a brand-new style.’ Thus, and incontrovertibly, not Harold Bloom, but Harold Pendleton, founder of London’s famous Marquee Club, where the Stones first met and Hendrix broke the house record. Pendleton’s Map of Musical Misreading, set out for the benefit of ...”

“... so many José Arcadios, even with some Remedios and Amarantas thrown in on the distaff side. Harold Bloom is right to complain of ‘a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is crammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb’. I would add to this an embarrassment the literary commentator is loath to ...”

“... to say much at all. The writer most mentioned was Borges, and there were quite a few references to Harold Bloom, who had recently been translated into Chinese. Everyone was surprised that Forrest and I were rather tepid on the Western Canon; they assumed that this was the universal gospel, and couldn’t quite believe our assertions that it was more like ...”

“... to the point of implosion. ‘The flag and the foetus [are] our Cross and our Divine Child,’ Harold Bloom wrote under the first Bush: ‘Together [they] symbolise the American Religion.’ This is even more the case under the second Bush: if the foetus is sacrosanct, so is the flag soaked in the aura of the Cross. Especially since 9/11 this ...”

“... out some significant themes. In his introduction to the American collection of Hill’s poetry, Harold Bloom acclaimed him as the ‘strongest British poet now alive’. Hill’s work, he said, ‘testifies to the repressive power of tradition’, but also forms an ‘immensely moving protest against tradition’. An inveterate foe of Eliot and ...”

“... though each enjoys his own style of disclosing again and again the ‘abysm’ of words. But Bloom and Hartman are barely deconstructionists. They even write against it on occasion. The reason why they do, is that they wish to preserve what is called ‘pathos’, in Yale parlance, from the total victory of ‘Nietzschean aesthetic play’. And ...”

“... perfect sequel. Way back in 1973 – it seems eons ago in the chronicles of literary theory – Harold Bloom argued in The Anxiety of Influence that ‘strong poets’ inevitably resist the priority of their literary predecessors, but, or and, that writing in the wake of others, paradoxically, did wonders for the originality of their work: ‘Poetic ...”

“... The place was forsaken and his own.In his introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and O’Connor the storyteller. In his opinion, the theologian does the storyteller a disservice. He would rather she had restrained what he calls her ‘spiritual ...”