The Anatomy of Bloom

For Lauren
 The Anatomy of Bloom

Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and

Anxiety

Alistair Heys
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: Bloom’s Gnosis

1 The Scene of Instruction
2 Bloom and Derrida
3 Bloom and De Man
4 Bloom and New Historicism
5 Bloom and Judaism
6 Bloom and Protestantism

Notes
Index
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Harold Bloom for granting me permission to quote

from his books. I should also like to thank Stephen Jones for allowing me to
pursue my research at the Beinecke Library. A big thank you must also go
out to James Prosek, Fred Burwick, and Jim McKusick. I cannot thank
Vitana Kostadinova and Vadim Banev enough; a more circumspect thank
you is directed to Jonathan Bate. I thank my parents for their support, while
many thanks should be expressed toward Alan Rawes, Philip Shaw,
Bernard Beatty, Jonathan Shears, Emily Bernhardt Jackson, and Michael
O’Neill. Rebecca Ferguson, Lyudmilla Kostova, and Marilyn Gaull are
most worthy of commendations, as is Agatha Bielik-Robson. Haaris Naqvi,
James Tupper, and Grishma Fredric deserve the biggest thanks of all.
 Preface

“What do you want to know now?” asks the doorkeeper, “you are
insatiable”. “Everyone strives to attain the Law”, answers the man,
“how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come
seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper perceives that the man is
at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in
his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since
this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it”.
Franz Kafka

Then one day I reached those city gates where angels are servants,
where planets and stars are slaves, a garden of roses and pines girded
round with walls of emerald and jasper trees, set in a desert of gold
embroidered silk, its springs sweet as honey, the river of paradise: a city
which only virtue can aspire to reach, a city whose cypresses are like the
sabres of intellect, a city whose sages wear brocaded robes of woven
silk. And here before these gates my reason spoke: “here within these
walls, find what you seek and do not leave without it”. So I approached
the guardian of the gate, and told him of my search. “Rejoice”, he
answered, “your mine has produced a jewel, for beneath this land of
Truth there flows a crystal ocean of precious pearls and pure clear
water. This is the lofty sphere of exalted stars; aye it is paradise itself,
the abode of houris”.
Nasir Khusraw

William Bradford describes the Pilgrim Fathers as quieted spirits; his Of

Plymouth Plantation lies at the beginning of American history. The
quietude of the Pilgrims figures an instant of repose, when the power and
grandeur of their Atlantic crossing, if you will, their shooting of the gulf,
their darting of an aim, had been accomplished. This quietus constitutes a
provocative place to start my book because it reminds of the very passage
that first inspired Harold Bloom to play Plotinus to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Plato. The Emersonian clinamen away from Europe represents the origin of
a significant portion of Bloom’s rhetoric but I wish to suggest that the
latter’s belief that Emerson founds an American religion adumbrates the
limit of Bloom’s opacity, the flaw in his gem of transparency. To
comprehend why requires a short introductory examination of Bloom’s
treatment of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, in order to demonstrate
the importance of the figure of iconoclasm in his work. Therefore, I want to
contrast Bradford’s pacific pilgrims with the iconoclastic disquiet of later
arrivals, who felt cramped under theocracy and, as W. C. Martyn
underlines, “sustained with intense fanaticism the paramount authority of
private judgment.”1
Martyn records that the settlers would not let “I would” wait upon “I
dare not,” a phrase that has unexpectedly pacifistic connotations. I write this
because a most truculent passivity is to be found in the aftermath of the
English Revolution and in chiasmus that saw George Fox swap the Lion’s
war of Cromwell for the Lamb’s war of meekness. Stephen Marx outlines
that, while the founding father of the Quaker movement began a covenant
of peace, he advocated speaking truth to power: “In 1654 Fox wrote to
Cromwell, ‘My weapons are not carnal but spiritual and “my kingdom is
not of this world,” therefore with a carnal weapon I do not fight’. ”2 The
figure of peaceful rebelliousness is one that teases Bloom in this meditation
upon Ahab’s war-like vitality, “There has to be . . . some peculiar inverse
ratio between the trope of whiteness in this book and the horrible paradox
that these killers—including the gentle Starbuck, still the best lance out of
Nantucket . . . and the fearful Ahab—are Quakers: opposed to war, to this
day, opposed to conscription.”3 A potential answer to Bloom’s conundrum
is provided in Abiezer Coppe’s visionary Fiery Flying Rolls where the
carnal room of the body is progressively depopulated of temptations: “Upon
this the life was taken out of the body (for a season) and it was thus
resembled, as if a man with a great brush dipt in whiting, should with one
stroke wipe out, or sweep off a picture upon a wall, &c. After a while,
breath and life was returned into the form againe.”4 Andrew Collier
interprets this ranting passage from the Interregnum as deriving in Isaiah,
“though your sins be scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (1:18), and
then adds that it “suggests the practice of contemporary iconoclastic
vandals in whitewashing over the pictures of church walls.”5 He goes on to
propose that this swapping of material hardness for the purity of spiritual
metaphor resembles “the mystical practice of clearing one’s mind of
thoughts and images, the ‘inner silence’ essential to Quaker worship.”6 The
peaceful puritans that Bradford celebrates vandalized Anglican churches on
their way to Plymouth and Southampton, leaving in their wake a trail of
destruction, as they left the depravations of Europe for the American strand.
If the laws of England did not follow them to the ends of the earth, then a
truly radical soul might begin to struggle against self-limitation, since did
not a law-giving God make the world, coin Adam in his own image, and
place man in the belly of Leviathan? Bloom insists that “Ahab is an
Emersonian who has broken beyond all limits into the Terrible Freedom of
a hunt for the absolute adversary, the sanctified king over all the children of
pride.”7 Ahab strikes at the white whale because it symbolizes the tyranny
of the sun and a Creator; therefore, I complement Bloom’s insight with the
further observation that the anti-hero of Moby Dick represents the
iconoclast in Melville’s Quakerish background. As Collier argues, in the
silence of the Quaker meeting-house, worldly icons must be carefully
removed by tranquil reflection: “the all-importance of the inner light is
incompatible with outward observances, which form the chief obstacles to
its pre-eminence.”8 Collier is peculiarly insightful into the spiritual
alterations of what Karl Marx would unconvincingly figure as the meekness
of opium visions: “The Quaker form of worship corresponds closely to this
inner iconoclasm: silence, particularly inner silence . . . because thoughts
are necessarily directed towards outward particulars.”9 In this extreme
version of Protestantism, outward thought equates to idolatry because the
mind has to be emptied of its exterior idols, so that quiet, inward belief in
Christ might triumph.10
 Collier’s perspicuous insights into Quaker religious practice open
casements on the dawning American poetry of Walt Whitman and in
particular, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.”11 Whitman was a Hicksite
Quaker and we find the figure of silence in arguably the most mysterious
passage of spontaneous Quaker confession in his poetry:

O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth,

Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written,
Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath.

Whitman’s arrogant poems are idolatrous creations and the real Me

disparages them as a form of selfishness, castigating them as “Held by this
electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems.” Leviathan is the king
of all the children of pride and Whitman, though more meek than Ahab, is
nonetheless stung by nature, and all the blab of outward observances that
quarrel with inner light. Whitman has dared to utter poems and the outside
world’s echoing recoil opposes what roughly equates to a far-withdrawn
silence that baffles his displaced individualism that once heard the Word of
the Lord but which now dares be lordly. The symbolism of the tide-
smoothed shore would seem the greatest triumph of the poem, since it
figures not only the never-to-be-touched untold richness that needs to be
cleansed of the dross of outward earthly backwash, but also the clearing
away of the influence of idolatrous Old England. Whitman is mothered by
the Atlantic and falls upon the shore as if it were his father; the sands are
teraqueous; Whitman’s sexuality was just as ambiguous. There is more than
a hint of self-disgust at Whitman’s stand-up-to-speak autoeroticism in the
phrase, “See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last.” But this image
can usefully be compared with lines from Coppe:
 No psalm shall be sung but the Lord our Song.
No Holiness,—but the Lord our Holiness.
No righteousness,—but the Lord our Righteousness.
Reprobate silver shall all other be called, as it is; yea, dung, dross,
dogs meat
—Menstrous rags,—worse than the filth of a Jakes house.

Collier comments on the ambiguity between saying that all is pure

sacredness and then that all is reprobate foulness; in contrast, Whitman
loves too much what he should hate and more often preaches that what is
good is perfect and what is bad is just as perfect. The same kind of listed
flotsam and jetsam is to be found in Whitman’s poem, albeit his inventory
of tide-dumped odds and ends has a certain lascivious musicality:

Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten,

Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the
tide,
...

Whitman displays a material spiritual sublime, the division between

descriptive lists of detritus washed up on the scummed sands that almost
seem to ooze with the same fleshly yet fascinated disgust at outward things
that the poet later describes as “dead” and the distant but very much alive
peals of laughter of the real Me. Inner silence is golden but the poet’s breath
profane. The word “real” is here an inversion of corporeal and invisible,
poetic breath that ironically reveals the untold since “there is nothing
covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known” (Mt.
10.26). Whitman’s father was in real estate and presumably could easily
reckon the worth of a thousand acres of grass; Hicksite Quakerism was
agrarian and schismatic against the perceived materialism of orthodox
Quakers. The white whale, as Bloom never tires of telling, symbolizes the
universal blank, Melville’s version of the Emersonian ruin of created
nature: “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white
whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon
him.”12Ahab’s intemperance vividly contrasts with Whitman’s temperate,
almost antithetically compassionate, loving words, since the blank canvas
of creation is figured by the washed clean shore of rippling Paumanok
waves, where Whitman

Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,

The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of
the globe.

To populate this blank with tropes is to manufacture icons: to create like

God the Father, when the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters. Iconoclasm means to break
religious images and, in the Quaker tradition, to clear a silence for inner
worship, or what it means to know Jesus within, a gnosis that Bloom
christens the American Religion; it means to replace the God of the
Hebrews with the living water of Christ.
There can be no more contentious subject to write criticism about than
iconoclasm; in 2006, the secular world was rocked by world-wide protests
against the depiction of the Islamic Prophet in Danish cartoons. Although a
book on Bloom is no place to rehearse all the arguments associated with the
Islamophobia of this controversy, it is worthwhile to note that Christopher
Hitchens thought the iconoclasts vandals:

. . . nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the

necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and
blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is
apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and
who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put
to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships.
Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.13

The mocked-at protestors in the Muslim world are perfectly antithetical to

the balked American poetic persona of Whitman but nevertheless share
something in common with American religionists. Whitman states that he
feels oppressed (just as the Danish artist fears for his life), his feelings hurt
by the mocking real Me. Whitman’s self-deprecation is reminiscent of a
biblical passage from John that occurs just after the behold-the-man
mockery of the King of the Jews: “The Jews answered him, We have a law,
and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God”
(19:7). The incarnation of Jesus as a co-substantial God is viewed as
blasphemous by the Jews because such a claim breaks the jealous injunction
of the Second Commandment, that is not to make graven images. My final
point draws from personal experience of sharing some “good news” with
regard to a recent publication in a poetry magazine with an ex-student who
had himself published two books of poetry. The budding young poet bowed
in just such a mock-congratulatory fashion as described by Whitman; he
was envious and obviously thought me boastful. In Whitman’s poem of
psychological introspection, the clash between the upright heart and pure
and that element of superbia, that in Bloom’s Miltonic allegory of the
modern poet challenges the God of cultural tradition, throws the would-be
national poet into disconcertion. He is caught between the selfish devil of
back-handed, strong-as-a-buffalo-but-wanting-good-morals compliments
and the mothering deep blue sea of Emersonian congratulation, the
welcoming of a gentle but genuinely American poetic and the protestant
suspicion of this hardening into an icon representative of a priestly caste.
What follows attempts to trace just such radical undecidability—not of
America’s primal shore ode—but as reflected in the dark glass of Bloom’s
prose, because I believe that similar dialectic lurks therein; or at least what
sometimes seems like a refusal to acknowledge that American poetry is
more Christian than Judaic.
My book of Bloomian fresh starts is divided into seven sections. The
first explores the influence of Judaism and Protestantism upon Bloom and
defines his Gnostic response. The second looks at the influence of the same
on Bloom’s Scene of Instruction. The third compares Bloom’s work to that
of Jacques Derrida. The fourth contrasts Bloom’s criticism with that of Paul
de Man’s legacy. The fifth grasps the nettle of Bloom’s response to the so-
called School of Resentment. The sixth charts Bloom’s writings on Judaism
and Kabbalah. The seventh examines what Bloom has written on the topic
of Protestantism, Post-Protestantism, and displaced Protestantism. Bloom’s
answer to Derrida turns on his speculation that Derridean discourse
substitutes the Judaic word davhar for the Greek logos. My treatment of de
Man suggests that the detergent of deconstructive irony attempts to bleach
clean the sins of misspent youth by scourging the philosophical fabric of
totalitarianism. Such a reading implies, but cannot be sure, that de Man
experienced deep feelings of guilt with reference to the Holocaust. The
ticklish subject of resentment casts Bloom as an Abdiel refusing to join
what he figures as the rebel hordes of deserting angels. Here I again ponder
the aftermath of Puritanism and the question of free speech: whether we are
over-determined by societal energies and historical background, or whether
it is possible to express dissent and speak one’s mind freely without fear of
reprisal. All in all, Bloom’s criticism is read as a form of spiritual
autobiography that I recapitulate as dialectic between Christian and Jewish
civilizations.
 Introduction: Bloom’s Gnosis

This book turns on the interlinked gyres of the Jewish and the Gentile that
one discovers in Bloom’s American criticism. Judaism is taken as a religion
that originates in the Near East, while Gentile indicates western and more
particularly Greek in the sense of agonistic, but then Protestant in the senses
of competitive and therefore quintessentially American. I write this because
in the Hebraic tradition, Bloom asserts that one must honor one’s father and
mother, but, in the Greek tradition, the most important quality is to be
agonistic:

Nietzsche remains the best guide I know to the clash of Greek and
Hebrew cultures. In Also Sprach Zarathustra, he ascribed Greek
greatness to the maxim “You shall always be the first and excel all
others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend.”
That certainly describes Achilles in the Iliad. Against this Nietzsche
sets the maxim that he says the Hebrews hung up as a tablet of
overcoming: “To honor father and mother and to follow their will to
the root of one’s soul.”1

Much if not all of Bloom’s writing can be accurately classified with

reference to this palpably incongruous Kulturkampf that ever leans toward
Dr Johnson’s judgment that fathers aim for power, while sons struggle for
independence.2 One could almost write Europe aimed for power and
America for independence, since Johnson’s definition of power is activated
by struggle, which is why I see Bloom as Mr Self-Invention, a questing
critic from a poor background, who came to the ivory tower of Yale, an
iconoclast who left behind the Orthodox Judaism of his Bronx family
background to redefine himself as an American Gnostic.
 I wish to outline those elements in Bloom’s work that explore his
Gnostic relationship with important Protestant and American figures like
Blake, Whitman, and Emerson. I suggest that many of the parallels that
Hans Jonas draws between Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nietzsche’s
remarks on the death of God influenced Bloom’s reception of this ancient
heresy. The Gnostic Religion seems richly scattered with gems that Bloom
cuts in his own idiosyncratic way, and hence it is fascinating to ask the
question: to what extent does Bloom’s gnosis interrogate Orthodox
Judaism, Pauline Christianity and especially later American versions of
Christianity? For me this question revolves around arguably the three most
central works of Bloom’s career, which I take to be The Anxiety of
Influence, The American Religion and The Book of J. Such a claim is not
meant to devalue his work on Blake, Shakespeare, Stevens, Yeats, or any of
the myriad authors he has written short treatises on, but instead crystallizes
the proposition that the anxiety of influence is a Gnostic formulation that
can be broken up into Jewish and Gentile narratives, as a short
consideration of the inspiration for The Anxiety of Influence reveals: “On
my 37th birthday, I woke up from a terrible nightmare, something almost
out of Blake’s Four Zoas. It featured a covering cherub pressing down upon
me. . . . I spent the next three days writing a ferocious dithyramb, which . . .
became the first chapter of The Anxiety of Influence.”3 The dream was an
amalgam of imagery drawn from Blake’s Gnostic usage of Hebrew figures
which were themselves tapped from an idiosyncratic Protestant reading of
the Bible, or as Bloom outlines with specific reference to the winged
creatures that guarded the Ark of the Covenant: “In Genesis he is God’s
Angel; in Ezekiel he is the Prince of Tyre; in Blake he is fallen Tharmas,
and the Spectre of Milton; in Yeats he is the Spectre of Blake.”4 The
Covering Cherub cannot be dissociated from Bloom’s nostalgia for his
Orthodox Jewish upbringing because as Bloom baldly states: “the cherubim
. . . symbolize the terror of God’s presence; to Rashi they were ‘Angels of
destruction’.”5 This reference to the nightmare of God’s presence could not
be more significant because I believe the very heart of Bloom’s work, the
concept of the anxiety of influence, to be based upon the prohibition of the
Second Commandment:
 You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for
yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven
above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the
earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the
Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity
of parents. . . . (New American Standard Bible, Exod. 20.3-4)

But to say that fear of being punished by an Old Testament God equates to
the anxiety of influence is merely to touch the tip of the Bloomian iceberg,
since in “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence” essay-draft, we
discover Calvinistic discourse that was elided from his argument in The
Anxiety of Influence; here Bloom writes that “Poetry may or may not work
out its own salvation in a man, but it comes only to those, who are
Reprobate.”6 Reprobates would seem Bloomian shorthand for young poets
trapped in the Blakean hell of rebellion; thus, “the Reprobate” exist in a
binary opposition with “the Elect,” whose poetic universes “are the frame
for the Tyger’s picture, the horizon against which he moves,” though,
Bloom is not interested in the frame but more the Covering Cherub, who is
“Milton . . . the Tyger; the Covering Cherub blocking a new voice from
entering Paradise.”7 The Tyger is a synonym for Leviathan, itself a stand-in
for the power of God; the youthful poet rebels against an Old-Testament
Deity. A study of Bloom’s esoteric Blakean imagery adumbrates the
religious implications of Bloom’s usage of Blakean coinages like Tharmas
or the Pauline natural man: “Before the Fall (which for Blake meant before
the Creation, the two events for him being one and the same) the Covering
Cherub was the pastoral genius Tharmas.”8 The Anxiety of Influence has a
Protestant dimension that is illuminated by Max Weber’s writings on
Puritanism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber
analyzes this quotation from the Westminster Confession that treats of the
natural man fallen into the state of sin: “Man, by his fall into a state of sin,
hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying
salvation. So that natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and
dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to
prepare himself thereunto.”9 Weber comments that with the repudiation of
Catholic confession and the Catholic machinery of salvation came the
pressing consciousness of sin from which “only a life guided by constant
thought could achieve conquest over the state of nature. It was this
rationalization which gave the Reformed faith its peculiar ascetic
tendency.”10 Reinhard Bendix helpfully notes that precisely this point of
Weber’s argument infers “a psychological condition—the feeling of
religious anxiety”: “Puritan believers felt deep anxiety because the absolute
certainty of their salvation had become an article of faith, and as a result
they sought to relieve their anxiety by intense and self-disciplined
activity.”11 In The Anxiety of Influence the ascetic temperament is
associated by Bloom with metaphor, Whitman, Stevens, and the
mind/nature dialectics that characterize Wordsworth’s poetry, but as well
the mental struggle to purge away the fripperies of precursive influence
where the rebellious-Orc Wordsworth figuratively quarrels with that mortal
god Milton: “This askesis yields up a Wordsworth who might have been a
greater poet than the one he became, a more externalized maker who would
have had a subject beyond that of his own subjectivity . . . pure isolation is
now Milton’s isolation also, and having overcome Milton, one
(Wordsworth) asserts that one has overcome oneself.”12 Bloom identifies
Wordsworth as the Modern poet proper and because of his innocent affinity
for nature as Adam or the natural man, who is Tharmas in The Anxiety of
Influence. He provides a rather puritanical portrait of Wordsworth as driven
by his election-love to become the prophet of nature in competition with
Milton the prophet of Protestantism.13 In complete contrast, hag-ridden
Coleridge is effectively damned into playing Beelzebub to Wordsworth’s
Satan, such that Wordsworth functions as Bloom’s model of Election.
Bloom’s argument would seem indebted to that of his friend Geoffrey
Hartman’s reading in Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814: “I call this aspect of
Wordsworth’s poetry spiritual because its only real justification . . . was that
it carried the Puritan quest for evidences of election into the most ordinary
emotional contexts.”14 In this Calvinist version of aesthetic sheep and
goats, the elect and the damned are separated according to aesthetic strength
and weakness; the prize is not so much heaven as the eternal life of being
idolized by future poets as an essential part of the canon of secular
scripture.
 The canon and election to the canon become the crucial concepts in
Bloom’s literary theories where writers seek to purge themselves of
influence in order to rid themselves of anxieties at the gates of death. It is
my contention that The Anxiety of Influence represents Bloom’s poetic
version of Yale deconstruction or the striving to unmask the creative
processes that poets undergo in the act of writing a poem; Bloom’s first idea
is the reduction of a religious concept to an original poetic formulation. I
argue that Bloom’s Stevensian version of deconstruction reduces his Judaic
background to a first idea in the J-Writer, who philologists believe wrote the
earliest existent part of Genesis and from which source the rest of Judaic
theology and, Bloom claims, all canonical literature ultimately derives. It
could not be more important to note that Bloom argues in The Book of J that
Judaism begins life as poetic tales which are then redacted into religious
forms of worship, and hence Bloom presents what he describes as the
unnerving paradox that “when script becomes Scripture, reading is numbed
by taboo and inhibition.”15 Much the same deconstructive procedure is
repeated in Bloom’s The American Religion and “Introduction to American
Religious Poems,” in which latter Whitman is proposed as the poet of
American spirituality. Such an inquiry necessarily demands a biographical
foundation, since it must rest upon Bloom’s continued existence as a
historical figure living in a largely American Protestant environment;
therefore, my discussion of Jonas is intimately connected to Bloom’s
pronouncements upon his own highly individual sense of cultural allegiance
and how this relates to his role as a Jewish professor at an Ivy League
college. From thence, I trace the expressiveness of Bloom’s early and often
Blakean interest in Gnosticism and British and American Romanticism with
their peculiarly Protestant associations to his more recent publications on
canonical literature, but paying particular attention to those increasingly
profound moments of confession when Bloom reveals his unique Jewish
lusters. Of particular interest are Jonas’s concept of pseudomorphosis and
Bloom’s interest in aesthetic genealogy, which form two of my central
themes because they provide available discourse with which to consider
how Bloom’s expressive Jewish identity manifests itself as Gnostic literary
criticism. So expressive is Bloom’s sense of identity that he prefers Jonas’s
Jewish-existential reading of the Gnostic thinker Valentinus to that of
Bentley Layton, who places Valentinus with Origen: “Doubtless, Layton is
historically accurate, but the experience of reading Valentinus is distinctly
unlike that of reading the Church Fathers,” and, for this reason, I principally
concentrate much less on the eminent scholarship of The Gnostic Scriptures
and far more upon Bloom’s entranced relationship with The Gnostic
Religion.16 Bloom defines “the Yankees of New England” as “once a
religion” but “now a people,” which has great secular significance because
he describes the Jews as “a religion become a people” too.17 However, this
survey is less concerned with society than it is with the crucial concept of
the Bloomian self, a Protestant and sometimes a Jewish sense of inwardness
that must flourish for a writer to enforce themselves upon tradition; a
sundered relationship to outward reception Bloom redefines as being akin
to the tenets of Gnosticism.
This study proposes to distinguish between Bloom’s Jewish cultural
background and the more pervasive American-Protestant culture that he
entered as an academic in order to show how both codes of thought
replicate themselves in Bloom’s sophisticated Gnostic theories and readings
on a multitude of topics, including what he defines as the American
Religion. The two most important ideas are firstly the inescapably Jewish
“thou shalt not” of the Second Commandment, which lurks behind Bloom’s
conception of the anxiety of influence, and secondly, the aloneness of the
Protestant self reading the Bible by its own inner light, a Miltonic procedure
that Bloom identifies as essentially Greek and agonistic. My purpose is to
read Bloom’s literary career for his Jewish and Protestant lusters, but such a
project instantly falls foul of the distinction that Bloom draws between
aesthetic and historical readings of literature. In The Western Canon and
elsewhere, Bloom “repudiates” historicist interpretations of literary works:
“If any standards of judgment at all are to survive our current cultural
reductiveness, then we need to reassert that high literature is exactly that, an
aesthetic achievement.”18 Bloom asserts with equal force that literature
represents, in the case of poetry, an achieved anxiety rather than “the
interests of a state, or of a social class, or of a religion, or of men against
women, whites against blacks, Westerners against Easterners.”19 He
defends aesthetic or cognitive criticism by confessing that his stance is
unique: “I can search out no inner connection between any social group and
the specific ways in which I have spent my life reading.”20 Although
Bloom is here at his outspoken best, I cannot absolutely take him at his
word and wish to contradict him by arguing that instead he tends to identify
with authors drawn from Jewish and Protestant social groups; for instance,
he identifies with obscure non-canonical Jewish Kabbalistic writers like
Isaac Luria and an equally obscure Jewish Gnostic like Valentinus, as well
as American Protestant authors he takes to be Gnostic like Emerson. In
order to call into question Bloom’s assertion that he finds no inner
connection between his own reading practice and any social group, I quote
from Genius, in which a more socially nuanced Bloomian statement occurs:
“with contextualizing or backgrounding a work, no one could quarrel. But
reducing literature or spirituality or ideas by an historicizing over-
determination tells me nothing.”21 Bloom sometimes provides a certain
amount of backgrounding material, for example in Kabbalah and Criticism,
when he distinguishes between historical Jewish anxiety and literary
anxiety: “Their human anxieties, particularly after the Expulsion from
Spain, were those of the endless vicissitudes of the Jewish Galut, the
Diaspora, but their specifically literary anxieties centered upon a genuinely
overwhelming anxiety-of-influence.”22 While this allusion to the literary
influences felt by these speculative Spanish Jews relates to centuries of
prior interpretation of Jewish Scripture, the “anxiety of influence” is
nevertheless a Freudian-sounding phrase that is overdetermined by the
Second Commandment; it sounds Jewish. The competitiveness and the
readerly acquisitiveness of the spirit of Protestant Capitalism are also seen
as central to Bloom’s genius, as is an agonistic reading of the Second
Commandment, such that the injunction not to make graven images
becomes the basic psychological ban that lurks behind the anxiety of
influence. God is a maker, or as Bloom commented in The New Yorker, “an
imageless God had made humankind in His own image, and then had
prohibited human emulation in image-making.”23 But anxiety is also
existentialist; it reminds of angst, dread, and nausea, “the nausea of the
poetic sufferer is indistinguishable from his sublimity,” thus, what might be
termed Bloomian existentialism becomes the main thread since Bloom’s
characteristic posture is that of an avid Jewish scholar and prolific writer
with an almost Protestant work ethic for prose.24 Bloom is required to
complete the work, but unfree to desist from it.
Here we encounter the paradox of Bloom’s twin allegiance to highly
individual definitions of American Protestantism and Jewish Gnosticism
since, as Cynthia Ozick points out, “If Bloom, with Vico, equates the
origins of poetry with pagan divination—i.e., with anti-Judaism—and is
persuaded of the ‘perpetual war’ between poetry and Judaism, then it is
inescapable that Bloom, in choosing poetry, also chooses anti-Judaism.”25
In fact, Bloomian divination in its most Orphic usage also means anti-
Europeanism, since he argues that Emerson committed American poets
after him to an enterprise that British High Romanticism was too repressed
to attempt, that is “divination”: “If we interpret divination in every possible
sense, including the proleptic knowledge of actual experience, and the
fearsome project of god-making, then we have a vision of the outrageous
ambition of the native strain in our poetry.”26 Bloom argues that the
American Christ is the resurrected Christ, “a very solitary and personal
Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus,” and that American poets and in
particular Whitman—together with the inventors of genuinely American
strains of Christianity—create Christian idols that implicitly refer to the
start-again spiritual wildness of the American psyche, “Whitman as the
American bardic Christ, self-anointed to strike up the cognitive and spiritual
music of the New World.”27 Ozick’s overview is that in so arguing Bloom
has lost touch with his Jewish roots: “over the last several years, it has come
to me that the phrase ‘Jewish writer’ may be what rhetoricians call an
‘oxymoron’—a pointed contradiction, in which one arm of the phrase
clashes so profoundly with the other as to annihilate it,” and this is because
“the single most serviceable . . . description of a Jew—as defined
‘theologically’—can best be rendered negatively: a Jew is someone who
shuns idols.”28 But Ozick is right to the extent that Bloom rejects the
Judaism of Akiba and the Orthodox Covenant entered into by his parents in
favor of an individualistic form of Jewish Gnosticism: “I myself do not
believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are
Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Tolstoy’s novels.”29
Bloom’s Gnosis finds expression in appreciations of poetic tales; he is
found by what he considers to be original poetic voices that add to the
augmenting life of the canon, a word that was initially used to signify a
collection of religious texts, “‘Canon’ as a word goes back to a Greek word
for a measuring rule, which in Latin acquired the additional meaning of
‘model’. . . . The Greek word kanon was of Semitic origin, and it is difficult
to distinguish between its original meanings of ‘reed’ or ‘pipe’, and
‘measuring rod’.”30 Thus, Timothy Parrish elliptically refers to Bloom’s
idiosyncratic version of deconstruction: “Ozick sees in Bloom’s work the
potentially terrible recognition that the artist creates through a kind of
shevirat ha-kelim, the ‘breaking of the vessels’, that does not shatter the
idol but ‘reinvigorate(s) the idol in a new vessel’.”31 Bloom’s reply to
Ozick would seem to be an inversion of Ozick’s anti-poetical attack upon
canonical divination that replaces what she sees as sacred with Bloom’s
Blakean wisdom that theology is ultimately founded upon poetic tales that
are misread as Scripture, “instead of choosing a form of worship from a
poetic tale, you attempt to write another poetic tale that can usurp its
precursor’s space.”32 But Ozick argues that “the secular Jew is a figment;
when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew,” and
consequently asserts that “when I write English, I live in Christendom”;
and, in so doing, accuses Bloom of being a gentile fully immersed in
American Protestant culture.33 The problem is that Bloom himself quotes
Vico to the effect that the true God founded the Jewish religion on the
proscription of the divination on which all the Gentile nations arose, “a
strong poet, for Vico or for us, is precisely like a gentile nation; he must
divine or invent himself.”34 Ozick responds by emphasizing just this
proscription, noting that “The strivings of divination—i.e. of God-
competition—lead away from the Second Commandment, ultimately
contradict it.”35 David Fite writes that Ozick indicts Bloom for being
“engaged in the erection of what can fairly be called an artistic anti-
Judaism” because divination means literary immortality, a place in the
canon of secular scriptures.36 Parrish further helps us to understand Ozick’s
concerns: “Labeling Bloom’s work the ‘erection’ of ‘an artistic anti-
Judaism’, Ozick argues that Bloom’s true heresy is not that he violated any
canonical New Critical dicta, but that he violated Jewish Law in conflating
literary creation with God’s creation.”37 This conflation of contraries is
exactly the nub of the matter, since the anxiety of influence functions in a
remarkably similar way to the “thou shalt not” of the Second
Commandment.
But how can we quantify Bloom’s deconstruction of what I take as the
two main strands of his cultural identity? The answer lies in an examination
of Bloom’s career as a literary critic, which starts with book-length readings
of Shelley in Shelley’s Mythmaking, Blake in Blake’s Apocalypse, six
canonical Romantic poets in The Visionary Company, and which blossoms
into a further major work (Yeats) and those essays on Romanticism, late
Romanticism, and American Romanticism contained in The Ringers in the
Tower. Up until this point in his career Bloom has almost entirely
concentrated upon Protestant figures, but in The Anxiety of Influence he
introduces his readers to the Gnostic theologian Valentinus, and then, in A
Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism, to Isaac Luria and Jewish
mysticism, which esoterica Bloom was later to claim as fundamentally
Gnostic in character. By the time of The American Religion, Bloom’s
confidence as a Gnostic interpreter is such that he redefines American
Protestantism as a form of Gnosticism. In later books, the Judaic/Protestant
binary emphasized here becomes much less visible—for instance, in The
Western Canon and Shakespeare, both of which (perhaps disingenuously)
Bloom professes to be disinterested books of criticism with no personal
bias. Nevertheless, other belated books like The Book of J and Jesus and
Yahweh effectively re-establish a more overt Christian versus Hebrew
dichotomy. In these latter, Bloom calls attention to the lateness of the New
Testament in comparison to the earliness of the so-called Old Testament; his
thesis is that the Christian Bible shows a demonstrable anxiety of influence
with reference to Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or the
Pentateuch). All literary anxieties of any description are characterized by
Bloom as essentially Gnostic, but before properly diagnosing this palpable
transformation that takes him from Judaic Orthodoxy to an American
Gnosis, it is first necessary to introduce Jonas and The Gnostic Religion,
which will provide my main definition of Gnostic existentialism.
 The centrality of Bloom’s Gnosticism is underlined by the redoubtable
Ozick in the following terms: “Kabbalah is Gnosticism in Jewish dress; still
it is not the Jewish dress that Bloom is more and more attracted by—it is
naked Gnosticism.”38 Gnosticism arose as a way of dealing with the
problem of evil; it conflates the Demiurge or mere craftsman Creator of
Plato’s Timaeus with the Creator God of Genesis and banishes the universal
principle of spiritual goodness beyond the borders of the material world. As
Ozick suggests, Bloom’s Gnostic faith is in some ways the product of his
Jewish upbringing and in others an existential reaction against it; hence, a
potted biographical discussion is necessary in order to highlight the
inevitable continuities and drastic discontinuities that characterize his
intellectual development. Continuity here means a residual attachment to
Judaism, and discontinuity immersion in American civilization; his family’s
escape from the Holocaust. While talking of his mother and father, Bloom
relates that their extended family were butchered in the Holocaust: “He had
been born in Odessa; she, in Ashtetol, long since wiped out by the Nazis,
near Brest-Litovsk.”39 To provide some background for the Harold Bloom
story, we must recall October 1941, when after a siege of two months the
Nazis finally occupied Odessa. Shortly afterwards, an explosion killed four
German officers in the Axis command center, which sparked immediate and
overwhelming reprisals. Orders were initially given for both Jews and
Communists to be hung in Odessa squares, but rather than punishing one or
two people, the reprisals escalated until five thousand civilians were shot.
Their arbitrary fate seems merciful in comparison to that of nineteen-
thousand Odessa Jews who were assembled in a square near the docks and
sprayed with gasoline and then burnt alive.40 Some sixteen thousand more
were marched to the village of Dalnik and summarily shot dead in a ditch;
because this process proved too time-consuming, the remaining survivors
were crammed into near-by warehouses, where they were machine-gunned
through holes in the walls,

For fear that someone might escape nevertheless, three warehouses,

which were filled mainly with women and children, were set on fire.
Those who were not killed by the flames sought to escape through
the holes in the roof, or through the windows; these were met with
 hand grenades or machine-gun fire. Many women went mad and
threw their children out of the windows.41

A further ten thousand Jews were deported from Odessa to three

concentration camps established near Golta; ultimately, in January 1942 a
last remnant of approximately twenty thousand Jews were sent in cattle
trucks to the same camps.42 The fate that befell the Jews in Brest-Litovsk
was no less thorough. On 15 September 1939 (immediately after the
partition of Poland) the Germans rounded up five thousand Jews,
supposedly for laboring purposes, but instead massacred them in cold
blood. The town was re-taken by the Nazis in June 1941 at which juncture
the Germans spirited away some nine-hundred Jews, again under the pre-
text of exploiting them for forced labor. The rest of the remainder,
approximately thirty thousand, were secured in a ghetto and finally
liquidated on 15 October 1942.
My intention is to point out that Jewishness seems to be the lynchpin of
Bloom’s identity, and absolutely central to an understanding of his literary
criticism; the death of God reduces to the Holocaust. If the Covenant with
Yahweh is taken as the central tenet of the Jewish faith, then we
immediately confront the severe existentialist paradox that, as Bloom
confesses, a God that can allow the Holocaust is not much of a Deity: “You
don’t have to be Jewish to be oppressed by the enormity of the German
slaughter of European Jewry, but if you have lost your four grandparents
and most of your uncles, aunts and cousins in the Holocaust, then you will
be a touch more sensitive to the normative Judaic, Christian, and Muslim
teachings that God is both all-powerful and benign.”43 Personal rather than
universal tragedy can also spark severe crises of faith; one of Bloom’s two
sons suffers from schizophrenia; Bloom’s personal reaction to this family
tragedy amounts to a further crisis in faith, “a cosmos this obscene, a nature
that contains schizophrenia, is acceptable to the monotheistic orthodox as
part of the ‘mystery of faith’. ”44 To Bloom blind faith seemed totally
unacceptable since age 35,

I got very wretched, and for almost a year was immersed in acute
melancholia. Colors faded away, I could not read, and scarcely could
 look up at the sky. . . . Whatever the immediate cause of my
depression had been, that soon faded away in irrelevance, and I came
to sense that my crisis was spiritual. An enormous vastation had
removed the self, which until then had seemed strong in me.45

Bloom was saved from this vastation by reading The Gnostic Religion:
“What rescued me, back in 1965, was a process that began as reading, and
then became a kind of ‘religious’ conversion that was also an excursion into
a personal literary theory. I had purchased The Gnostic Religion by Hans
Jonas.”46 His preservation finds a curiously antithetical parallel with the
way in which he describes the vastation of Henry James senior in Genius,
since Bloom writes that James was rescued from his profound depression
by reading Swedenborg and consequently believing that “individual
selfhood led to vastation.”47 In contrast, Bloom’s recovery depended upon
the discovery that something in the self was immortal, an idea that links
Jonas to his reading of Romantic and Post-Romantic American poetry.
The conversion experience equating to the historical hub of this book
turns on Bloom’s yoking of Jonas and Emerson: “Jonas’s book had a
delayed impact upon me; it did not kindle until I began to read endlessly in
all of Emerson, throughout 1965–66.”48 In Omens of Millennium, the book
Bloom chose to call a Gnostic version of “Self-Reliance,” he confessed, “At
sixty-five, I find myself uncertain just when my self was born. I cannot
locate it in my earliest memories of childhood, and yet I recall its presence
in certain memories of reading, particularly of the poets William Blake and
Hart Crane, when I was about nine or ten.”49 The act of reading visionary
poetry extended Bloom’s consciousness by tessellating with something
deep within the self that recognized a spiritual need, “a reading that
implicitly was an act of knowing something previously unknown within
me.”50 The important existential element to underline in Bloom’s
confession of second birth is that this inner occult self can be known
“primarily through our own solitude.”51 Bloom often borrows from Stoic
doctrine and in particular from Shelley’s use of fiery imagery in Adonais to
symbolize the immortal part of the self as an Empedoclean spark, hence
Jonas, referring to the Stoics, records a syncretically related interpretation
of fluming sparks,

“This warm and fiery essence is so poured out in all nature that in it
inheres the power of procreation and the cause of becoming”; to them
(the Stoics) it is “rational fire,” “the fiery Mind of the universe,” the
most truly divine element in the cosmos. But what to the Stoics is
thus the bearer of cosmic Reason, to the Valentinians is with the same
omnipresence in all creation the embodiment of Ignorance. Where
Heraclitus speaks of “the ever-living fire,” they speak of fire as
“death and corruption” in all elements.52

The embers of Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode and the fires of the eternal in
Shelley’s Neo-Platonic eulogy to Keats cohere in Bloom’s reading of
Romantic and late Romantic poetry, but akin to the example of his
understanding of Emerson, they are interpreted in an idiosyncratically
Gnostic fashion. In Bloom’s philosophy, these Gnostic embers and their
correlatives symbolize a prior creation, or what Jonas summarizes as “the
awakening of the inner self from the slumber or intoxication of the
world.”53 Bloom encapsulates the Gnostic dilemma in American terms via
the palimpsest of Emerson, who equalizes sparks with what is antithetical to
facticity: “Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts
or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over
them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal
obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man
is truly man.”54 Jonas taught Bloom that Gnosticism reminds man of his
heavenly origin, the promise of redemption, and practical instruction as to
man’s salvation that aims at the restoration of the original unity.55 The
Gnostic Religion remains a repository of intriguing formulations, since it is
also possible to demonstrate Bloom’s absorption of Jonas’s identification of
modern existentialist dread with Gnosticism: that while crossing the
shortness of his duration man confronts death, his beatitudes are arbitrary
and can be inverted and are ultimately meaningless.56 Yet, by means of a
via negativa, the Gnostic concept of selfhood furnishes Bloom with the
saving imaginative belief that a benevolent Deity has absented Himself
from this cosmos and dwells elsewhere, perhaps in a time without
boundaries, “exile is an ironic reduction or displacement of the Blessing, a
substitution of wandering in a space without boundaries for coming home to
a time without boundaries.”57
Bloom’s time without boundaries would seem a mystical state akin to
the Gnostic myth of Sophia, or the mythical realm of “good” beyond the
evil labyrinth of the fallen world; these Manichean opposites are termed by
Gnostics the Pleroma and Kenoma, respectively. The Gnostic adept believes
that we have been thrown from the Pleroma by the catastrophe of the
Creation-Fall: “when we crashed down into this world made by the inept
angels, then God crashed also, coming down not with us, but in some
stranger sphere, impossibly remote. . . . In those waste places, God now
wanders, himself an alien, a stranger, an exile, even as we wander here.”58
But Bloom finds traces of the Yahwistic presence in the form of poetic
flourishes that give him the sensation of the reader’s sublime; hence,
Bloom’s mature Gnosis treasures the sublime concept of the Wordsworthian
“something ever more about to be” (1805.VI: 542). For this reason he
counsels us to “confront only the writers who are capable of giving you a
sense of something ever more about to be,” because “to feel that time has
become hastier, even as the interval narrows, is a vertigo . . . that
profoundly works against the spark that can help to hinder our hastening to
a nihilistic consummation.”59 As we have seen, Bloom’s Gnostic selfhood
is often denoted as a spark, or else by the Greek word pneuma, that is
knowledge of the oldest part of your own deepest self, and thus Bloom
interprets this Emersonian statement as Gnostic: “It is God in you that
responds to God without, or affirms his own words trembling on the lips of
another.”60 But do not confuse the banished Gnostic God, Sophia, with the
Creator-God of Genesis, also called the Demiurge, or mere cosmic
craftsman, who created the material world that the Gnostics name the
Kenoma, since as Bloom explains, “Gnosticism first rose among the
Hellenistic Jews, both of Alexandrian Egypt and Syria-Palestine, a full
century or so before Christ. I do not think that it began as a rebellion against
the priestly Creator-God of Genesis 1, though eventually it turned into that,
and it continues to regard the false Creation of Genesis 1 as the true Fall of
men and of women.”61 The Demiurge God, for Bloom, is the God of
natural cycles and repetition, not to mention the ghastliness of human
history, “If you can accept a God who coexists with death camps,
schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all powerful and somehow benign,
then you have faith, and you have accepted the Covenant with Yahweh, or
the Atonement of Christ, or the submission to Islam.”62 Bloom’s mode of
being rejects the Yahweh of the Covenant and yet finds an intrinsically
Jewish answer to the existentialist problem of the death of God by inventing
an American church of one and preaching a religion of Gnosis.
The self-created character of Bloom’s gnosis is well illuminated by this
comparison with the figure of Beatrice in Dante, taken from Genius:
“Modern scholarship mostly errs in emphasizing Dante’s Catholic
orthodoxy since he imposed his own genius upon the traditional faith of
Paul and Augustine.”63 This might on first reading seem an unusual
quotation in a study that mainly charts the triple nexus of Jewish, Gnostic,
and American Protestant inwardness in Bloom’s distinguished career as a
literary critic. The quotation refers to Dante, an idiosyncratic Catholic poet,
and compares him to St Paul and Augustine, who, with the Anglicans, T. S.
Eliot and C. S. Lewis, are more generally the straw men of Bloom’s
characteristic anti-Christian asides. But on second or third perusal the
forcible idea that seizes the imagination is that an expressive and highly
individual mind has imposed itself on whatever received views dominated
within Dante’s medieval socio-political background, and has remade them
very much in his own image insofar as Beatrice is granted a considerably
more important role in Dante’s spiritual hierarchy than in orthodox
conceptions of the Catholic faith in which she has none. Bloom reiterates
exactly the same argument when he writes, “Whatever the future of
American Jewish cultural achievement will be, it will become Jewish only
after it has imposed itself as achievement.”64 The basic assumption here is
that Bloom’s early experiences were passive enough at point of origin as
indeed all human lives are relatively passive in earliest infancy, but only up
to a point, since after this Bloom’s voracious reading and incredibly active
sensibility turned these formative influences on their head; in short, the son
of a garment-maker became a professor at Yale. Like a strong poet initially
over-informed by a precursor, Bloom absorbed the experiences of his
Jewish childhood in the Bronx, including an early immersion in the poetry
of Blake and Crane et al., but then his remarkable intellectual energies
transformed his cultural expectations into something very different: “I
assimilated understanding the poetry to my background in biblical
commentary.”65 Bloom’s prose commentaries radically challenged the
orthodoxy of his teachers, since as John Hollander observes, “he has moved
forward to revise the lessons of his earliest days, those of rabbinic
exegetes.”66 Hollander means not only that Bloom rejected the covenant
with Yahweh that his parents believed in, but also that his genealogical
investigation of the historical transmission of Judaism from the time of
Solomon to the present interferes with the passive acceptance of dogma,
“normative Judaism is an extremely strong misreading of the Hebrew Bible
which was done eighteen hundred years ago to cover the needs of the
Jewish people in Palestine under Roman occupation . . . the notion that it
should in any way bind me as the proper version of the covenant is
ridiculous.”67 One must never forget that Bloom’s cultural background is
Jewish American and that the imposition of one’s self on canonical tradition
amounts to sheer verve and willful aesthetic determination (rather than the
Bloomian bugbear of passive historical over-determination) since, as
Carlyle notes in Sartor Resartus, “only some half of the Man stands in the
Child, or young Boy, namely his Passive endowment, not his Active.”68
Carlyle’s reference to the relative passivity of childhood and the more
actively questioning mind of adulthood draws upon Wordsworth’s gnomic
wisdom that the child is father of the man, as well as Coleridge’s attack on
Newtonian rationalism: “Newton was a mere materialist—Mind in his
system is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the
mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, & that too in the
sublimest sense—the Image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion,
that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a
system.”69 Hollander notes that Bloom has always been an antithetical
critic, and he opposes Bloom’s practice to the primary kind of criticism
championed by the New Critics because much of their literary theory
derived from Coleridge’s philosophy, as does Bloom’s Yeatsian term
“antithetical,” which roughly correlates to the secondary imagination.
Bloom envisages poets as demiurgical makers creating poems that claim to
be self-contained linguistic structures but which in fact betray the influence
of prior poems. My biographical point is that Bloom’s historical
background was, at its earliest and most tender, that of a second-generation
orthodox Jewish immigrant living in a district where Yiddish was still the
primary language of the streets. By questioning those misreadings of the
Hebrew Bible that facticity imposes upon him, Bloom existentially chooses
a Gnostic sense of religious identity very different from that of his received
rabbinical education. Indeed, his obstinate questionings lead him to
dismantle Judaism and instead invent his own personalized understanding
of the religion of his fathers, although a complete break with Judaism
proved psychologically impossible.
Before exploring the intricacies of Bloom’s decades-long relationship
with the intertwined fields of Gnosticism and Jewish mysticism; it is of
some relevance to weigh up Norma Rosen’s hypothesis that although
American Jews were safe from the Holocaust, “since then, in imagination,
we are seldom anywhere else.”70 This assertion is easily demonstrable with
recourse to Bloom’s thoughts upon Ezekiel: “The shadow of the Holocaust
still and always falls upon Judaism. How could it not? What would we
think of a Hebraic prophet who rose up now to say that the martyrs of the
Shoah were abandoned by Yahweh because of their sins against him?”71
Bloom does not entirely start anew on a fresh American canvas with the
gusto of a Henry Church, rather, he remembers the past because of a
nightmare that he cannot forget. The prime evidence for this assertion is
provided by Bloom’s thoughts on Isaac Babel and Paul Celan. Both these
twain are Jewish writers ambivalently estranged from tradition and yet
capable of transcending their victimization by Russian Communists and
German Nazis, respectively. Bloom notes that the Jews were “tormented as
if in hell” in Russia and ends his piece by quoting Babel’s down-to-earth
apotheosis of the Jews of Odessa: “the stout and jovial Jews of the South,
bubbling like cheap wine.”72 Bloom translated his own version of a lyric
called “Psalm” by Celan that Bloom calls a “hymn of the Holocaust,” a
poem in which no one, including Yahweh, “utters no word about his
slaughtered people, who are No one’s rose.”73 Bloom styles himself the
enemy of historicism, but I want to argue that his work does not exist in a
historical vacuum; that the Holocaust is just one major example of the
impingement of history upon his ideas. The historical context for Bloom’s
Gnostic quest is America, but his cultural origins are Jewish and therefore
encompass the condition of exile from Zion; the sullied conditions of
Davidic culture and Diaspora often resolve themselves into numerous
pogroms. In what follows, I engage with some of Bloom’s more outstanding
critics, including David Fite, Graham Allen, Norman Finkelstein, and Frank
Lentricchia in order to suggest that ideas associated with Protestantism and
Judaism are frequently combined in Bloom’s oeuvre in the form of his own
brand of Gnosticism. Fite’s outline of Bloom’s reading of Jonas is very
quotable because of the word crisis: “Jonas compares the world of
Gnosticism to modern nihilism and to the existentialism of the early
Heidegger, showing the affinities of Gnostic knowledge, which effaces the
present before the eschatological momentum of the past and future, to the
‘radical temporality’ of Heidegger in Being and Time, for whom ‘the
present is nothing but the moment of crisis between past and future’.”74
Bloom has written that he awoke from a bad dream, here interpreted as his
personal biographical vision of Jewish history, to write that severe prose
poem, The Anxiety of Influence. My surmise is that Bloom was responding
to the distant background melancholia of the Holocaust, a creative
resolution that Jonas anachronistically describes as the Gnostic’s “death-
begotten resolve . . . balanced on the razor’s edge of decision which thrusts
ahead.”75 Bloom’s sense of historical crisis was shared by Jonas, who
dramatically returned to Germany in 1945 as part of the conquering British
army; indeed, he had vowed not to do so otherwise.76 Jonas states that
Gnosis has many parallels with modern nihilism and “our twentieth-century
Being” because war-torn humanity was here in an abject crisis.77 Bloom
was moved by the Gnostic existential statement of this German Jew, as he is
similarly moved by the writings of Celan, precisely because Bloom’s belief
in the orthodox Jewish covenant was severely undermined by the notion
that such a Deity could allow the death camps to happen. Jonas writes that
to be “a good citizen of the cosmos, a cosmopolites, is the moral end of
man; and his title to this citizenship is his possession of logos, or reason,
and nothing else—that is, the principle that distinguishes him as man and
puts him into immediate relationship to the same principle governing the
universe.”78 Angus Fletcher gives me a hint as to how to connect the
cosmic obscene to poetic breath, when, in his discussion of allegory, he
quotes C. N. Cochrane: “the Aeneid has in addition the character of a
national epic . . . Aeneas is . . . the pilgrim father of antiquity . . . the
Graeco-Roman counterpart to the New England Kingdom of the Saints.”79
He continues (in a manner reminiscent of the providential reception of
Humboldt’s Kosmos in nineteenth-century America) that Burnett thought
kosmos meant “originally the discipline of an army, and next the
constitution of a state.”80 I would underline that at John 8:23 Jesus
gainsays his opponents by claiming “you are of this world” but “I am not of
this world,” which means the material world of darkness is a divinely
created “cosmos” and the kingdom of heaven is symbolized by mystical
light, a love within but from without this fallen world. Whitman (Bloom’s
American Adam) describes himself as a cosmos in Song of Myself; thus,
this cosmic dualism inspired the identification of Jewish mysticism and
Whitman’s poetry of the self, in the mind of Bloom, when he establishes a
Kabbalistic connection between poetic being-in-the-world and that world as
created by a departed Being. From Bloom’s stark perspective, Yahweh is
acosmic; he also admits to being himself “alogos, averse to philosophy”
since first falling “in love with the poetry of William Blake” and bitterly
complains against Plato’s banishment of Homer from his utopian
republic.81 In an essay on Jewish tradition in the contemporary moment,
Norman Finkelstein notes that Bloom prefers the Hebrew notion “davhar”
to “logos,” for in contrast to the Greek sense of order and linguistic context
in “logos,” “davhar emphasizes linguistic acts of the self that establish the
priority of personal being.”82 This preference for the assertive irrational in
poetry as opposed to the logic of philosophy later became a crucial
distinction in Bloom’s many arguments and struggles with Heideggerian
deconstructionists but, for now, I merely underline Bloom’s theological
preference for the Judaic word for speech, act, and breath, over its
philosophical Greek cousin. Because Bloom’s impish Yahweh breathed the
life force into Adam, the tentative conclusion one comes to is that Bloom’s
conception of literary language would seem mystical: “the god of the J-
Writer seems to me a god in whom I scarcely could fail to believe, since
that god was all of our breath and vitality.”83 But with reference to the God
of Augustine Bloom also admits, “unbeliever as I am.”84
Fite’s Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision has the merit of
being the first and still the best book-length treatment of Bloom’s early
career. Although I am deeply indebted to his scholarship, it is nevertheless
the case that this trail-blazing book was published in 1985, and since then
the amount of biographical material available on Bloom has increased
dramatically. Bloom calls Omens of Millennium (1996) his spiritual
autobiography; the last section of this book is entitled “A Gnostic Sermon,”
and here Bloom deciphers the Valentinian credo that he encountered in
Jonas:

What makes us free is the Gnosis

Of who we were
Of what we have become
Of where we were
Of wherein we have been thrown
Of what we are being freed
Of what birth really is
Of what rebirth really is

My immediate focus is on Fite’s assertion that Bloom’s reading of the

Valentinian excerpt in Poetry and Repression is illusory, “a grand enabling
fiction, a ‘something evermore about to be’.”85 Fite interprets Bloom’s
understanding of Valentinus from the perspective of Bloom’s literary
criticism; thus, Fite writes, “it is the poetic battle proper, the drive towards
an illusory freedom, that is the great glory . . . of strong poetry.”86 Fite’s
eloquent reading of Bloom proposes that poets desire originality, but begin
by imitating precursor poets, then wrestle with this influence, until they
develop their own original style, which is always at some level indebted to
precursive writing. The obvious objection to Fite’s reading is that Bloom
does not take Valentinian Gnosis to be a grand enabling fiction; there is
strong evidence to support the view that he believes, or at least involuntary
half-believes, in a religion of Gnosis, and that his subsequent writings
present many illuminating parallels with existential philosophy. In an
invaluable review of Jesus and Yahweh, Jonathan Rosen underlines the
latent theism in this Bloomian statement, “My Orthodox Judaic childhood
lingers in me as an awe of Yahweh” and Rosen comments that while
Bloom’s “mother trusted in the covenant with the Jewish God . . . he
cannot?”87 The point here is that Bloom cannot quite dismiss his belief in
the sublimity of the Jewish Deity even if he no longer trusts in the Orthodox
Jewish faith, and this despite confessions like, “I still recall my childhood
awe at the wineglass set aside for Eliahu ha-navi at every Passover seder,
with my sleepy fantasies that indeed he had come to drain it.”88 Bloom will
instead argue that the phrase “I am that I am” means “I will be here when I
will be here,” and hence sometimes Yahweh is present and sometimes not. I
want to argue that Bloom finds evidence of Yahweh in the sublimity of
canonical literature; for instance, he once said to me that “I don’t believe in
Yahweh,” but on another occasion emphatically enunciated the words,
“Whitman will always remain a mystery!” In this light, the Wordsworthian
phrase “something ever more about to be” seems proto-existentialist; it
pertains to finding a transcendent sense of being within time that ever slips
away beyond man’s perceptual grasp. Bloom singles out the Valentinian
phrase “have been thrown” and writes “there is an exhilarating dynamism in
our condition, but this does not prevail, and is not the norm of our
existence.”89 The norm is death-in-life and with regard to the Gnostic
formulation, “if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty”;
Bloom explains “‘poverty’ is exactly what . . . Emerson founder of our
American Gnosis, named . . . imaginative lack or need.”90 In particular,
Bloom was drawn to Emerson’s idealist apothegm, “That is always best
which gives me to myself. The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical
doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That
which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen.”91 This
fortifying spirit is best understood as the reader’s sublime or the point when
a text augments the reader’s consciousness; Bloom often mentions that you
should read books that find you, and by this he means the instances when an
author grabs your attention for whatever duration. Bloom comments that in
Jonas and Emerson, “the moment of Gnosis is the mind’s direct perception,
a pure movement and event that simultaneously discloses the divine spark
in the self, and a sense of divine degradation even there, in the inmost self,
because the Gnostic Fall is within the Godhead.”92 This movement would
seem to be the joy and vaunting flight of the imagination when stimulated
by literary sublimity of a kind that helps the reader know himself or herself
better. However, every writer is necessarily a reader first, and if the concept
of Godhead were to be swapped for that of tradition, then Bloom’s analogy
is that the modern writer owes his inception to a fall into an inter-textual
relationship with previous writing that Bloom sometimes figures as a
compound precursor, who stands in for the force of tradition. Gnostic
selfhood is here my main interest in relating Bloom’s agonistic American
criticism to his palpably Jewish sensibility; what follows is an existential
meditation upon Bloom’s career as a Jewish-American literary critic par
excellence.
Fite is mistaken in saying that each new poetic style is mere illusory
fiction, since this sounds like the meaninglessly ironic world of de Man, or
what is here interpreted as existential nihilism by Jonas: “that only man
cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency
and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings.”93 In Fite’s
view, Bloom deconstructs each poet’s fiction of originality in order to
uncover the lurking bias of precursive influence, because in influential
terms death is a form of literal meaning, the empty echoing of a precursor
by a poet too weak to break his influential shackles. To return to Bloom’s
bad dream, in The Anxiety of Influence, he defines anxiety by recourse to
Freud: “Freud’s use of ‘danger’ reminds us of our universal fear of
domination, of our being trapped by nature in our body as a dungeon, in
certain situations of stress.”94 Bloomian anxiety loosely coheres with what
Sartre termed dread, and Kierkegaard angst, “The name
‘Angst’—‘angustiae’, ‘Enge’ (German and Latin words for ‘narrow place’,
‘straits’, from the same root as ‘Angst’ and ‘anxiety’)—emphasizes the
characteristic of restriction in breathing which was then present as a
consequence of the real situation and is now almost invariably reinstated in
the affect.”95 Freud’s equation of anxiety with the symptoms of
hyperventilation becomes interpreted by Bloom as analogous to the readerly
inspiration of influence and then its restricted expulsion as poetry, “if the
anxiety of influence be imaged as a lack of breathing space, then the
voluntary limitation that allows a poem to begin, amounts to a holding-in of
breath, until some space is cleared for it.”96 The clearing of space for the
self equates to that freedom that Sartre proposes man reclaims for himself
when he becomes aware that the transcendent is silent; therefore, I again
quote Jonas, who declares “that this freedom is of a desperate kind, and, as
a compassless task, inspires dread rather than exultation.”97 Thus, as Fite
memorably notes, in his desperation the Bloomian poet, slughorn set to lips,
sings in his defeat, a Great defeat that is as American as it is Christian.98
Bloom answers a Heideggerian ironist like de Man by arguing that there is
no end to the influence of Yahwistic breath and that the strong poet seeks
more life into a time without boundaries; though “more life” to Bloom is
death to Heidegger. Like Hillel, Bloom wants, “More flesh, more worms;
more wealth, more care; more women, more witchcraft; more maidservants,
more lewdness; more menservants, more thieving; more Torah, more life;
more assiduity, more wisdom; more counsel, more understanding; more
charity, more peace.”99 Jonas concisely explains that Nietzsche indicated
the root of the nihilistic situation in the phrase “God is dead” and that to
Heidegger, “The phrase ‘God is dead’ means that the supra-sensible world
is without effective force.”100 Bloom suggests that the astrological flowing
from the stars upon our fate is the prime meaning of influence; and his work
upon the earliest Jewish strand in the Bible indicates that although Yahweh
is dead or has absconded nevertheless the invisible paths of influence that
begin in Genesis are still affective for modern authors, and indeed Bloom
himself. Jonas intelligently states that the main difference between
Existentialism and Gnosticism is that the Gnostics believe in a Demiurge
and an alien God beyond the material cosmos, whereas an existentialist
interpreter of Valentinus might well ask, “what is the throw without the
thrower, and without a beyond whence it started?”101 But Bloom instead
emphasizes the facticity of tradition that makes of latecomers a Gnostic
Tantalus, who tries with all his aesthetic might to break free into the realms
of epicurean originality. Jonas purveys the Gnostic wisdom that “the power
of the world is overcome, on the one hand, by the power of the Savior who
breaks into a closed system from without, and, on the other, through the
power of the ‘knowledge’ brought by him.”102 If one were to re-interpret
this Gnostic catechism as the saving knowledge of genius that allows a
writer of startling individuality to break into the canon where the canon is
defined by the facticity of ultimate biblical origins, then the further
ramification of this inference is that Bloomian analysis of tradition becomes
a mode of psychoanalyzing one’s personal relationship with the canon
where the canon is a kind of secular Godhead. We must recognize, however,
that the word canonical has a dualistic meaning here, insofar as Bloom by
no means limits himself to secular authors, and indeed, he sees no real
difference between Scripture and secular literature, especially when the
texts that constitute the former are read for their aesthetic lusters: “I myself
have come to the opinion that it makes sense to assert that all strong
literature is sacred, and just as much sense to insist that all of it is
secular.”103 For instance, his main argument in The Book of J is that the
earliest strand of Genesis started life as a collection of folk tales, but then
became redacted and codified as religious matter after the Babylonian
captivity. Nietzsche is the best commentator to employ in this context:
“there is in fact no other alternative for Gods: either they are the will to
power—and so long as they are that they will be national Gods—or else the
impotence for power—and then they necessarily become good.”104 The
conquest of the Israelites by the Babylonians called into question the status
of Yahweh the warrior-god; the Holocaust, I am arguing, had the same
albeit antithetic effect on the agonistic (and more subtly agnostic) Bloom,
who possesses an almost Israeli fighting spirit.
Fite is by no means a naïve reader of Bloom, but I cannot agree with his
contention that Bloomian Gnosis is one-hundred-percent “contextless”
because this would kill off the nightmare of Jewish history.105 To Gnostics
the Kenoma squares with historical facticity, and the historical moment that
I wish to concentrate upon is a phrase culled from a war-time speech by
Winston Churchill: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”106
His speech makes no direct reference to the Holocaust because Churchill
did not dare let the Germans know that encrypted messages were being
decoded; as Martin Gilbert informs us, “The week following Churchill’s
broadcast, seventeen separate reports of the shooting of Jews and Russians,
in groups of between 61 and 4200, were sent to Berlin by secret radio code
from the eastern front.”107 These missives were intercepted during exactly
the same time-period in which the Einsatzgruppen were operating near
Brest-Litovsk and Odessa. The phrase that needs emphasizing is “without a
name,” which has imagistic connotations aplenty in Bloom’s prose
statements concerned with the death of God. Bloom notes that Milton’s
invocation to the Muse at the beginning of Book VII of Paradise Lost
contains the phrase “the meaning, not the name, I call” (VII, 5). Bloom
dramatically states that he rose from a nightmare to write The Anxiety of
Influence, and it is here that he treats of the death of God in terms of the
nameless phrase,

God has no Muse, and needs none, since he is dead, his creativity
being manifested only in the past time of the poem. Of the living
poets in the poem, Satan has Sin, Adam has Eve, and Milton has only
his Interior Paramour, an Emanation far within that weeps incessantly
for his sin, and that is invoked magnificently four times in the poem.
Milton has no name for her, though he invokes her under several; but,
as he says, “the meaning, not the Name I call.”108

This angst-ridden allegory is extended in such a way that Wordsworth and

Coleridge enter the debate as Satan and Beelzebub, the strong poet and the
good poet, who will now never make it because disquieted at the prospect
of re-writing Scripture in lyric autobiographical terms. Bloom argues that
poetic sublimity is achieved as a counter-sublime, at which Coleridge
trembled because he could not attribute it to the Divine Nature, “The fear of
solipsism is greater in him than the fear of not individuating his own
imagination.”109 According to Bloom, Coleridge acquired a doubly
sublime anxiety of influence, or that of Milton and Scripture: “all things
became Milton—the poet ever present to our minds and more than
gratifying us for the loss of the distinct individuality of what he
represents.”110 Bloom’s allegory is a direct development of this passage
from “To Reason with a Later Reason: Romanticism and the Rational” and
it employs that word “crisis”:

“Resolution and Independence” is a poem dealing with the passage

from crisis to what will suffice, that place of the spirit from which
one can start to live and write. The poet stands almost at the midpoint
of his existence—he is thirty-two, soon to be married, and fearful that
his vision has fled. He contemplates the acedia and ruin of his brother
poet, Coleridge, and sees in him the entire line of the doomed poets
of Sensibility, from Chatterton to Burns, the bards who in their youth
began in gladness, but who fell one by one into the despondency that
preceded total alienation. From this terrible anxiety, this grief without
a name, Wordsworth is rescued by a privileged moment that scarcely
yields itself even to the later reason of the imagination.111

Bloom interprets the phrase “grief without a name” as akin to the meaning,
not the name of the Heavenly Muse, because as Thomas Weiskel argues,
“the Imagination may be structurally defined as a power of resistance to the
Word, and in this sense it coincides exactly with the psychological necessity
of originality.”112 In “Martin Buber on the Bible,” Bloom leaves the
precincts of the literary when he investigates Jacob’s wrestling at Jabbok
with “a nameless one” from among the Elohim.113 By wrestling and
defeating Sammael, the angel of his own death (and indeed the figurative
death of all Israelites), Jacob gains a blessing such that his name will
become synonymous with Israel and his people shall not be scattered.
Bloom has said in an interview that the important thing is that Israel
survives and this comment dovetails with the wisdom that pragmatically
Yahweh’s blessing means survival; he includes the Shekhinah, or Divine
Presence, in a list with the real Me and Interior Paramour in The Shadow of
a Great Rock, which prompts me to suggest that he himself is wedded to the
Holocaust as his own dark repression of the angel of destruction.114
Bloom’s exegesis insists that Romantic poets like Wordsworth wrestle
against literal death defined as the empty echoing of a precursor’s stance, so
that their names might attain literary immortality, though in the first draft of
what later became The Anxiety of Influence, the titanic figures that wrestle
are Blake’s Milton and Urizen:

Silent they met, and silent strove among the streams, of Arnon
Even to Mahanaim, when with cold hand Urizen stoop’d down
And took up water from the river Jordan: pouring on
To Miltons brain the icy fluid from his broad cold palm.
But Milton took of the red clay of Succoth, moulding it with care
Between his palms; and filling up the furrows of many years
Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones
Creating new flesh on the Demon cold, and building him,
As with new clay a Human form in the Valley of Beth Peor.
. . . . (Milton I.19.6-14)115

As a hempen knotting of horizon and reason, Urizen represents the tyranny

of a rational sky god over nature, not to mention human aspiration; this
figure conforms to the Gnostic Demiurge, who confines humans within the
cycles of creation. Blake’s expressive poetry has the allegoric meaning
within Bloom’s text of signifying the wrestling of Wordsworth with Milton.
But this quotation, however magnificent its portrayal of a poetic precursor
wrestling with Blake’s figure for rational Godhead, is only a stepping stone
toward this celebrated passage in Blake’s Milton:

To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human,

I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration;
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Savior,
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration,
To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering,
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination;
. . . . (II.41.1-7)

In the prior passage, Blake’s Milton inverts the creation of man from the red
earth by making a clay man from cold rationalist Deity; but here, Blake’s
Milton casts off the ragged garments of the empirical tradition that would
stifle visionary poetry. The fact that Bloom has a particular penchant for
quoting this passage which boasts a reference to ragged garments can
hardly go unrelated to the fact that his father was a garment-maker.
Although Bloom claims that we fall in love with poetry in an arbitrary
fashion, it is hard to believe that this passage meant nothing to Bloom
junior, presumably after borrowing the text from the Bronx library as a
child. The irony of this is that Bloom’s own anxious exegesis of the above
was instrumental in breaking his belief in the Covenant with the orthodox
Jewish conception of God; Bloom realized his own authentic selfhood by a
Gnostic mode of interpretation that led to a turning away from the religion
of the father.
The most explicit detail of Bloom’s rejection of normative Judaism is his
preference for the irascible warrior-god version of Yahweh that he
championed in The Book of J, which I desire to examine in the light of
Allen’s post-structuralist criticism of the same. The crisis of anxiety, or that
existentialist precipitation of influence between the strong poem in the past
and one in the present tense, would seem remarkably similar to the
proscriptive framework of the Second Commandment, and yet Bloom’s
concept of agon is not Judaic in character but Greek. The Anxiety of
Influence derives from a moment of mid-life crisis and therefore this
becomes a critical word, one borrowed from Abrams’s concept of the
Wordsworthian crisis-autobiography: “A crisis is a crucial point or turning
point, going back to the Greek krisis, which derived from krinein, ‘to
separate’ or ‘to decide’, from which came also the Greek kritos, ‘separated’
or ‘chosen’, and so kritikos, ‘able to discern’, and so to be a critic.”116 This
said, Bloom is especially adept at finding Judaic figures to underpin his
arguments, since in “Martin Buber on the Bible” Bloom has it that the J-
Writer “chronicles the vicissitudes of an agonistic blessing” and that agonist
Jacob, was the “most agonistic of his characters,” while remaining “the
most Jewish of all personages.”117 Bloom once wrote that the first
caveman who daubed a wall suffered from the anxiety of influence, but I
find this instance of the existential dilemma a trifle anachronistic because
Bloom has a Jewish Gnostic conception of influential anxieties. While
thinking through Bloom’s use of the term facticity, Allen dwells upon
Bloom’s statement that we are imprisoned by the contingency of
Shakespeare, Freud, and the J-Writer of Genesis, though I here concentrate
upon the J-Writer, or the putative author of what some philologists claim
was the earliest strand of Genesis, “J is our original . . . precisely because J
was . . . J has authority over us, whether we are Gentile or Jew, normative
or heretic. . . . This is the authority of brute contingency, of our being
imprisoned by what we might call J’s facticity.”118 Allen’s objection is that
“Bloom cannot prove that cultural history depends upon the factitious
power and authority of various strong ‘personalities’”; he merely asserts
that a strong author who comes early in cultural history necessarily
imprisons his or her successors in the arbitrary figures of their particular
stories.119 Whether or not Allen is right—and Bloom would seem
abundantly right in terms of the influence of Genesis upon Paradise Lost—
and Blake’s The Book of Urizen—Bloom nevertheless speaks for his own
beliefs and his treatment of Yahweh is most revealing. My rejoinder to
Allen is that Bloom claims that the earliest significant canonical author is
not the Persian poet of Gilgamesh but the Jewish author of Genesis, who
first set down the Garden of Eden story in writing, and hence strongly
influenced the primary doctrine of Christianity which says that Christ
sacrificed himself on the cross to redeem mankind from Adam’s sin. To
define his own version of facticity, Bloom turns to the Hebraic language of
J, which he argues contains Christian poets like Dante and Milton, because
“those poets are so much imprisoned by the contingency of his being the
Word of God for them.”120 Bloom supposes that J is like an amalgam of
Kafka and Tolstoy, “as though Hadji Murad and the Hunter Gracchus could
be accommodated in the same fictive universe.”121 Leaving aside the
typically Russian theme of east confronting west and the Tolstoyan one of
struggle and loyalty, the Hunter Gracchus presents the reader with the
incommensurable irony of an undead intelligence being interviewed by a
bourgeois mayor: “Do you mean to linger with us in our beautiful town of
Riva is the mundane query, and the more-than-courteous response of
Gracchus is that he thinks not, since his ship has no rudder, and is driven by
winds that come from the icy regions of death.”122 This weird sublime is
the closest thing to the J-Writer’s incommensurable irony, an irony that
breaks the Second Commandment since Bloom argues “irony comes from
clashes or encounters between totally incommensurate orders of reality”
and because J’s Yahweh “likes to go down, walk about amidst places,
persons, and things,” which underlines that Yahweh never shrinks from
face-to-face encounters with J’s characters.123 J’s characters are like
Wordsworth in The Prelude because they enjoy an election love and
compete for God’s blessing, though for Bloom, J’s Yahweh is blasphemous,
insofar as he is depicted as a theomorphic man, yet he is an example of
primitive Judaism that Bloom admits to being obsessed by: “Yahweh is not
here when you need him. . . . I wish he would go away, though he
won’t.”124 Bloom has written that to think of the God of Israel is to
remember mortality and Yahweh’s broken covenant with His people.125
It is vital to flesh out what sometimes seems to be the Jewish-cultural
bee in the bonnet of Ozick’s waspish gentile because otherwise Bloom may
seem overdetermined by his background. Bloom laments that the Jews “are
no longer a text-obsessed people, whether in America or Israel or
anywhere,” but this hardly rings true in Bloom’s own case; he is simply
obsessed with reading texts.126 Like Kierkegaard’s allegiance to being
Christian, Bloom has an existential stance with reference to justifying his
chosen life of reading that is continually reaffirmed by more reading. He
undercuts one myth commonly held about Jewish culture, and in so doing
confirms himself as a secular almost faux Jewish scholar: “Nothing, we
think, could be more Jewish than the idea of achieving holiness through
learning, but the idea was Plato’s and was adopted by the rabbis.”127
Nevertheless, Bloom reads secular texts for their pastness; in the
Kabbalistic sense that they contain meaning between the lines, between the
letters even, because to find meaning in everything is incontrovertibly to
echo the rabbinical doctrine that all possible Midrashic meanings were
already present in the Hebrew Bible, which indicates the Jewishness of
Freudian interpretation, “Primal repression, which ensues before there is
anything to be repressed, is Freud’s version of the Second
Commandment.”128 In The Book of J, Bloom is scandalized by the textual
repression of J’s incommensurable Yahweh undertaken by later orthodox
scribes; thus, Bloom declares that from the perspective of Akiba, he is one
of the minim, a heretical Gnostic, who celebrates “the scandalous power of
J’s text, which by synecdoche stands for the Hebrew Bible as the strongest
poem that I have ever read.”129 Unlike Akiba, Bloom finds the acosmic
center of the Yahwist’s vision in the phrase ehyeh asher ehyeh, which is
often translated as I AM WHO I AM, but which Bloom renders as “I will
be present wherever and whenever I will be present.” Bloom’s contention is
that this phrase would seem the Yahwist’s sublime, or “a time without
boundaries,” an olam (meaning a world created by God but an eternal one
“that transcends spatial limitations”).130 There can be no better indication
of Bloom’s Jewish pride than the historical re-inversion of the Christian
reduction of the Jewish Bible to an Old Testament, which occurs in his
deconstructive analysis of John’s reportage of Jesus’ assertion that “I say to
you, before Abraham was, I am” (8.58). The fathers of the Jews ate manna
in the Wilderness and died, whereas John’s Jesus states “I am the living
bread . . . if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever” (6.51). Bloom
argues that this speech is a rhetorical trap, “the transumption leaps over
Abraham by saying also, ‘Before Moses was, I am’, and by hinting. . . . I
am one with my father Yahweh.”131 Yet Bloom practices his own
transumption and knight-leaps his primal author “J” over the bishops,
castles, and kings of the documentary-hypothesis Moses, John, Paul, and
indeed Akiba. Bloom believes that we are imprisoned by J’s contingency
because J is our original, “as, say, Gilgamesh is not.”132 It is no matter that
a snake steals the tree that grants eternal life from the sleeping Gilgamesh
and that his eponymous epic predates the Garden of Eden story that
possesses its own talking snake that has consciousness before Adam and
Eve, or that the later story turns on a transgressive theft of the fruit of the
tree of life and that therefore Yahweh punishes his children by casting them
out of paradise, itself a Persian word. It follows that Fite’s contextless
reading of Bloom as the present-tense head of tradition eating its
ourobouros tail would be correct if it were not for the anxiety of the Garden
myth; the fact that he takes this story as his starting place means that his
existential fiction is deeply Hebraic in character, truculently so. Bloom then
proceeds to refute Northrop Frye’s argument in The Great Code that his
Bible “is the Christian Bible, with its polemically named ‘Old’ and ‘New’
Testaments,” responding that Frye seeks imaginative liberation from the
imprisoning facticity of the J-Writer “and that liberation is achieved at the
expense of the Hebrew Bible, which indeed is consumed in Frye’s great
Blakean Code of Art.”133 I will treat Bloom’s relationship with Frye in
more detail in the next section, but it is important for now to note that
Bloom has described Frye as the precursor proper. Bloom wrestles with
Frye’s precursive influence insofar as Bloom’s interpretation of the
Yahwist’s “I will be when and where I will be” as “the dialectics of infinite
human aspiration and finite human limitations” almost reads as an
unintended comment upon his own wrestling with what he describes as
Frye’s Myth of Concern, or Frye’s failure to accept that the Bible, like a
secular canon, “is an achieved anxiety,” because “the desire of any
individual poet is to surpass the precursors who created him.”134
Essentially, Bloom adds the idea of agon to Anatomy of Criticism; he writes
that “Frye’s Bible is the Protestant Bible, in which the Hebrew Scriptures
dwindle down to that captive prize of the Gentiles, the Old Testament,” and
concludes, “Yahweh is less a personal possession, even for fundamentalist
American Protestants, than Jesus is.”135 Bloom’s war-like conception of
Yahweh represents earliness and Jesus’ peacefulness lateness; the crease in
Bloom’s Gnostic sense of selfhood is that he is Jewish and American and
that the facticity of the tradition that he wrestles with is mediated by these
two points of origin.
Bloom is deeply uncomfortable with any Christian revision that purports
to supersede the Jewish Bible; his Gnosis would seem deeply Jewish.
Significant Bloomian critics like Allen and Fite underestimate Bloom’s
spiritual affinities, namely the theological and existential consequences of
being Jewish and American. Bloom’s later career might well be
characterized as a running battle fought with those Marxist followers of
Gramsci, who believe that we are entirely dominated by the hegemonic
values that the dominant echelons of society impose upon culture.
Ironically, Bloom’s sublime over-reaction in The Western Canon helps us
tease out his own cultural and spiritual positioning:

The hero of these anticanonizers is Antonio Gramsci, who in his

Selections from the Prison Notebooks denies that any intellectual can
be free of the dominant social group if he relies upon merely the
“special qualification” that he shares with the craft of his fellows
 (such as other literary critics): “Since these various categories of
traditional intellectuals experience through an esprit de corps their
uninterrupted historical qualification, they thus put themselves
forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social
group.”136

Another potential definition of culture favored by Bloom is this statement:

“the self stands within yet beyond culture, culture being that ideology
which helps such a self: coherent, capable of standing apart, yet dutiful and
pious toward the force of the best which has been said in the past.”137
Bloom here argues for the Arnoldian model of culture that partly defines his
stance as a canonical critic, at least to the extent that a Swiftian term like
sweetness and light (meaning the honied sweetness of learning and the
beeswax candles of enlightenment) can be compared to the spidery
modernist webs of his formidable explanatory critical apparatus. But a more
revealing insight into Bloom’s background as a critic emerges from his
impassioned defense of the canon against cultural materialists and the
school of New Historicism: “I myself insist that the individual self is the
only method and the whole standard for apprehending aesthetic value. But
‘the individual self’, I unhappily grant, is defined only against society, and
part of its agon with the communal inevitably partakes of the conflict
between social and economic classes.”138 Ideology is sometimes lazily
taken to mean political persuasion, but initially it meant false consciousness
or the factitious imposition of the dominant elite’s ideas and propaganda
upon the proletarian multitude. Thus, Bloom is forced to admit the
economic consequences of his existential aesthetic pleasures: “Myself the
son of a garment worker, I have been granted endless time to read and
meditate upon my reading,” and hence he acknowledges that “my
passionate proclamations of the isolate selfhood’s aesthetic value are
necessarily qualified by the reminder that the leisure for meditation must be
purchased from the community.”139 It would be perfect to argue that
Bloom’s Gnostic existentialism largely boils down to the physical and
mental act of reading canonical literature from J to the present in the hope
of locating the unconscious echo of departed Yahwistic breath. But we have
to be careful because Bloom sometimes argues in a manner more consistent
with that of his orthodox critics: “poetry, unlike the Jewish religion, does
not go back to a truly divine origin.”140 Yet, Bloom writes of
Wordsworth’s something ever more about to be in Jewish Gnostic terms:
“What the Ein-Sof or infinite Godhead was to the Kabbalists, or the
Imagination was to the Romantic poets, tradition is now for us.”141
The experience of reading The Gnostic Religion is that of confronting
great erudition, since the reader is almost over-powered by the minutiae
contained in a dense middle-section. In truth, this is no fault of Jonas’s
prose, which is lucid, but rather the result of trying to incorporate the
fissiparous and fragmentary religious doctrines (Jonas calls them
“ingenious and elaborate speculative structures”) of such Gnostic/Hermetic
luminaries as Simon Magus, Marcion, Hermes Trismegistus, Valentinus,
and Mani, as one basic myth.142 A remarkably similar dilemma confronts
the Bloomian scholar scrabbling for a system that will unite the multitude
of ideas and perspectives that Bloom’s ever-growing list of publications
presents. I find myself bowled over by Jonas’s opening argument that after
Alexander and the Romans began the Hellenization of the Near East, by
whip-like recoil, the colonized Persians and Syrians had slow and sensual
revenge by introducing the “rational” West to an insidious counter-wave of
religious speculation, “the metamorphosis of Hellenism into a religious
oriental culture was set on foot.”143 I argue that the geological analogy
provided by Jonas captures both the Gnostic influential thrownness of The
Anxiety of Influence and the historical thrownness of Bloom’s émigré
identity as a second-generation American Jew. Jonas borrows Oswald
Spengler’s term “pseudomorphosis” in order to figure the spiritual revenge
that the ancient orient had upon its rational western counterpart. Jonas
defines pseudomorphosis as being akin to the process when “a different
crystalline substance happens to fill the hollow left in a geological layer by
crystals that have disintegrated, it is forced by the mold to take on a crystal
form not its own and without chemical analysis will lead the observer into
taking it for a crystal of the original kind.”144 The basic analogy expresses
the position of a second-generation Jewish immigrant child growing up
within New York society, but one who became the self-invented Gnostic
scholar of Yankee Yale. In The Decline of the West, Spengler presents a
cyclic theory of history, which Jonas employs to promote this parallel
between modern existentialist thought and ancient Gnosticism: “Spengler
went so far as to declare the two ages ‘contemporaneous’, in the sense of
being identical phases in the life cycle of their respective cultures.”145
According to Jonas, anguish and homesickness are part of the stranger’s lot,
the spiritual stranger being the Gnostic adept lost in the material Kenoma,
and one wonders whether the experience of Bloom’s family in coming to
America, the acculturation of Bloom’s older Jewish and therefore religious
familial ties within New York’s capitalist culture, do not represent a form of
pseudomorphosis. I write this with direct reference to the fact that Bloom,
who admits being a throwback to prior Kabbalists in Hebraic Russia, has
somehow managed to bring obscure Jewish Kabbalistic authors like Isaac
Luria into the mainstream of critical thought in such books as A Map of
Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism.146 One could easily be more
generalizing and utilize this crystalline metaphor for the experience of
many families coming to the New World, but this would seldom be
consistent with the literary fame that Bloom has accrued. Bloom’s
unprecedented career seems a quintessential example of the American
dream, and yet it is a dream that has soured in some ways, not least because
New Historicist academics (for a time) ruled the academic roost—to a
Gnostic critic these opponents must have appeared like Archons, the
materialist rulers of the fallen world.
In After the New Criticism, Lentricchia argues that the Bloomian poet
“believes himself free to make his own unique identity, to create himself out
of nothing.”147 Lentricchia gets Bloom almost right, but not quite;
certainly, Bloomian poetics are concerned with self-invention, though not
creation ex nihilo, which is always associated in Bloom’s writings with the
lies of the Creator-God. To give the most striking example, in The Breaking
of the Vessels, Bloom quotes this translation of the creation-scene in
Genesis 1:1–2:4: “When God set about to create heaven and earth—the
world being then a formless waste, with darkness over the seas and only an
awesome wind sweeping over the water—God said, ‘Let there be light.’
And there was light.” Looking over the Priestly Author’s shoulder, the
Gnostic critic asks, “What was that ‘then’ prior to Creation? What were
those entities, ‘a formless waste’ and the ‘water’ over which the awesome
wind swept?”148 Lentricchia notes that an assault on the New Critics
would seem central to Bloom’s critical theology; in particular, the
commonsensical notion that meaning in a poetic text is self-contained.149
Furthermore, he is right to suggest that “for Bloom, the great hope is for a
secular substitute for the God who can no longer be assented to, and for a
discourse that will release consciousness from the entrapments of a fallen
world.”150 But then Lentricchia represents Bloom as someone who refuses
“to recognize any longer the constitutive role of extraliterary forces . . .
upon identity.”151 Lentricchia is hardly alone in making this criticism,
since Allen writes that to Bloom “the sense of history, or extra-poetic
concerns . . . are an irrelevance” and that this constitutes “an evasion of the
socio-historical determinants of poetic meaning.”152 In fact, the main
criticism that is generally leveled against Bloom by his many cultural-
materialist detractors corresponds to Edward Said’s formulation that “texts
are worldly . . . even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a
part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in
which they are located and interpreted.”153 Allen covertly criticizes
Lentricchia’s suggestion that Bloom has “succeeded, in returning poetry to
history,” and that he works toward a “desperate principle of freedom in
history”; thus, Allen outlines that one of the major misconceptions of
Bloom’s account of poetic anxiety is that it “supports a form of literary
history, and is in itself part of a general reassertion of the historical or
contextual understanding of literary texts.”154 He asserts that Bloom’s
concern is with an achieved anxiety between texts rather than poets in
historical interrelationship, a point that I will return to in my discussion of
The Anxiety of Influence. While I cannot quarrel with the accuracy of
Allen’s statement that Bloom’s “account of poetic texts” makes “an
historicized reading of poetry inconceivable,” there is more to be said on
the subject of criticism understood as autobiography and, indeed, history as
biography, not to mention the interrelationship of text and psyche, and
hence self to society.155 From a religious perspective, Ozick incisively
emphasizes, the anxiety of influence would seem to reject Judaism in favor
of divination, the religion of the Gentiles. By the logic of Allen’s own
employment of Said, there should be a means of reading Bloom for his
social-historical determinants; thus, I think that Bloomian existentialism
equates to the phenomenology of the canon, since this is what he has spent
his life doing—reading, writing, and teaching canonical literature. From his
perspective, authentic literature comes into existence when new ways of
saying enter literary history; hence, authentic being for Bloom becomes a
meditation upon so-called mortal gods like Shakespeare and Milton. He
honors the gods of the western tribe and yet shows how they wage agons of
the spirit for the prize of immortality; they experience an elective anxiety as
to their own aesthetic salvation.
My intention is to show that there are extrapoetic overtones to be
discovered in Bloom theories of reading and that these conform to Judaism
and Protestantism. This said, I firmly agree with Lentricchia in the respect
that for Bloom “the unspoken assumption is that poetic identity is somehow
a wholly intraliterary process in no contact with the larger extraliterary
processes that shape human identity.”156 Yet, there is strong evidence to
suggest that Bloom’s poetic theories of influence, as laid out in the
argumentation of The Anxiety of Influence, correlate with his views in later
books like The American Religion and the “Introduction” to American
Religious Poems, inasmuch as they all express concerns that are not entirely
limited to the intrapoetic reading of poems. By means of a short
consideration of Lentricchia’s thoughts upon Bloom, I want to show how
theories present within The Anxiety of Influence are manifestly connected
with Bloom’s views on American Protestantism. Lentricchia notes Bloom’s
romantic fascination with solipsistic subjectivism and morbid self-
consciousness, then concludes that in The Anxiety of Influence, “God is an
allegory for everything outside the self—nature, society, ‘cultural history,
the dead poets’ . . . (and that) the alternative . . . is . . . to ‘accept a God
altogether other than the self’.”157 The important concept here is the
Bloomian “self” that, as Lentricchia indicates, learns its own solitude, and
whose freedom corresponds to an assertive discontinuity from tradition (and
I would add European tradition). Thus, Lentricchia launches into his
criticism of Bloom’s concept of the freedom of the unique self, as pure or
absolute consciousness caused by the astral disease of influence to which
“we can add . . . the sin against community.”158 The problem with this
diagnosis is that it accepts Bloom at his own word, where his word is
limited to the earlier books on influence from the 1970s; The American
Religion (1992) had not been written in 1982 when After the New Critics
was published. Hence, I intend to dwell upon Lentricchia’s focus upon
Bloom’s “willful drive deeper into the self, toward solipsistic discontinuity
—a drive away from community and toward increasing lyric
inwardness.”159 From this Bloomian emphasis upon selfhood, Lentricchia
draws the conclusion that “the psychic and social life of the poet as a man
in the world count for nothing; history in a big, inclusive sense cannot touch
the sacred being of intrapoetic relations.”160 Yet, Bloom’s poetic models
are almost invariably Protestant: Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Emerson, Whitman, etc. It needs to be reiterated that even atheists like
Shelley, Keats, and Stevens are definable as post-Protestants, while Yeats
was a Protestant Irish nationalist turned Gnostic theosophist. The poetic
selfhood of which Bloom takes Milton’s Satan to be representative of is
inescapably derived from a Protestant fixation with reading the Bible
without an authoritarian priestly hierarchy imposing its allegorical
catechism. In Bloom’s poetic theology, the Quakerish disdain for
dependence upon earthly things becomes the disparagement of any god
beyond the quickening power of the self. But here we run aground on the
paradox that the damned Satan could function as anyone’s figure of an
elective poet saving himself from ruin. Athens and Jerusalem are therefore
represented as competitive individualism that is agon and the Freudian
influence of fathers to whom in the Jewish faith one is meant to be
respectful. Of course, Bloom is always syncretic and there are Jewish
figures for usurping agonists, but this crystallizes the thought that the
phrase “anxiety of influence” is at once an expression for being Jewish in
post-Protestant American society and as well the anxiety that, following in
the wake of the Holocaust, Yahweh has departed.
The Greeks used their nous to escape fate, and if not, then hubris meets
with nemesis. The argumentation of this monograph is deceptively similar
since the accident of historical background is, for my purposes,
reinterpreted as a fate to be avoided. From Bloom’s viewpoint, Hamlet the
writer tells us that ethos is not the daemon, that character is not fate but
accident, and that eros is the purest accident. In Shakespeare, Bloom
unpacks the Player King’s speech thus: “Our ‘devices’ are our intended
purposes, products of our wills, but our fates are antithetical to our
characters, and what we think to do has no relation to our thoughts’ ‘ends’,
where ‘ends’ means both conclusions and harvests. Desire and destiny are
contraries, and all thought thus must undo itself.”161 Gnosticism is to the
fore when Bloom writes: “There is a breath or spark to Hamlet that is his
principle of individuation, a recognizable identity whose evidence is his
singularity of language, and yet not so much language as diction, a
cognitive choice between words, a choice whose drive always is toward
freedom.”162 The problem is that Hamlet’s inward freedom does not
escape death, which confirms the Player King’s dark wisdom and Bloom’s
open-ended paradox that at the play’s conclusion we have personality’s
freedom and the prince’s character as fate. Bloom relates that Hamlet
knows himself to be nothing in himself and yet his personality has become
the canonical sublime which depends upon a strangeness that assimilates us,
even as we wrestle with our own assimilation to its persuasive linguistic
inevitability.163 In his essay on Yeats in Poetry and Repression, Bloom
treats of much the same ideas but rearranged, according to the peculiarities
of Yeatsian sensibility:

The evolution of the Daimon in Yeats is curious. In Per Amica, it is

clearly a father or precursor-figure, “an illustrious dead man,” but
Yeats insists that “the Daimon comes not as like to like but seeking
its own opposite, for man and Daimon feed the hunger in one
another’s hearts.” “The Daimon is our destiny,” Yeats says, thinking
he cites Heraclitus, but Heraclitus actually said that character or ethos
was fate or the daimon, whereas Yeats’s remark is a powerful
tautology.164

In these pages, I propose a dialogue of willful self and cosmic soul where
the daimon is defined as an alternative poetic reality within the self-soul
matrix, the Gnostic myth of an essential purity before and beyond
experience. I do not hold that Bloom is entirely free from the taint of being
reductively defined by the mask of his historical background, even though
the mask in Yeats meant the defenses of poetry against the material world.
My presumption is that Bloom wrestles with American identity conceived
as Protestant selfhood and the honorific Jewish traditions of his fathers, and
that, despite almost unceasing mental activity, he experiences nostalgias.
Bloom views the daemonic in poetry as a morbidly anxious love for the
precursor, an unconscious influence that produces the sublime repetition
compulsion of poetic composition and, indeed, criticism written by a
devouring mind. In this book, the precursor is taken as a composite of
Bloom’s Jewish-American background; the force of Judeo-Christian
tradition that he deconstructs because Gentile poetry was his destiny.
 1

The Scene of Instruction

Erich Auerbach once told Hartman a story of a violinist forced to leave

Germany and wishing to take up his profession in America: “Alas, his
violin no longer emitted the same ‘tone’ in the new country.”1 My task in
this section is not only to detect the timbre of the “violin” that Bloom plays
upon, but also to distinguish it from the writings of genealogically related
critics in the Yale string section. The starting point is hence Bloom’s
championing of the Protestant poetry of the Romantics in the teeth of fierce
opposition from the New Critics, or the School of Eliot. The critical
followers of Eliot preferred Metaphysical poetry (for instance, Donne’s
image of the well-wrought urn) to what the Romanticist M. H. Abrams
identified as an expressive kind of displaced Protestant individualism and
its lighthouses. Bloom names his precursor proper as Frye; therefore, it is
necessary to briefly measure the amplitude of his influence on Bloom and
then proceed to an extrapolation of the Scene of Instruction. I shall argue
that the Scene of Instruction opposes a form of deconstruction to holistic
urns, and that Bloom’s phraseology owes something to Derrida’s Scene of
Writing, or, as John Ellis writes, it is “impossible for Derrida and his
followers to see themselves as other than, first and foremost, iconoclasts.”2
Yale Deconstruction has to be seen as somewhat Jewish in orientation, not
least because Bloom, Hartman, and Derrida were all Jewish, but also
because, as Miller suggests, deconstruction resembles the Hebraic
temple/labyrinth binary. In this respect, I cannot avoid recapitulating the
scandal caused by the revelation that de Man had written collaborationist
newspaper articles during the war, including the unsettling anti-Semitic
piece, “Les Juifs dans la littérature actuelle.” In cautious mitigation, I argue
that de Manian deconstruction was anti-totalitarian and that his
autobiography of critical works remains ironically undecidable as a maze of
seashells. My deliberation on Yale deconstruction is followed by an analysis
of Bloom’s ill-starred relationship with what he christens the School of
Resentment. The latter phrase seems a nebulous name for what, in The
Western Canon, Bloom describes as a motley collection of theorists:
“surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory;
by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by
multiculturalists unlimited, I realize that the Balkanization of literary
studies is irreversible.”3 Balkanization is here a metaphor for the dense
tangled forest of modern literary studies; thus, the ending of my narrative
meditates upon the thorny question of what is worthy of study and what is
not and therefore the topic of the secular canon that displaced the religious
canons of Christian and Jewish Scripture that in turn replaced the Jewish
Temple.4
Bloom’s definition of the canon is Jewish and his method of judgment as
to what is canonical would seem agonistic; he collates these two ideas
under the umbrella term “western revisionism”: “the deep split between the
fact that its religion and its morality are Hebraic-Christian, and its cognition
and aesthetics—and therefore its dominant imaginative forms—are
Greek.”5 In Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity, Jean-Pierre
Mileur provides a lucid discussion of the teleology of Bloom’s Judeo-
Christian definition of tradition. My argument differs from his interest in
tracing the genealogy of the modernist critical sensibility in the respect that
I am more concerned with the extent to which Bloom escapes the tentacles
of historical over-determination. Granted that this concern means
examining just how religious Bloom’s literary criticism is, Mileur’s
interests and mine pleasingly overlap: “the demon haunting the enlightened
mind is religion as a response to the secular mind’s own archaic demons,
demons which can no longer be acknowledged as such because they are
aspects of an outmoded religious sensibility.”6 In terms of Bloom’s critical
oeuvre, Anglo-Catholic mimesis is subjected to iconoclasm (thought of as a
consequence of the Second Commandment) and which Protestant process
leads to the internalization of consciousness, although Bloom finds esoteric
Jewish models to figure this phenomenon. In Kabbalah and Criticism,
Bloom revises his already well-developed assault upon the New Critics into
a manifesto that reductively lists risible Anglo-Catholic reading habits:

1. There is the religious illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a real

presence.
2. There is organic illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a kind of unity.
3. There is the rhetorical illusion, that a poem possesses or creates a
definite form.
4. There is the metaphysical illusion, that a poem possesses or creates
meaning.7

In actual fact, Bloom’s attack on the New Critical desire to find formalistic
or organic unity in poems implicitly targets Coleridge’s interpretation of
Shakespeare as an explicit nature deeper than consciousness, which quasi-
religious insight affirms the absolute in the sphere of art: “By likening the
work of art to a living organism, Coleridge does justice to the impression
the work may give us, but he ‘does not express the process by which that
work was produced’.”8 The result is wholeness not in vision or conception
but in an inner feeling of totality and absolute being, the illusionary holistic
wisdom of which Bloom urges should be held “against the formalist
criticism that continued in Coleridge’s absolute spirit,” and we might add
because it breaks the affective fallacy.9 Bloom’s agon with Coleridge (and
his theories of organic unity, as mediated through I. A. Richards and his
reception by T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate,
Robert Penn Warren et al.) is ultimately an attack on German Romanticism.
In particular, Bloom references the New-Critical dogma that the meaning of
an object was to be found only in the critical object itself; he links mimetic
criticism that was dependent upon readerly accuracy, or as Coleridge puts it,
the different throughout a base radically the same, to the thing-in-itself.10
There is an organic loop to Coleridge’s contemplative criticism, “the very
powers which in men reflect and contemplate, are in their essence the same
as those powers which in nature produce the objects contemplated,” and a
religious dimension, since these powers were named by the Pythagoreans
and Anaxagoras “the Nous (the Logos or the Word of Philo and St.
John).”11 Coleridge thought that poetry had a logic of its own that he
exemplifies with specific reference to the great men of English letters: “It
would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with
the bare hand than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or
Shakespeare.”12 It should be remembered that in Judaic theology one
describes the process of building, not the Temple itself; therefore, Bloom
deconstructs in a Jewish fashion the Coleridgean idiom of practical
criticism from the position of the Second Commandment.
De Man compliments Bloom on “debunking the humanistic view of
literary influence as the productive integration of individual talent within
tradition,” and yet without tradition art is not possible, or as Ernst Robert
Curtius argues, “tradition is a vast passing away and renewal.”13 Thus, it is
important to examine the closeness of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual
Talent” to Bloom’s belated thought and, in particular, “We dwell with
satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from . . . his immediate
predecessors.”14 The concomitant observation has a touch of Bloom about
it: “the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead
poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”15 The main
influence on Eliot’s famous adage I adduce to be Shakespeare, who is said
to be above his age and therefore impersonal as concerns the characters that
populate his literary creations: “the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which
creates.”16 Life was real as toothache to the bard. His catalyzing conceptual
faculties that created so many characters appear as pure unreactive platinum
to the gentlemanly Eliot. Eliot writes of the metaphysical unity of soul and
unreactively scorns any supposed sense of sublimity, but Bloom’s theories
attack organic unity and are Longinian. Bloom conceives of poets as
wrestling with the centrality of Shakespearean influence, while Eliot
idealizes the Tudor Rose. Eliot praises an escape from personality, Bloom,
the clash of titanic personalities, the triumph of the self. Monuments of
unageing intellect form an “ideal order” for Eliot, which Platonism Bloom
dismisses as statist, since Nietzschean poets fight for freedom, as Eliot
himself points out, anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.17 Eliot is often
the whipping boy of Bloomian aesthetics because, not content with
directing his fiercest criticisms at Blake and Shelley, he denied the influence
of Whitman and Tennyson: “Notoriously, he asserted that his precursors
were Dante and Baudelaire. . . . But that is the usual poetic spiel: the central
forerunners of The Waste Land are Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloom’d’ and Tennyson’s ‘Maud: A Monodrama’.”18 Eliot was
advised by Ezra Pound to remove “phantasmal gnomes” from The Waste
land because said angels of earth were a throwback to Romantic thought,
but Bloom’s criticism contains gnomic wisdom; he complains that Eliot was
the Anglo-Catholic vicar of Neo-Christianity and “there remains his anti-
Semitism, which is very winning, if you happen to be an anti-Semite, if not,
not.”19 Despite repudiating Hamlet as an aesthetic failure and yet being
haunted by it, Eliot advises that works of literature should be “measured by
each other,” and this insight is entirely consonant with Bloom’s
comparative Judaic definition of the word “canon” as a measuring rod.20
Frye, the Protestant preacher, was more to Bloom’s taste than Anglican-
convert Eliot: “his blend of Protestant Dissent and Platonism is securely
allied to what remains strongest in our poetic tradition.”21 Thus, Bloom has
nostalgias aplenty for the age of Frye: “Frye . . . charmed me by calling
Eliot’s critical vision the Great Western Butterslide, in which a large blob of
Christian, Classical, and Royalist butter melted down and congealed at last
into The Waste Land.”22 But Bloom confesses “that his Methodist
Platonism was very different from my Jewish Gnosticism” and relates how
he fell in love with Fearful Symmetry absorbing Frye’s anatomy “in ways I
no longer can apprehend.”23 He notes that Frye disliked the idea of the
anxiety of influence: “His Myth of Concern saw literature as a benignly
cooperative enterprise, Frye blinded himself to the agonistic element in
Western tradition that has been chronicled from Longinus through
Burckhardt and Nietzsche down to the present.”24 Bloom gives as an
example that “Frye . . . saw Blake as attempting to ‘correct’ Milton . . .
which is to repeat Blake’s idealistic self-deception.”25 Bloom thinks Frye
irenic, and his own temperament bellicose; Anatomy of Criticism finds
archetypes in common, whereas The Anxiety of Influence discovers
concealed agons. Bloom talks of Frye’s archetypes as symmetries; in his
review of The Visionary Company, Robert Preyer notices that the reader’s
attention is directed to “a tissue of correspondences, analogies,
analogues.”26 In The Visionary Company, Bloom borrows what Frye called
the Orc Cycle and used it as an archetype with which to link all the
canonical Romantic poets. At this point in his career, Bloom is still close to
the archetypal criticism of his precursor as described in Anatomy of
Criticism where Frye writes, “we could get a whole liberal education by
picking up one conventional poem, Lycidas for example, and following its
archetypes through literature.”27 Because all the microcosms of literary
works cohere in the encompassing macrocosm as individual manifestations
of the total order of words, Frye’s Christian Platonism is quite manifest:
“Anagogically, then, the symbol is a monad, all symbols being united in a
single infinite and eternal verbal symbol which is, as dianoia, the
Logos.”28 Frye locates the central archetype of Lycidas as that of Orpheus
and then catalogues the Orphic with the Christian myth since “the study of
archetypes is the study of literary symbols as parts of a whole.”29 Bloom
recalls that Frye apprehended him as a “Judaizer of Blake” and that he read
Fearful Symmetry, until it became “part of me,” which nicely captures the
indebtedness of Bloom, as well as his revisionary swerve away from the
Protestantism of his precursor.30
Bloom states that Frye’s precursors were Milton and Blake; the uneasy
dialectic of father and son makes for a pithy start when attempting to define
the Orc Cycle. Frye writes that Blakean desire of man being infinite, he
himself is infinite, and consequently “the limit of the conceivable is the
world of fulfilled desire emancipated from all anxieties and frustrations.”31
Blakean desire became personified as a giant form, or as Bloom
summarizes: “the red Orc of Blake’s symbolism, an upsurge of the Hell of
desire against the Heaven of restraint.”32 Restraint and desire have many
analogs:

The Prose Edda, the Hebrew Cabbala, and the classic myths of
Greece told, according to Blake, one story and one story only. An
 Adam Kadmon, a wholly human and therefore wholly Divine Man,
at first existed as comprising all things of heaven and earth in his
own limbs. When this god-man fell, gigantic energies, sprung from
his body, fought for control of it. The wars between Zeus and the
Titans, Odin and Jötuns, Jehovah and the rebel angels are all
traditional, scriptural accounts of the battle for control of the fallen
Albion by his components. These accounts are all orthodox, that is,
told from the viewpoint of the victors, the sky gods Zeus, Odin, and
Jehovah, all setters of limits, orderers of the cosmos, restrainers of
man’s violent energies, like Blake’s Urizen, the god with the
compasses who is meant to embody them in Blake’s attempt at one
central myth. Man in Blake falls from Titan to Giant and finally to
his present weak form, as the sky god presses his limits in. The
chained Prometheus, then chained Loki, the Satan bound in hell are
all embodied in Blake’s Orc, the “imprisoned Titanic power in man,
which spasmodically causes revolutions”. Blake calls him Orc, from
orcus or “hell,” because that is where orthodox morality holds these
bound energies to originate.33

Here we find what Preyer refers to as hot slabs of melded relationships, the
claustrophobic “sense of being imprisoned in a suffocating House of Art
which in turn dissolves into the appearance of a House of Mirrors.”34
Others may remember Frye’s definition of archetypal criticism as “a will-
o’-the-wisp, an endless labyrinth without an outlet” and connect this to
Bloom’s conviction that literary influence is labyrinthine, and hence authors
wander lost, “until the strong among them realize that the windings of the
labyrinth are all internal.”35 This mingled maze of imagination would seem
faintly Coleridgean, since Bloom believes that images reign in the baroque
intermediate world without limits, a world that exists between the empirical
world of the senses and the abstract world of the intellect. Bloom denies
being a Jungian and yet apprehends the archetypal criticism of Frye as his
true model, which means that when he treats of this suprasensible world of
the imagination, it becomes figured as the angelic world of a so-called
giant, archetypal, human image. This giant image when still unfallen is
christened Adam Kadmon (and sometimes Yahweh), and all the angelic
images Bloom collates and analyzes are ultimately related to this
Promethean figure, including the giantism of Emerson and his followers’
Laertes-like rebellion against the Hamlet of English poetry. The giant leap
made by Blake is to read the sufferings of Job as akin to the punishment of
Satan at the beginning of Paradise Lost and then to further identify this
figure with the trials and internalized tribulations of the poetic character:

It is in Collins’ Ode on the Poetical Character that the most daring

claim is made. There, not only does the poet in his creation imitate
the creative power of God, but is himself a son of God and Fancy, a
“rich-hair’d youth of morn” associated with the sun-god, like the
Greek Apollo, a prophet and visionary of whom the last exemplar
was Milton. This youth is the direct ancestor of Blake’s Orc.36

Job is a sympathetic character because he was unjustly punished, his

identification with Milton’s Satan thoroughly revolutionary since it makes
Messiah the creator of eternal damnation, or the pit, in which Satan is thrust
down by the Almighty much like Job is tormented by the Ha-Satan, the
restrainer of desire. Blake’s identification of the poet with rebirth of energy
as the poetic character, or more strikingly with those who restrain desire
because they are weak enough to be restrained, leads to Bloom’s correction
of Blake, since Bloom interprets the Orc/Urizen binary as akin to the
influential relationship of ephebe and precursor poet. Strong thinkers-for-
themselves follow the Orc cycle in their lifetime because they are canonized
by the glamor of gaining followers, who are gaoled like Satan in the
anxious internalized pit of influential chains: “Orc always ends by
becoming Urizen, Jesus by becoming identified with Jehovah, Prometheus
one with Zeus.”37
The main strength of The Anxiety of Influence lies in its exquisite
marriage of allegory to rhetoric; the switch between a dramatic Blakean
reading of Paradise Lost and Bloom’s revisionary ratios is called the Scene
of Instruction, since as Kenneth Burke prophesied: “every once in a while a
critical fantasy or tour de force turns up, such as a literary manifesto . . . a
critic’s way of writing a poem.”38 Bloom’s severe prose-poem explores the
pathos all young poets feel at being unable to do anything else other than
repeat borrowed images that they fell in love with at a tender age. In the
most stirring passage in The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom describes Satan’s
fall from the world of eternity into clock-time and hence duality: “There is a
terrible pathos in his . . . adopting an heroic dualism . . . a dualism upon
which almost all post-Miltonic influence in the language founds itself.”39
Bloom presents a reading of Paradise Lost “as an allegory of the dilemma
of the modern poet, at his strongest. Satan is that modern poet, while God is
his dead but still embarrassingly potent and present . . . ancestral poet.
Adam is the potentially strong modern poet, but at his weakest moment,
when he has yet to find his own voice.”40 The Orc Cycle of rebellious Orc
and tyrannous Urizen becomes the life cycle of the poet figured as Adam
passing into Satan and, ultimately, the creatively dead God of Paradise
Lost. It is Bloom’s agonistic archetype, and with it he charts all post-
Romantic poetry. Later Bloom was to revise the post-Romantic aspect of
this pronouncement since the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence
attempts to uncover the anxious relationship between Shakespeare and his
precursor Marlowe. In his pocket epic, Milton, Blake describes how “We
are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals” (Milton
II.32.10). Blake means that the imagination is a state and that his
imagination is beholden to Milton in the sense of a Nietzschean rendezvous
of persons. It is from this insight that Bloom drew his inspiration for the
revisionary ratios that make up The Anxiety of Influence:

The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State

Created to be Annihilated, & a new Ratio Created. (Milton II.32.34-
5)

Bloom encapsulates his six states as the Scene of Instruction, a Jewish

allegory that pries into the moment of Protestant creation. Hartman explains
the intrinsic Jewishness of the book: “Bloom has seen that Blake is indebted
to Pauline revisionism that recognizes the Bible as authoritative yet asserts
of the Jews that their moral and theological understanding has been limited
by God’s will. . . . Thus it is the Old Testament, not the New, whose
strength is the scandal.”41 One of Bloom’s most revealing confessions is
that the ratios that make up the Scene of Instruction are based on the
Priestly Author’s hymn to spoken light:

Six days of creation, via their Kabbalistic interplays, gave me tropes I

called “revisionary ratios” and turned into A Map of Misreading. . . .
Starting with irony, considered as a Lucretian swerve or clinamen, I
went on to synecdoche as the tessera (desire for recognition) of
mystery cults. . . . The metonymy/metaphor division of Roman
Jakobson, I rewrought as kenosis/askesis, the first an undoing
measure and the second a perspectivizing maneuver. Between them
came hyperbole, but conceived as a daimonic assertion of individual
genius. To conclude the sequence I summoned metalepsis, or the
metonymy of a metonymy. . . .42

Missing from this summary is Bloom’s fondness for allegory, since each
revisionary ratio is accompanied by an explanatory anthropomorphism, or
as Johan Huizinga relates: “Having attributed a real existence to an idea, the
mind wants to see this idea alive . . . by personifying it.”43 Bloom’s
admission that Jakobson’s categories influenced his revisionary ratios
reminds me that Jakobson writes, “In aphasia one or the other of these two
processes is restricted or totally blocked.”44 Bloom speaks of the structural
genesis of poetic composition in Freudian terms as an unconsciously
purposeful forgetting; Jakobson derives his twin structural poles from
research into aphasia and mentions an unnamed pathological blocking
agent. As we shall see, Bloom christens his blocking agent the Covering
Cherub; Hartman clarifies this last Blakean figuration as Bloom’s doubt
with reference to Blake’s attempt to correct Milton and even the Bible.45
The Scene of Instruction is incestuously defined in terms of six
revisionary ratios that Bloom proposes are manifest in all Romantic and
post-Romantic poetry. Bloom’s primal scene was Blake’s Milton; this
identification is hinted at in Bloom’s prolegomenon to A Map of
Misreading: “Viewing his Sixfold Emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep/In
torment” (I.II.19-20). What Blake calls an emanation, Frye summarizes as
meaning in Blake “the total form of all the things a man loves and
creates.”46 Bloom explains that “an emanation is literally what comes into
being from a process of creation, in which a series of effluxes flow from a
creator,” so when Blake’s Milton views his six-fold emanation in the deep,
this figuratively equates to a sestina of sisters and their dams.47 The
motherly emanations symbolize the ratios of limitation or contraction,
whereas their daughterly progeny, the ratios of representation or expansion.
I have yet to read a Bloomian reading of Blake’s Milton, but such an
exercise would be entirely concentric to Bloom’s Blakean reading of post-
Romantic poetry. Indeed, it would uncover the incestuous sheets of Bloom’s
relationship with Blake in the act of begetting his severe prose poem upon
his father’s muse. Or, as Bloom argues in The Breaking of the Vessels,
“Freud’s ‘Primal Scene’ takes place in the beginning, when an infant sees
his parents in the act of love, without in any way understanding that sight.
Memory, according to Freud, holds on to the image of copulation until the
child, between the ages of three and five, creates the Primal Scene fantasy,
which is an Oedipal reverie.”48 Bloom refines this myth into the formula:
“As a Primal Scene, the Scene of Instruction is a Scene of Voicing; only
when fantasized or troped does it become a Scene of Writing.”49 By this,
Bloom means a guilt of indebtedness, not so much the fear of there not
being enough left to do (which is not the largest component in the anxiety-
of-influence), but rather “the horror-of-origins that seems to be one of the
most basic of human anxieties.”50 Bloom’s explanation of the Primal Scene
in his introduction to Figures of Capable Imagination is Freudian and
Derridean:

Freud located this horror in our repressed sense of the Primal Scene
where our parents begat us, or alternatively in his more fanciful
Primal scene of transgression in which a primal horde of rival sons
murdered a Sacred Father. The contemporary French philosopher
Jacques Derrida has gone Father Freud one better, by locating the
Primal Trespass in what he calls the Scene of Writing. I am
attempting to go one stage beyond, by situating the anxiety-inducing
transgression in what might be called the Primal Scene of Instruction.
. . .51
Note that Bloom writes “Father Freud,” which almost predetermines that
Bloom falls in love with Freud’s muses or the hysterical women that Freud
psychoanalyzed; one is reminded of Bloom’s fascination with the hysterical
intensity of Blake’s Bard of Experience, as he recites his quatrains to the
Tyger: “The Tyger should be read as meaning ‘fearful ratio’, since The
Tyger’s speaker is the ephebe and the Tyger’s maker the precursor.”52
When Bloom psychoanalyzes the poetry of Blake, like Frye, Freud would
seem a major component of his composite precursor, although the tone in
The Anxiety of Influence seems camp rather than hysterical, overelaborate
more than psychoanalytical, which perhaps represents Bloom’s Wildean
swerve away from Freud. Bloom asserts his individuality in un-prosaic
rhetoric that borders on rhapsody and which later denies Freud; he refuses
to accept that we are “more like one another than we can bear to believe.”53
Christopher Ricks enters this discussion as doubting Thomas; his
incisive summary of the primary influences upon The Anxiety of Influence
interrogates the agonistic aspects of literary anxiety: “‘He who is willing to
work gives birth to his own father.’ (Kierkegaard) ‘When one hasn’t had a
good father, it is necessary to invent one.’ (Nietzsche) ‘All the instincts, the
loving, the grateful, the sensual, the defiant, the self-assertive and
independent—all are gratified in the wish to be the father of himself.’
(Freud).”54 Ricks is chiefly concerned with the problem of allusion in
Dryden and Pope and the Miltonic idea that we receive with gratitude; his
subsequent analysis is that competitiveness is the thing to be competed
with. Therefore, Ricks proposes that Bloom’s agonistic energies are
alternating current, gain and loss, that they make subsequent theorists of
influence: “Beneficiaries, granted his passion, his learning, and his so
giving salience to the impulse or spirit of allusion. Victims, because of his
melodramatic sub-Freudian parricidal scenario, his sentimental discrediting
of gratitude, and his explicit repudiation of all interest in allusion as a
matter of the very words.”55 For Bloom, fluent allusion often disguises
darker relationships; for example, Eliot’s The Waste land is riddled with
allusions and yet, as W. J. Bate records, Eliot could opine: “Not only every
great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet, fulfills once for all some
possibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his
successors.”56 Bloom partly answers Ricks by lamenting that he “never
meant by ‘the anxiety of influence’ a Freudian Oedipal rivalry.”57 Yet,
those rhetorical flourishes that begem The Anxiety of Influence do seem
rather Freudian for all their Emersonian allusivity and Empsonian ambition:
“The Sphinx, as Emerson saw, is nature and the riddle of our emergence
from nature, which is to say that the Sphinx is what psychoanalysts have
called the Primal Scene.”58 Bloom’s definition of the primal scene is
nothing if not Oedipal: “It is his Poetic Father’s coitus with the Muse . . . he
must be self-begotten, he must engender himself upon the Muse his
mother.”59 This recalls Empson’s sixth type of ambiguity and the
Empsonian reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams where conflict
is sometimes expressed as a contradiction, not to mention another Freudian
example expressed by Empson, this time of antithetical primal words, or
specifically the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for young and old, which
reminds one of the Orc cycle’s yoking of the young Orc and the elderly
Urizen.60 Empson supervised Ricks just as Ricks in turn begat Jonathan
Bate, who himself emphasizes literary gratitude, whereas I, alas, tend to see
them as emblematic of a deeply unfair two-tier education system; to wit,
Ricks has every reason to feel grateful. The romantic poet is an Orc who
wants to become Urizen, or as Bloom the Bronx argues in relation to his
archetypal gnosis: “every new poet tries to see his precursor as the
demiurge, and seeks to look beyond him to the unknown God, while
knowing secretly that to be a strong poet is to be a demiurge.”61
The Primal Scene was first introduced in an essay called “Coleridge:
The Anxiety of Influence” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Hartman notes in the introduction to this volume that “Mr.
Bloom’s six versions define nothing less than the life (or death) cycle of
poets genuinely in touch with a sublime tradition.”62 Bloom’s Yale
colleague emphasizes agon: “the relation of past and present is that of
person to person, a dialogue in which someone is bound to live another’s
life, as poet competes with poet for his own, significant difference.”63
Bloom contrasts a Coleridgean Notebook entry of March 1802 (synchronic
with Blake’s composition of Milton), in which Coleridge sets down an
enigmatic plan for a poem called Milton, a Monody that was to be
concerned with “poetical influences” and a potential refutation of Johnson’s
vision of Milton in The Lives of the Poets.64 Developing Hartman’s insight
that the Bard of Experience stands in a symmetrical ratio with a tiger-like
precursive poem, Bloom proposes that the poem-ratio characterizes a total
relationship between two poets, earlier and later, but as an image, a ratio
represents the varied positions of freedom for a poet.65 Yet, Hartman points
to this identification skeptically, when he seeks to free Wordsworth from
Miltonic chains: “For a reason not entirely clear to me, Bloom wishes to
establish English poetry after Milton as a Milton satellite.”66 Bloom calls
Hartman “a noble idealizer of Wordsworth”; Hartman would seem
defensive to the extent of forgetting that quest romance is more Spenserian,
while Shakespeare’s patent swerving is added in the second edition.
Bloom’s scene of instruction is applied in two discrete ways, one
macrocosmically and the other microcosmically; in his essay on Coleridge,
and in his book on Wallace Stevens, an entire career is mapped according to
the psychological allegory of the revisionary ratios, while in A Map of
Misreading and Poetry and Repression, individual poems become subject to
an antithetical form of close reading.
The Anxiety of Influence proposes a Freudian scene of instruction
consisting of three pairs of revisionary ratios, Clinamen and Tessera,
Kenosis and Daemonization, Askesis and Apophrades. Each pair of ratios
represents the contracted ground of a poem’s influence opposed by an
expansion of this influence, and therefore, a three-fold dialectic symbolized
by the revolutionary Orc trying to free himself from the tyranny of Urizen.
Bloom has written that every word is a clinamen and as a consequence there
are no meanings in poems; only bias and swerve, only the verbal agon for
freedom, only words lying against time.67 The word clinamen was
naturalized as a critical term by Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection, where it
figures the gentle warp that concerns the essentials of a man’s being;
Coleridge distinguishes it from the anxiety those suffer whose loveless
passion it is to be admired.68 Bloom develops Coleridge’s Lucretian
source, such that the exiguum clinamen or little swerve guarantees free will:
“I have settled upon the Epicurean-Lucretian clinamen. . . . The clinamen or
‘swerve’ is the trope-as-misreading, irony as a dialectical alternation of
images of presence and absence.”69 Bloomian irony implies the potential
defeat of action, defeat at the hands of introspection, and in Coleridge’s
case the self-irony of being advised to know himself by his own greatest
invention (Wordsworth).70 The wrong kind of irony has to be repressed,
whether the anxiety is caused by a Miltonic revision of Scripture or
Wordsworthian agon with Milton: “Just as rhetorical irony or illusion . . .
says one thing and means another, even the opposite thing, so a reaction-
formation opposes itself to a repressed desire by manifesting the opposite of
the desire.”71 Bloom was taught by Yeats’s misreading of Blake that poetic
influence always proceeds via indeliberate misconception, but this said, his
theory seems somewhat Derridean: “‘supplementary difference’, a rather
baroque, ornamental name for the trope-as-misreading, which Jarry called
by the Lucretian name of clinamen.”72 The influence of Pater is visible in
Bloom’s treatment of Lucretian flux: “truth is always in appearances, the
mind is a flow of sensory patterns, and moral good is always related
directly to pleasurable sensations.”73 Whitman would seem inescapably
epicurean from Bloom’s perspective and the primal American poet had
been reading De Rerum Natura in the run-up to composing Song of Myself,
a poem in which the peace that surpasses understanding is unabashedly
associated with post-orgasmic self-touching, but this deviation was not the
only point of reference for Bloom. In Lucretius, the swerve of the atoms in
the void guarantees free will, but Satan’s fall in Paradise Lost is predicted
beforehand by God, and, as Bloom notes, “Urizen swerves oblique as he
comes down in his Creation-Fall in The Book of Urizen.”74 This struggle
implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, “but
then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem
moves.”75 Here, we find honor and then agon, as well as the figure of
wandering signification, since Bloomian interpretation depends upon
revisionary ratios, and on certain topological displacements that Bloom
calls “crossings.”76 He describes crossings as rhetorical disjunctions, the
moment of transition from a past to a new state, although this power ceases
in the instant of repose. The first one is christened the Crossing of Election
in which the poet overcomes a crisis of confidence as to poetic
originality.77 Bloom speaks of the crossing between clinamen and tessera
as “a movement from a troubled awareness of dearth, of signification
having wandered away and gotten lost, to an even more troubled awareness
that the self represents only part of a mutilated or broken whole.”78
In terms of the ratio tessera, Coleridge is again Bloom’s guide since “he
identified Symbol with the trope of synecdoche.”79 His source in Coleridge
identifies this attack on organic unity as part of Bloom’s answer to the
symbolic urns of the New Critics: “Tessera. . . . I take the word . . . from the
ancient Mystery-cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment,
say, of a small pot which with the other fragments would reconstitute the
vessel.”80 Honor and antithetical agon occur as completion and antithesis,
or “so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in an
opposite sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.”81
Bloom writes that “Lacan cites a remark of Mallarmé’s,” which “compares
the common use of Language to the exchange of a coin whose obverse and
reverse no longer bear any but worn effigies” and from this adjudges that
“tessera represents any later poet’s attempt to persuade himself (and us) that
the precursor’s Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly
fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe.”82 There is a hint of Nietzsche
in tessera: “Truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has been forgotten,
metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now
operate as mere metal, no longer coins.”83 George Steiner writes that few
possess the genius “needed to invent new words or to imprint on existing
words, as the great poet or thinker does, a fresh value and contextual scope.
We make do with the worn counters minted long since by our particular
linguistic and social inheritance.”84 Bloom couples tessera with the
Freudian defense of reaction-formation, which is styled as a contracting
movement, a willful often aggressive need to contradict the precursor:
“Reversal-into-the-opposite is a tessera or ambivalent completion because
it is a process in which an instinctual aim is converted into its opposite by
turning from activity to passivity.”85 He associates the ratio with Whitman
pre-eminently, and the “thou-wast” allusion to Keats’s deathless nightingale
from the Lilacs elegy is as good an example as any because here Whitman
seems caught up in the universal mood, which renders him passive from a
Yeatsian perspective. But I want to consider Shelley’s Mythmaking in which
Bloom makes an antithetical identification between “The Second Coming,”
with its rhapsodic “the best lack all conviction” vignette and “the good want
power” speech from Prometheus Unbound; Bloom states that Yeats would
seem antithetical to Shelley because he appropriates the rhetoric of the left
for the right. As such, Bloom puzzles over Yeats’s synopsis that Shelley
lacked a vision of evil but nevertheless identifies the myth of Demogorgon
in Prometheus Unbound as the ultimate source of Yeats’s theory of the
gyres, or what A Vision calls the repeating cycles of history.86 As Bornstein
points out, cycles oppose historical progress: “Yeats emphasizes apocalyptic
reversals in the course of history, whereas Shelley, though keenly aware of
reversals, emphasizes the possibility of eventual development toward an
ideal.”87 Bornstein confirms Bloom’s reading of Yeats’s intertextual
relationship with Shelley even to the extent of shadowing Bloom’s more
overt distaste for Yeats’s deterministic philosophy that is passive rather than
active.
Kenosis has a Christian source: “St. Paul’s word for Christ’s ‘humbling’
or emptying-out of his own divinity.”88 Metonymies represent wholes by
means of a part (the Stars and Stripes as a metonymy for the United States),
and Bloom outlines that kenosis subsumes “the trope of metonymy, the
imagistic reduction from a prior fullness to a later emptiness.”89 The
determinism of Bloom’s irrational theory of poetry is readily apparent in
three parallel Freudian defenses, those of regression, undoing, and isolating,
“all of them repetitive and compulsive movements of the psyche.”90 The
Freudian defenses are further fleshed out; undoing is defined as an
“obsessional process by which past actions are repeated in a magically
opposite way,” while isolation “segregates thoughts or acts so as to break
their connecting links with all other thoughts or acts,” and regression “is a
reversion to earlier phases or development.”91 Rather than being a
liberating God the precursor is reduced, as is the ephebe poet, “Kenosis . . .
is a breaking-device . . . a movement toward discontinuity with the
precursor” and as such, the later poet, apparently, empties “himself of his
own afflatus,” until “the precursor is emptied out also.”92 Bloom describes
this Whitmanian ebbing as a liberating discontinuity that isolates the self
from the continuity of the Covering Cherub.93 The poet is consubstantial
with the precursor but he individuates like the Pauline Jesus, “made in the
likeness of men . . . humbled himself, and become obedient unto death.”94
By this ratio, the reader hopes to know the dancer from the dance, the son
from the father, the ephebe from the precursor, and Whitman from John’s
Christ.
Daemonization is founded upon the ancient notion of the daemonic as
the intervening stage between the human and the divine.95 Fletcher writes
that men subject to daemonic agents are “obsessed with only one idea . . .
driven by some hidden, private force . . . outside the sphere of his own
ego.”96 He indicates that anxiety is a most fertile ground for allegorical
abstractions: “if a man is possessed by an influence that excludes all other
influences . . . then he clearly has no other life outside an exclusive sphere
of action.”97 To Bloom, it signifies a version of the sublime because
tradition itself is daemonic: “a movement toward a personalized Counter-
Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime . . . an intermediary being,
neither Divine nor human, enters into the adept to aid him.”98 The later
poet misreads the power of the parent poem as belonging to this daemon;
the imagined power is honorific, but the process of generalizing away the
earlier poem’s uniqueness would seem agonistic. Bloom discerns that poetic
repression tends toward exaggerated representation, the overthrow called
hyperbole, with imagery of great heights and abysmal depths.99 He
explains that the metonymizer is a compulsive cataloguer, but that the
contents of the poetic self never can be wholly emptied out; Moby Dick
would seem an anatomy of whaling, and yet, to exaggerate etymologically
means “to pile up; the function of the Sublime makes Ahab cry out ‘He
heaps me!’”100 But like Lowell’s evisceration in “The Quaker Graveyard
in Nantucket,” the sublime can degenerate into the grotesque where
Lowell’s hurdling enjambment represents continuity not just with the force
of Melville but also the Whitmanian shore ode.101 Bloom calls the crossing
between metonymy and hyperbole the Crossing of Solipsism, an
extravagant isolation that creates inwardness and a regressive catalogue of
sublime associations.
In the ratio of Askesis, Bloom amalgamates Freud’s scene of instruction
with Shamanistic rhetoric: “Vico’s primitives created a system of
ceremonial magic. . . . The giant forms who invented poetry are the
anthropological equivalents of wizards, medicine men, shamans.”102 The
word severe returns my interpretation of Bloom as a Jewish-American
ephebe of Frye to the question of Puritanism, since Bloom writes: “Dodds
traced the origin of Puritanism to the Greek shamans, and . . . pointed to
ritual and musical incantation as supplementary shamanistic therapies, but
placed the emphasis upon askesis, a conscious training of psychic powers,
the living of life in a particular way.”103 To concentrate upon Puritanism
first, Fletcher mentions that “Swift regarded Utopian schemes as
projections of the mind, particularly as ‘the mechanical operations of the
spirit’ in which the variability of nature was denied.”104 He writes that
ascetic habits induce visions of needs, desires, and hates, “the state of
asceticism with its physical debility induces extremely varied, abundant
fantasies.”105 Who among us would forebear from granting Hamlet’s
quibble the status of anchoritic fantasy: “I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad
dreams” (II.ii.255-7).106 Such an apprehension of poetry as shamanistic
utterance resolves Bloom’s definition of askesis, which is associated with
mind/nature dialectics and the figure of metaphor: “the revisionary ratio
that subsumes metaphor, the defense of sublimation, and the dualistic
imagery of inside consciousness against outside nature.”107 Athletic
discipline and ascetic self-denial are combined in the self-restraint of
Paterian ascesis; it is related to the pre-Socratic Pythagorean denial of
sensuality, a skillful economy of means akin to that rejection of materialism
which brings the Christian closer to Christ. Askesis demands a hair-shirt; or
the work ethic of a protestant, but also, requires that element of mythology
which returns us to Shamanistic divination, the interpretation of dreams.
Bloom applies Nietzschean perspectivism to the relationship of precursor
and ephebe, since for Nietzsche, “every trope is a change in perspective, in
which outside becomes inside.”108 The Covering Cherub signifies nature
and the precursor; therefore, Bloom continually decries the Coleridgean
bower of Beulah, the marriage of the mind to nature: “Pater was attempting
to refine the Romantic legacy of Coleridge, with its preference for
mind/nature metaphors over all other figurations . . . the secularized
epiphany, the ‘privileged’ or good moment of Romantic tradition.”109
Bloom explains the privileged moment as a revisionary swerve away from
Ruskin’s reduction of the Wordsworthian spot of time to an instance of
pathetic fallacy: “By de-idealizing the epiphany, he makes it available to the
coming age, when the mind will know neither itself nor the object but only
the dumbfoundering abyss that comes between.”110 Askesis represents the
perspectivizing confusions of metaphor and the dualistic defense of
sublimation, in which the polarities of subject and object defeat every
metaphor that attempts to unify them; it is representative of deterministic
natural cycles.111 Bloom’s career proceeds from the American sublime to
the American religion, or from the repression of European influence in
American poetry that constitutes Bloom’s early obsession to a consideration
of the American religion as a contraction of Protestant orthodoxy consonant
with an Emersonian idolizing of the self. Metaphor does not represent
sublime translation in Bloom but an ironic lessening that combines
Christian purity and pagan-athletic strength: “a movement of self-purgation
which intends the attainment of a state of solitude.”112 In the ensuing
crossing, that of identification, space is set against time, where space
functions as a metaphor of limitation and time as a restituting metalepsis or
transumption.
Apophrades solves the riddle of underdetermination of meaning in the
longer poems of Stevens by means of suggesting an overdetermination of
precursive influence. In Bornstein’s prose, we glimpse the Bloomian ratio
of apophrades: “in the nineties he (Yeats) read his own work in terms of
Shelley’s, he now wants to reverse the process and read Shelley’s work in
terms of his own.”113 The ratio involves a haunting, the return of a
revenant: “I take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days upon
which the dead returned . . . we might believe the wheel has come full
circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship.”114
The uncanniness of this solipsistic openness makes it almost appear “as
though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic
work.”115 This poetic final movement is frequently a balance between the
Freudian defenses of “introjection (or identification) and projection (or
casting-out the forbidden)”; and imagistically, “the balance is between
earliness and belatedness.”116 At the level of the figure, metalepsis would
seem profoundly Stevensian, not least because ancient guides to rhetoric
associate it with comedy; Stevens employs metalepsis in his Comedian as
the Letter C and hence in its malapropisms “it substitutes one word for
another in earlier figurations.”117 The trope of transumption produces the
sense of having fathered one’s own fathers; Bloom associates it with
divination. He describes transumption as a process in which commonly “the
poet goes from one word to another that sounds like it, to yet another, thus
developing a chain of auditory associations getting the poem from one
image to another more remote image.”118 Bloom’s final definition is
reminiscent of a cryptic crossword puzzle: “metalepsis can be called,
maddeningly but accurately, a metonymy of a metonymy.”119 He means
that a prior poem’s rhythm and tone is captured but the exact wording
altered: “As a figure of a figure, it ceases to be a reduction, either proleptic
or ‘preposterous’, in the root sense of making that later into the earlier.”120
Bloom’s Scene of Instruction is a transformed archetypal Orc cycle that has
been profoundly altered by the addition of rhetoric and Freudian defenses,
since “To undo the defenses of Romantic poets would be to lead them back
to health . . . their identity consists precisely in the strength of their
defenses, this would also strip them of their poetic voice.”121 There is a
subtle anti-Christian element to Bloom’s Freudian borrowings; for example,
R. V. Young implies that the imagistic associations of psychoanalysis
substitute themselves for examination of conscience and the work of
grace.122 Apophrades occurs in Bloom’s oeuvre when he writes religious
criticism that redefines the New Testament as the belated testament; his
other great poetic model for this ratio is Whitman’s transumption of the
Gospels and the poet’s presentation of himself as an American Christ during
the closing sections of Song of Myself.
 2

Bloom and Derrida

Derrida began teaching at Yale in 1975; Bloom responds to his work in A

Map of Misreading (1975), Poetry and Repression (1976), and
Deconstruction and Criticism (1979). Indeed the caveman analogy from
Poetry and Repression seems much akin to the infinite regress that Barbara
Johnson wryly observed at work in the constantly deferring and differing
Derridean figure of différance: “The caveman who traced the outline of an
animal upon the rock always retraced a precursor’s outline.”1 The paradox
of such an ever-receding line of temporal inquiry is that the author of The
Anxiety of Influence becomes beholden to Derrida; scenes of writing and
instruction sound suspiciously similar. Although Bloom asserts that
“Nothing is more alien to me than deconstruction,” he admits
deconstructionists are “my remote cousins intellectually speaking.”2 The
main features that Bloom’s books share with his Yale colleagues are a
penchant for discussing rhetoric to the detriment of philosophical truth, a
tendency to rely on etymological investigations when deciding the true
meanings of words, the reverse-dialectical procedure of inverting accepted
hierarchies or binary oppositions, and a marked liking for charting the
genealogical histories of concepts and/or verbal figures. Thus, I want to
investigate what Bloom’s methodology has in common with Derrida, de
Man, and to a lesser extent, Miller. I argue that deconstruction appears
Jewish in the sense that it inverts the temple/labyrinth binary such that
Derridean discourse is always on the threshold, but never quite discovers a
transcendental signified. But I also maintain a healthy amount of skepticism
with reference to claims that Derrida’s emphasis upon writing to the
detriment of speech means that he was a secretly Jewish philosopher who
filled his entrails with the scroll of the law which has become sweet as
honey in his mouth, even though the characteristic absence of a godly
presence in Derridean discourse seems quintessentially Judaic. But for
Bloom, God has merely withdrawn after speaking the prologue to a cosmic
psycho-drama and, as the critic of visionary desire, he argues that “if there
is a temple at the visionary center, then the circumference may well be a
labyrinth,” but characteristically internalizes this figure: “if you inhabit a
labyrinth, then you created it.”3 However, there is a Greek as well as a
Judaic conception of the labyrinth and the former grants the foremost place
to those like Theseus who use rationality to outwit animal desire, albeit
Derridean playfulness subverts this binary opposition, and hence,
conversely, I ask the question to what extent does Bloom internalize the
Greek concept of the Daedalian with the “Derridaedalian” consequences of
fashioning what Fletcher figured as an endless prolixity?4
The central textual tenet of all deconstructive enterprises is identified by
de Man: “A moving army of metaphors, metonymies and
anthropomorphisms, in short a summa of human relationships that are being
poetically and rhetorically sublimated, transposed, and beautified until, after
long and repeated use, a people considers them as solid, canonical, and
unavoidable.”5 Taking de Man at his word, my purpose is to demonstrate
the closeness of the quotation to one by Derrida that purports to undermine
the truth claims of Platonic philosophy and, at the same time, to explain the
rules of the game that constitutes Derridean playfulness:

The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history
of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix . . . is the
determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It
could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to
principles, or to the I center have always designated the constant of a
presence—eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence,
substance, subject) aletheia (truth), transcendentality, consciousness,
or conscience, God, man. . . .6
In my analogy, the Temple represents transcendent truth that
deconstructionists skeptically reconfigure as a metaphor for the presence of
a god in whose (non-existent) mind exist eternal verities; Derrida attacks
the Socratic method of ironic questioning that leads debaters to truths
grounded in the mind of the Greek version of Deity. In opposition to
Socratic irony, Derrida coins the phrase “there is nothing outside the text,”
which means that rational inquiry never halts at a transcendental signifier
because language is self-contained and does not correlate with the object
world; therefore, its constant iteration would seem not so much a Falstaffian
ruse to corrupt a crypto-Jewish saint, but rather constant interpretation.
Admittedly, there is a hint of the Jewish culture of the book contained in the
idea of constant interpretation and the phrase “nothing outside the text,” if,
that is, text is taken as Jewish Scripture, although I tend to interpret Derrida
as an atheist. Derrida claims Socrates fails to lead his disciples out of the
mysteries of the cave-labyrinth by introducing the skeptical argument that
words refer to words and not to transcendent concepts or God’s truth; the
inference being that Plato’s ideal model Zeus remains more metaphorical
Minotaur, spiriting Europa away toward Crete to be the mother of Minos,
than transcendent Deity symbolic of virtue. In Writing and Difference,
Derrida inverts the Platonic subordination of writing to speech outlined in
the Phaedrus dialogue such that what he terms archewriting, or an
understanding of language as a system of differences, is to be found in both
speech and writing. He argues that, traditionally, writing exists as a
supplement to speech and that what he terms supplementarity corresponds
to the privileging of speech over writing. Derrida further implies that
supplementarity exists in the texts of those thinkers like Plato, Levi-Strauss,
Husserl, and Rousseau, who similarly privilege speech over writing, and
that this discovery leads to dubiety as concerns the truth claims of said
texts. Therefore, Derrida attacks the authenticity traditionally granted to
voice as self-presence; he claims that writing is falsely seen as the shadow
of speech, as somehow dead, a phenomenon christened phonocentrism.
There does not seem much difference between voice-mail and e-mail,
although Plato suggests that when someone speaks they can be called to
proper account by means of Socratic irony, whereas when they write the
resultant piece of writing might be misinterpreted according to the slant of
the interpreter. Yet, spoken words are as apt to be deliberately misprisioned
by the cunning of a barrister, albeit Socrates disingenuously claimed that it
was easy to out-argue Socrates, but impossible to cheat the truth. Here we
approach a great truism of deconstructive criticism, since the stance of the
Yale tribe was precisely an inversion of the relationship that Plato portrays
as existing between the Sophists and Socrates. Iconoclastic deconstructive
arguments reduce Platonists to the status of teachers of rhetoric, the
identification of Socrates as a particularly eloquent Sophist and Platonic
truth as the will-to-power of Plato’s metaphors.7
Bloom’s answer to Derrida revolves around an appeal to literary history
understood as a combination of psyche and text; it is theological in the
respect of preferring a Jewish philosophy of language to a Greek one.
Bloom proposes that poets will themselves into poetic being and, hence,
become the gods of poetry; from this perspective Plato is seen as the poet,
who penned The Symposium, but, who hardened into the punitive Law-
giver and formulated the Laws. The Bloomian poet iconoclastically
smashes influence as allusion and replaces it with echoing shards of
internalized romantic discourse; an old god is replaced by a new god. My
initial discussion focuses on Bloom’s relationship with Derrida and circles
around the same linguistic problems, that is the suspicion that Derrida
deliberately refused to define his terms monotheistically because he was
trying to deconstruct such procedures. A good example is logocentrism, a
word that refers to the mediation of presence via belief in the Platonic forms
that guarantee God’s truth as the highest good, taken together with the
Platonic doctrine that Socratic speech can be called to truthful account
because the speaker and his truth-claims are present and apt to be subject to
rational inquiry (Socratic bullying). From Derrida’s deconstructive
perspective the illusory nature of logocentric truth would seem closely
allied to the term différance, which skeptically implies that concepts
articulated in language cannot be fixed to one single truthful definition, and
which consequently defers our understanding of the precise meaning of any
one sign indefinitely. Another example is trace, or the mark of an absent
presence implied by a sign that has been deconstructively denuded of its
logocentric potential to signify anything but that sign’s relationship to other
signs. Derrida has stated that his philosophy is diametrically opposed to
mysticism (“there is nothing mystical in my work”), and therefore his
deconstruction of a term like presence differs dramatically from Bloom’s
interest in the mystical presence and absence of the Kabbalistic Deity.8 I
find attempts to link Derrida to Kabbalah unconvincing and yet the
convergence between constant Derridean interpretation and the Bloomian
investigation of infinitely regressive language substitutes for God means
that there is at least some vestigial semblance of Jewishness remaining in
the critical procedures of both thinkers. Thus, I distinguish between
Bloom’s Scene of Instruction and Derrida’s Scene of Writing because
Derrida’s deconstructive enterprise questions logocentrism, or the idea that
there is an ideal representation of truth, however obscure. Derrida proposes
in his discussion of the Freudian Scene of Writing that the psyche itself
becomes a text and this text a scene in the sense of a backdrop for the
signature of the author. He undermines the notion of the authorial subject as
lonely self that possesses a Platonic soul replete with the sincere power of
spontaneous expression. Instead, he envisages the writerly subject as a
ghostless machine of writing, in which consciousness, in the act of
composition, actively repeats without copying a prior text that is re-pressed,
and which process Bloom figures as an example of the daemonic. I want to
relate this Derridean attack on authorial presence to Bloom’s thesis that as
tradition becomes more belated so poetic meaning becomes under-
determined and, ultimately, to his thesis that the best analogy for this
phenomenon is to be found in Kabbalah.9 To do so entails investigating
Bloom’s psychological insights into poetic egoism and his understanding of
influence as a metaphor; his dramatizing of a linguistic structure into a
diachronic narrative that considers the text as existing in a willed-into-being
intertextual relationship with tradition thought of as a series of texts and
composite precursors.10 Minus the Freudian subject as anxious poet,
Bloom’s theory of influence would seem embarrassingly similar to
Derrida’s coinage différance, were it not for the influence of Scholem as
revealed in Kabbalah and Criticism. Derrida’s neologism différance
combines “to differ” and “to defer” as the interplay of signs with other
synchronic signs within a linguistic system to the extent that definitions
playfully resist closure; thus, an interpretation of language speaks (rather
than the subject), because meaning is held to be generated by semiotic
oppositions, either in an articulated-as-sound or marked fashion. In some
ways there seems to be little difference between the respective stances of
Bloom and Derrida because as linguistic units on a piece of paper, poems
differ and hence defer in a diachronic way from earlier poems. Indeed,
Bloom believes that the meaning of a poem is another poem just as Derrida
states the meaning of a word is another word and then another ad infinitum.
The main difference lies in Bloom’s belief that without the anxious subject
no poem would differ or swerve from another where said clinamen
guarantees free will.11 Crucially, rather than confining his analysis of texts
to ever-receding synchronic thresholds of signification that assert the
illusory nature of established philosophical truths, including mysticism,
Bloom charts the labyrinth of influence by psychoanalyzing the literary
artifact in a diachronic fashion, and his analyses are often illustrated with
mystical analogies from Jewish theology and esoterica (though both Jewish
interpreters express themselves as guests in a host country’s tongue, and
there is pathos in that).
I wonder that literary anxiety seems more pronounced in a post-
Romantic world because of the imposition of dictionaries, one function of
which was to stop the language of Pope becoming estranged as that of
Chaucer, a settled lexicon denying each new generation fresh rhymes.
Without the phonemic changes associated with Grimm’s Law, language
would be static; though grammarians, lexicographers, and academies do
their best to fix words like specimens in amber. Ever a rebel against stasis,
Bloom smashes the icon of objectivity: “Against Arnold, Wilde insisted that
‘the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is
not’.”12 Bloom’s clinamatic distinction depends upon his assertion that,
cognitively speaking, reading comes before writing; that composition is
closer to mere process, to the automatic behavior of the id, since the
precursor’s literary object becomes absorbed into the id.13 Influence-
anxieties inhibit writing as utterance caught up in a tradition of willful
misprisions, but not the logocentric tradition, because the rational ego is
associated with philosophical logos and poetry would seem irrational, the
cognitive music of the creative spark. From this angle, Bloom is not a
typical deconstructor, since as Hartman outlines, “Derrida, de Man, and
Miller are certainly boa-deconstructors” and enjoy “disclosing again and
again the ‘abysm’ of words.”14 In “The Deconstructive Angel,” Abrams
employs his anti-deconstructive sarcasm to ledger the “skepticism” of
“Derridada” in the hope of catching the leviathan of presence: “Derrida’s
chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced
to a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign
of ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one,
referring to nothing, bombinating in a void.”15 Confronting what Abrams
interprets as labyrinthine nihilism, but which Derrida calls the free play of
the world, Bloom responds by stating that as far as literature is concerned
“every word is a clinamen,” or the swerve of words lying against past
time.16 Bloom’s complaint is that deconstructive criticism is merely
synchronic and “refuses to situate itself in its own historical dilemma, and
so by a charming paradox it falls victim to a genealogy to which it evidently
remained blind.”17 Bloom refers to the synchronic status of the
deconstructive aporia, or the linguistic moment, when a text deconstructs
itself to reveal a faux one-sided binary opposition termed by Derrida the
supplement, which discovery of indefinite processions of signs of signs
shuts down the referential function of language altogether so that no single
over-arching or privileged reading is possible, because the meanings of
words can be traced only to more supplementary chains of words. A
diachronic approach, on the other hand, suggests that “true” or unitary
meaning becomes lost in a form of willful error that lies in order to justify
one reading over another; or the on-going tessera of modern poetics with
the past. In response to Derrida’s assertion that “all Occidental methods of
analysis, explication, reading or interpretation” were produced “without
ever posing the radical question of writing,” Bloom argues that “this is not
true of Kabbalah, which is certainly an Occidental method, though an
esoteric one.”18 In this formulation, Bloom argues that Kabbalah figures
the presence and absence of God to the extent that during the ratio of
clinamen the demiurgical precursor is and is not present. Bloom’s central
point is that Kabbalah stops the movement of the Derridean trace since it
has a primordial point of origin “where presence and absence co-exist by
continuous interplay.”19 For Bloom, Yahweh’s ambiguous statement “I am
that I am,” translated as “I will be present when I will be present and absent
when I will be absent,” combats the slipperiness of the Derridean concept of
the trace that claims to undermine authorial presence in the constantly
differing interpretations of words and hence their constantly deferred
thresholds of meanings. He battles against the continuous skeptical slide
away from privileged lexicographical definitions toward what Derrida
terms their bricolage of associated meanings and usages, such that
bricolage means the linguistic system of signs created by the inventor of
language games from his/her background culture. Bloom’s system has been
called “psychokabbalistic,” and its emphasis upon the interaction of a
repressed precursive absence and yet sublimated psychic presence opposes
the trace’s merely signified illusion or simulacrum of metaphysical
presence.
To better understand the concept of the trace, we could do worse than
consult what Miller recognizes as a transparent statement of Derrida’s
fundamental theme:

The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence

that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has,
properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very
structure of the trace . . . the present becomes the sign of the sign, the
trace of the trace; it is no longer that to which every reference
ultimately refers. It becomes a function in a structure of generalized
reference. It is a trace and a trace of the effacing of the trace. . . .20

Far from transparency, one detects beautifully circular logic, to call it that.
Miller offers an ingenious analogy, that of a maze within a maze, “What
would be outside the labyrinth? More labyrinth!”21 Even Ariadne’s thread
cannot help us escape the interpretive labyrinth of Derridean discourse in
which the very idea of a transcendental signifier is tomorrowed and
tomorrowed by constant deferrals of meaning. In the Derridean multiverse
of labyrinthine differences (it would be impossible to imagine a Derridean
universe with God at the center) we are beyond even the Freudian
interpretation of dreams:
. . . there is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted
dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware
 during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of
dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds
nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the
dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The
dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from
the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to
branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world
of thought. It is at some point where this network is particularly close
that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its
mycelium.22

Miller summarizes the mushroom syndrome as the polarity between

logocentrism and deconstruction: “One way is referential (there is an
origin), and the other the deconstruction of this referentiality (there is no
origin, only the freeplay of linguistic substitution).”23 Bloomian analysis
attempts to unravel this navel until one discovers where the deeply
repressed genesis of a text in the burrows of the nightmare naked lies.
Bloom determines that dreams are made from free association of ideas and
that Freud borrows from the associationist philosophy of Mill and Locke,
which indicates that “all dreams depend upon associative chains of imagery
and ideas,” which are in turn “modifications upon empirical data.”24
Derridean freeplay refuses to nominate a transcendental signifier, whereas
Bloomian analysis is more akin to Nietzsche’s aphorism that consciousness
is a fantastic commentary upon an unknown text. In Derridean
deconstruction, Being and the Platonic One are displaced by becoming and
the many; the constantly deferred threshold of becoming takes the place of
the Temple, or for that matter any nationalistic hope of rebuilding Zion.
Derrida always deprecated his banally Judaic background, in which French
culture asphyxiated any remnant of Jewishness; he even described himself
as the “last Jew,” someone who belonged without belonging to a “heritage
of amnesia.”25 Another way of putting this is to regard Derridean discourse
as the repudiation of totality:

If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the

infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite
 discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a
finite language—excludes totalization. The field is in effect that of
play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is
finite . . . instead of being too large, there is something missing from
it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. . . .26

Ironically, the term bricolage begins as an attempt to make sense of the

world from the navel point of a specific tribal culture’s temporal and
geographic setting but soon mutates into a worn Derridean coinage for the
inability of interpretation to totalize the information set before it: “The
bricoleur, says Lévi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand’ . . .
those which . . . had not been especially conceived with an eye to the
operation for which they are to be used.”27 At first this explanation seems
to fit the profile of the bungling Gnostic demiurge, constructing the world
from the waste and waters to hand, but then, Derrida introduces an element
of skepticism that deconstructs the myth of the immaculate poetic
conception: “A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his
own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing’ . . . would
be the creator of the verb, the verb itself.”28 Derrida’s transcendentally
ruined discourses that question the origin of the verb “to be,” or indeed,
deconstruct the phrase “Let there be,” remind of the disfigured landscapes
of Romantic quest romance insofar as “what appears most fascinating . . . is
the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a
privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archia.”29 Frye’s
definition of quest romance, which illustrates the Bloomian dream-quest,
would seem dream more than reality: “Translated into dream terms, the
quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment
that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that
reality.”30 Pondering the delirium of Derridean imbrications, I am
reminded forcibly of what Alethea Haytor named the “Piranesi Effect”:

Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a
little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt
termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to
him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below.
 Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that
his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes,
and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again
Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the
abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is
beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and
so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the
upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and
self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.31

The mushroom thrust up from the mycelium of De Quincey’s

hallucinogenic dreams has been identified by the English Bate as
originating in the influence of “a Doppelgänger effect whereby Coleridge’s
shadow becomes De Quincey’s self-image.”32 In contrast to Derrida,
Bloom’s interpretive quest for origins seeks out the central man, the
memory of genesis, and a dream; its poetic substance can be illuminated by
further comparison with the almost infinite regressions of Derrida.
Bloom’s understanding of the sign as grounded in the presence and
absence of Yahwistic breath is not exactly what Derrida condemns as
logocentrism because Bloom privileges the Jewish word davhar over the
Greek term logos; the Bloomian transcendental signifier is not placed under
erasure, or Derrida’s curious technique of crossing out philosophical terms
because their ostensible meaning has been deconstructed. Yet, Bloom’s
supreme fiction is nevertheless a figure that is submitted to a great deal of
skeptical inquiry and soul-searching. As a figure, the breath of Yahweh
undergoes constant revision. At the beginning of Poetry and Repression,
Bloom makes a distinction between his own concerns and those of Derrida:
“Derrida asks a central question in his essay on Freud and the Scene of
Writing: ‘What is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be
represented by a text?’ My narrower concern with poetry prompts the
contrary question: ‘What is a psyche, and what must a text be if it can be
represented by a psyche?’”33 His answer, reliant as it is on the creative
reconstructions of etymologies, is that psyche means to breathe, but text
means to weave, and that etymologically “represent” signifies the verb to
be, or the welding together of psyche and text as fabrication.34 Bloom then
introduces a dichotomy between Jewish honor and the challenge to
authority that replicates itself throughout this book: “In Vico’s absolute
distinction between gentile and Jew, the gentile is linked both to poetry and
history, through the revisionary medium of language, while the Jew (and
subsequently the Christian) is linked to a sacred origin transcending
language, and so has no relation to human history or to the arts.”35 But in
“Poetry, Revisionism, Repression,” the Lurianic cosmology that Bloom
employs to describe the act of poetic creation exists only by analogy; the
distinction between poetic creation and divine creation remains absolute:
“The Lurianic story of creation begins with an act of self-limitation on
God’s part that finds its aesthetic equivalent in any new poet’s initial
rhetoric of limitation, that is, in his acts of re-seeing what his precursors had
seen before him.”36 Bloom is keen to emphasize that “a primal fixation or
repression . . . takes us back not to the Freudian Primal Scene of the
Oedipus Complex, nor to the Freudian Primal History Scene of Totem and
Taboo, nor to Derrida’s Scene of Writing, but to the most poetically primal
of scenes, the Scene of Instruction.”37 There is a slight indication of
anxiety in Bloom’s remark, “Blake’s London centers itself upon an
opposition between voice and writing, by which I don’t mean that somehow
Jacques Derrida wrote the poem.”38 Bloom’s reply is ferociously Judaic:
“No—the poem is precisely anti-Nietzschean, anti-Derridean, and offers us
a terrifying nostalgia for a lost prophetic voice, the voice of Ezekiel and
religious logocentrism.”39 In the third essay in Poetry and Repression,
Derrida’s influence once more asserts itself but this time as an aid to
repudiating Laplanche and Pontalis:

Derrida tells us that the psyche is a kind of text and that this text is
constituted of what Derrida calls “written traces”. . . . Derrida
assimilates Freud to Nietzsche by finding “the real origin of memory
and thus of the psyche in the difference between path-breakings” or
sensory excitations as they encounter resistances in consciousness.
What Derrida calls “the trace as memory” is the impalpable and
invisible difference between two path-breaking forces impinging
upon what becomes individual mind.40
The psychic text under discussion is “Tintern Abbey,” where Bloom finds
stray echoes of Milton’s presence in the landscape, much as Coleridge
postulated the ancient Greeks find godkins and godesslings in every bush or
hollow statue. Milton’s scarcely repressed presence as the blind hermit
personifies the prophetic voice, upright and pure, together with the absent
monotheism of the precursor. Another gradation needs to be adumbrated at
this juncture because for Lacan, Pontalis, and Laplanche, the unconscious
as language becomes the central mechanism, but for Derrida, it is one more
faux transcendental signifier. Because Bloom’s impish Yahweh breathed the
life-force into Adam, my tentative conclusion is that Bloom’s conception of
language appears to be mystical, the breath that is Yahwistic influence
continuing to be active at that circumference of writing called the
present.41
For me, the Johannine phrase “In the beginning was the Word” (Jo. 1.1)
is the center point of Bloomian poetics because the anxiety of influence
overturns the priority of the New and Old Testaments. Bloom utilizes
Thorleif Boman’s distinction between the Greek and Jewish words for
word, or logos and davhar: “Davhar is at once ‘word’, ‘thing’ and ‘act’,
and its root meaning involves the notion of driving forward something that
initially is held-back.”42 Bloom comments that davhar is word as a moral
act, an object, or a deed, and if not, then it becomes a lie and this in contrast
to the ordering, arranging and gathering connotations of logos: “Logos
orders and makes reasonable the context of speech, yet in its deepest
meaning does not deal with the function of speaking.”43 By function,
Bloom implies that davhar signifies being and doing, whereas logos implies
ratio and rationality, “The concept of davhar is: speak, act, be. The concept
of logos is: speak, reckon, think.”44 Bloom ends his assessment of Derrida
in A Map of Misreading by making a distinction between the influence of
Spenser and Moses on Milton’s Paradise Lost and contrasts the influence of
written with oral tradition in terms of the id and the superego, respectively.
But first, he recapitulates the Derridean attack on logocentric discourse in
Plato’s Phaedrus, the Socratic wisdom that exalts “words founded on
knowledge.”45 Bloom places Derrida more in the tradition of Nietzsche
than Saussure, and consequently, he writes that his binaries are unbound:
“From Nietzsche descends the tradition that culminates in Jacques Derrida,
whose deconstructive enterprise questions this ‘logocentric enclosure’ and
seeks to demonstrate that the spoken word is less primal than writing is.”46
In A Map of Misreading, Bloom offers a Judaic reading of Derrida’s
privileging of writing over speech, but before discussing this inversion
further, it is apposite to briefly place these deconstructive ideas in the
context of Whitman’s capitulation to the Covering Cherub of Quakerism in
“As I Ebb’d.”
The mysteries of Whitman’s belched words of poetic breath function as
a naturalistic god substitute in Bloom’s Kabbalistic discourse but Whitman
himself was menaced by the iconoclastic nature of conventional Quaker
belief and this inhibition causes his self-belief to ebb. The being and doing
of davhar, or performative act, reminds of Austin’s distinction between
performative and constative discourse and my analogy is that when faith
incarnates as a real agent in the constative sense then imagination stutters.
The said terms derive in How to Do Things With Words, where Austin
sought to call into question the philosophical rigor of asking whether a
statement was true or false; as Jonathan Culler points out, “Austin’s
investigation of the qualities of the marginal case leads to a deconstruction
and inversion of the hierarchy: the performative is not a flawed constative:
rather, the constative is a special case of the performative.”47 Such a
relationship in this opposition would seem closely akin to the structuralist
proposition that words exist in a semiotic system and that meaning is only
derived from the interrelationship of words; the truth of language is not
necessarily the truth of logic. Frank Kermode pinpoints a confessional
example of the difference between the performative and constative in
Allegories of Reading, when de Man distinguishes between confession and
excuse, “The former is ‘governed by a principle of referential verification’,
whereas the latter lacks the possibility of verification—‘its purpose is not to
state but to convince’: excuses are performative whereas confession is
constative.”48 It seems to me that Whitman’s confessional stance in “As I
Ebb’d” is more constative than performative, but this binary can be further
illuminated by a short consideration of Jakobson’s celebrated terms
metonymic and metaphorical. The aforesaid tropes link to Austin’s thesis
that language is more generally performative than constative, as is
demonstrated by the analogy of dreams that either have their own internal
logic, or else some symbolic quality that refers to an event or object that
truthfully exists in the real world:

Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question

is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on
contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synecdochic
“condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s “identification and
symbolism”). The principles underlying magic rites have been
resolved by Frazer into two types: charms based on the law of
similarity and those founded on association by contiguity. The first of
these two great branches of sympathetic magic has been called
“homoeopathic” or “imitative”, and the second, “contagious
magic”.49

To define sympathetic magic Frazer employs the ceaseless allegorical

motions of the tide to the extent that symmetry predominates, “in the ebbing
tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure.”50
As an example of contagious magic, Frazer lists how hunters in many
different cultures “stab the footprints of game with a sharp-pointed stick”
and so to hinder the animal’s escape by interfering with “the fresh spoor of
the quarry.”51 Spivak explains that the Derridean trace is a play upon the
Heideggarian path in the forest of signification etymologically tracked, “the
end of philosophy, according to Heidegger, is to restore the memory of that
free and commanding signified, to discover Urwörter (originary words)”
and that the French word Derrida employs has strong implications of track,
footprint, imprint, spoor even.52 Christopher Norris develops this point
when he writes that logic and language as illocutionary acts are two
fundamentally different ideas, “language serves a great variety of purposes,
not all of which are accountable as statements of fact or logical
entailment.”53 Derrida pushes these rough correlates into a repudiation of
logocentric “fact,” since aporia, or the figure of doubt, derives from the
Greek for an impassable path, while Bloom seeks the hidden paths of
influence which are often revealed in moments of failure.54 To return to
“As I Ebb’d,” Whitman finds that the lines underfoot left by the ebbing tide
subdue and yet represent his performative pride and that the constative
figure of repentance humbles his poetic persona.
Perhaps the best way of providing a supplement to Bloom’s breezy but
not in depth adumbration of Derrida is to contrast the usage both make of
the mythical Egyptian god Thoth. In The Ringers in the Tower, Bloom
provides an extended and almost Platonic myth to illustrate the return of
Romanticism in contemporary American poetics as the return of the gods:

A parable of Borges tells of a dream in which the gods returned, to

occupy a platform in a lecture hall before an audience of the School
of Philosophy and Letters. The professors first applauded, tearfully,
but then began to suspect that the Gods were dumb and degenerate,
“cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey.” Lest the gods
destroy them, the scholars “took out our heavy revolvers . . . and
joyfully killed the Gods”. . . .55

Divination is a gentile trait, and here the philosophers protect a

monotheistic conception of God diametrically opposed to being usurped by
polytheistic or else generational revaluations of transcendent truth: “the
Gods are poets whose auguries all have been fulfilled, men who somehow
learned never to die, men who mastered divination.”56 In Bloom’s book
Thoth is symbolic of iteration, the passage from Orc to Urizen, and Adam
naming animals: “Hermes Thoth, God of commerce and so of all property,
invented all names, establishing the certainties of ownership, and so goes on
writing all books whatsoever.”57 Derrida, on the other hand, quotes a
Socratic retelling of much the same myth, that of Theuth: “it was he who
first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to
speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing (grammata).”58 Derrida
concentrates upon the linguistic figure that Thoth represents, that is
representation and substitution in a field defined by opposites: “He cannot
be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and
masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack,
but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play
into play.”59 If Thoth invents language, then he invents the play of
differences as well. As Bloom explains, the play of signifiers in a system is
the basic principle of différance: “Writing, as Derrida tropes it, both keeps
us from the void and, more aggressively (as against voicing), gives us a
saving difference, by preventing that coincidence of speaker with
subject.”60 Derrida’s performative rebuttal of the Socratic logic that written
words are all too apt to be misprisioned leads Bloom to speculate much in
the fashion of Hélène Cixous that Derrida is a secret Jew: “Derrida is
substituting davhar for logos, thus correcting Plato by a Hebraic equating of
the writing-act and the mark-of-articulation with the word itself.”61
Bloom’s response to Derrida is theological; he seeks to reassert the
primacy of speech over writing because in terms of poetry writing
constitutes a tradition of dead poetic speech. To see why, it is necessary to
consider Freud’s “A Note Upon ‘The Mystic Writing Pad’,” since here
Freud proposes that memory works according to the analogy of a child’s
writing toy similar in kind to the Etch-a-sketch device that I remember
playing with as a small child: “I do not think it too far-fetched to compare
the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system Pept.-Cs. (perception-
consciousness) and its protective shield, the wax slab with the
unconsciousness behind them, and the appearance (becoming-visible;
Sichtbarwerden) and disappearance of the writing with flickering-up and
passing away of consciousness in the process of perception.”62 Freud’s
analogy supposes that through the processes of primary perception,
experience is accumulated as “writing” in the mind, and that this process
leaves memory-traces that are overwritten by fresh memories ever gathered
anew from everyday experiences which for the most part remain actively
repressed. Derrida’s interpretation of Freudian memory, as Bloom explains,
would seem to depend upon memorized texts that find their way into
consciousness via a process of path-breaking:

In Derrida’s Sublime trope, we are told that “there is no psyche

without text”, an assertion that goes beyond Derrida’s precursor,
Lacan, in his grand trope that the structure of the unconscious is
linguistic. Psychical life thus is no longer to be represented as a
transparency of meaning nor as an opacity of force but as an intra-
 textual difference in the conflict of meanings and the exertion of
forces.63

Derrida’s Scene of Writing belongs to the post-structuralist culture of the

text and Bloom’s Scene of Instruction to the culture of the book; thus, de
Bolla is an excellent source to consult at this juncture: “Bloom is interested
in Derrida’s notion of the primacy of writing because it contradicts what for
Bloom . . . is the most obvious and problematic truth, that speech is first and
foremost, and that what produces poetry is the interrelationship of speech
and dead speech, the voice of the precursor poet, the voice of tradition
through writing.”64 De Bolla’s intervention underlines that Bloom opposes
Kabbalah to Derridean différance, or, as Bloom puts it in Kabbalah and
Criticism: “Kabbalah speaks of a writing before writing (Derrida’s ‘trace’),
but also of a speech before speech, a Primal Instruction preceding all traces
of speech. . . . Kabbalah stops the movement of Derrida’s ‘trace’, since it
has a point of the primordial, where presence and absence co-exist by
continuous interplay.”65 Derrida attacks the Lacanian concept of the
linguistic unconscious taken as the transcendental signifier, but Bloom
resorts to a mystical Jewish moment of transcendence that he thinks refutes
Derrida’s deconstructive hyperbole, that sublime fall into the abyss of
signification. Bloom nominates hyperbole as the Derridean trope of tropes
because “Derrida’s keenest insight . . . is that ‘writing is unthinkable
without repression’, which is to identify writing-as-such with the
daemonizing trope of hyperbole.”66 Writing supplements perception; thus,
Derrida interprets Freud as borrowing rhetorical models not from oral
tradition, but from an internalized script that is never subject to the spoken
word, and which path-breaking writerly activity is figured as a symbolic
substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth. Derrida’s Scene of
Writing reverses or, as Bloom puts it, transumes the fantasy neurosis of
Freud’s Primal Scene; the latter indicates that Freud belongs to the tradition
of interpretation, or Midrash, because the inhibition of primal repression
parallels the injunction not to reveal oral tradition, the hedge around Torah.
Bloom’s objection is that God’s instruction of Moses is more primal than
the written tradition of Maimonides. He then demonstrates how Derrida
evades Freud’s caveat that during the uninhibited process of writing the ego
avoids a conflict with the id such that writing flows:

. . . for writing to be as primal as coitus—the inhibition of writing

would have to come about to avoid a conflict with the superego, and
not with the id. But speech, not writing, as Freud always says, is
inhibited to avoid conflict with the superego. For the superego
presides over the Scene of Instruction, which is always at least quasi-
religious in its associations, and speech therefore is more primal.
Writing, which is cognitively secondary, is closer to mere process, to
the automatic behaviour of the id. . . . Freud, unlike Nietzsche and
Derrida, knows that precursors become absorbed into the id and not
into the superego.67

It is worth emphasizing that Bloom compares the influence of Spenser and

Moses on Milton, arguing that as Milton’s Great Original Spenser was
absorbed into the id-component of his psyche, and Milton was inhibited by
this influence, while his oral muse, Moses, became an attribute of Milton’s
superego which accounts for Milton’s freedom in expanding Scripture in
Paradise Lost. Bloom wishes to assert the primacy of Yahwistic davhar
over Christ’s logos (he describes the depiction of Christ as an aesthetic
failure in Paradise Lost), the primacy of poetic utterance over the dead
letter of written language where written language here divides into poetry
and Scripture and, indeed, Scripture is viewed as redacted poetry. The blind
spot for Bloom is that Milton is more inhibited by the Johannine Word than
Moses.
One obvious difference between Bloom and his deconstructive brethren
would seem the influence of Burke. From Burke, Bloom gains his greater
fascination with trope-spotting, that is the taxonomical classification of
pieces of writing according to their rhetorical category. Bloom defines a
trope as “wherever there is a movement from sign to intentionality,
whenever the transformation from signification to meaning is made by the
test of what aids the continuity of critical discourse.”68 Intentionality has a
phenomenological ring to it; the Scene of Instruction attempts to peer into
the mental processes that govern composition by means of textual analysis
figured as a map of defenses and tropes, except that when applied to an
entire career the figure of duration enters the existential equation. Bloom
champions his rhetoric of tropes but attempts to distance himself from the
“supposed critical distinction between metonymy and metaphor”: “the
fundamental dichotomy in trope is between irony and synecdoche or, as
Burke says, between dialectic and representation.”69 Bloom continues that
metaphor and metonymy level to perspective and reduction and are alike
heightened degrees of dialectical irony. Bloom’s Burkean rhetoric distances
him from deconstruction per se, since Derrida writes that the history of
western metaphysics is the history of redundant metaphors and metonymies
for what Derrida posits as the decentered center of Being and presence.70
These figural substitutions for the transcendental signifier belong to a
system of differences “in which the central signified, the original or
transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of
differences.”71 Derrida then adds that the “absence of the transcendental
signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.”72
Play, we should remember, is for Derrida the disruption of presence; for
him, the performative is freedom from cant and not at all nihilistic.
Nihilistic despair in Bloom is represented by Iago’s motiveless malignity;
his deceptive statement, “I am not what I am” has a certain existential
similarity with Bloom’s post-Holocaust interpretation of Yahweh’s
message, “I Am what I Am” that Bloom renders: “I will be there when I
want to be there and not there when I do not want to be there.” Bloom’s
ultimate reply to Derrida might well reduce to the rebuff: nothing is true;
everything is permitted!
 3

Bloom and De Man

The subtle truth of rhetoricians is that they demand our connivance; Walter
Nash starts his anti-theoretical book on classical rhetoric with the
observation that “in rhetoric there is always an element of complicity.”1
Abrams puts this point most forcibly in “The Deconstructive Angel,” when
he compares the “textual labyrinth” to that passage in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell where a ghastly vision of hell as an “infinite Abyss”
replete with “fiery tracks on which revolv’d vast spiders” is shown to Blake
by an Angel. But the black-sun vision fades as soon as the Angel departs
and when the Angel asks Blake how he freed himself, Blake calmly replies:
“All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.”2 Blake knows that a
Pauline and yet Gnostic conception of Jesus is the way but Bloom does not
because, as he writes in Anatomy of Influence, “literary influence is
labyrinthine.”3 I have argued that Bloom responds to the Derridean sublime
with the figure of Yahwistic irony; in this section, however, it is my
argument that Bloom’s response to de Man is akin to Nash’s insight that
rhetoric requires readerly complaisance, and that genetic influence involves
more tropes than just irony, and the further irony that de Manian
deconstruction does and does not respond to the Holocaust.
Bloom was often given to verbally debate with de Man whether all texts
reduced to the basic trope of irony, since de Man believed that truth was the
coinage of metaphor:

He insisted that an epistemological stance in regard to a literary work

was the only way out of the tropological labyrinth, while I replied
 that such a stance was no more or less a trope than any other. Irony,
in its prime sense of allegory, saying one thing while suggesting
another, is the epistemological trope-of-tropes, and for de Man
constituted the condition of literary language itself, producing that
“permanent parabasis of meaning” studied by deconstructionists.4

Jargon is the bugbear of contemporary criticism; parabasis makes an

appearance on the last but one page of Allegories of Reading, where de Man
defines it as “a sudden revelation of the discontinuity between two
rhetorical codes.”5 This moment of linguistic revelation occurs when one
notices a disjunction between the interpretive pathos of performative
rhetoric, that is when metaphors reference the reality of doing, if not the
truth of being, and their grammatical function in the sense of what a
syntagmatic chain metonymically means when analyzed from a purely
linguistic perspective. Indeed, de Man’s disjunction between literary and
linguistic analysis often resembles friendly, if incommensurable, debates
that I have had with philologist colleagues on the topic of how to interpret a
particular text. De Man explains this disjunction with highly ironical
reference to an allegorical understanding of metaphor: “Allegories are
always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of
the impossibility of reading.”6 Abrams glosses that if the paradigm for all
texts consists of a figure (usually metaphor), or a system of figures, then de
Man supposes that this forms a second-order narrative, or an allegory in
“which the tenor . . . is invariably the undecidability of the text itself.”7 De
Man bases his deconstructive understanding of metaphor on a reading of
Nietzsche in which the poles of metaphor and metonymy become rough
correlates; the categories of the Dionysian world of plastic art and the false
Apollonian world of appearances. He praises Nietzsche for being the first
theorist of rhetoric adjudged as the will to persuade to fully reverse the
“established priorities which traditionally root the authority of the language
in its adequation to an extralinguistic referent or meaning, rather than in the
intralinguistic resource of figures.”8 De Man records that it is difficult not
to see The Birth of Tragedy “as a plea for the unmediated presence of the
will, for a truly tragic over an ironic art” and in so doing recounts
Nietzsche’s nostalgia for the age of Sophocles over that of Aristophanes,
which is an acute context to view de Man’s assertion that philosophy should
have a purely literary conception, since the age of Aristophanes was also
the age of Plato and, as Bloom notes, Aristophanes was not just the father
of literary criticism but also the person who started the rumor that caused
the arrest of Socrates.9 Allegories of Reading ends with de Man staking a
large claim on behalf of the figure of irony: “Irony is no longer a trope but
the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the
systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding.”10 Persuasion
depends upon a suspension of disbelief but, when rhetorical figures are
spotted, then the orator is revealed to have designs on us; in writerly terms,
the linguistic moment means that the reader becomes overcome by
skepticism and the inability of words to connect with Lockean reality.
In Bloom’s view, the irreconcilable ironies of deconstruction, the clash
of rhetoric as system of tropes with the pathos of rhetoric as persuasion, is a
form of double-speak: “Philosophers of intertextuality and of rhetoricity
usefully warn me that the meanings of an intertextual encounter are as
undecidable and unreadable as any single text is, but I discover
pragmatically that such philosophers at best teach me a kind of double-entry
bookkeeping, which as a reader I have to discount.”11 His capitalist
metaphor functions as an Abrams-like rebuke on the part of Bloom aimed
against the familiar Jakobson rhetorical division between metaphor and
metonymy: “I subtract the rhetoricity from both columns, from rhetoric as
system of tropes, and from rhetoric as persuasion, and return to where I
started.”12 Bloom is effectively saying that the deconstructionists have got
things back to front, since deconstructive critics search for Miller’s
linguistic moment: “the linguistic moment is the moment when a poem, or
indeed any text, turns back on itself and puts its own medium in question,
so that there is a momentum in the poem toward interrogating signs as
such.”13 The textual self-questioning of ostensibly accepted hierarchical
binaries becomes the second-order of meaning or allegory from which
evidence de Man claims that texts deconstruct themselves but which
ostensible self-consciousness demands the reader’s complicity. He playfully
argues that reading is itself impossible, while Bloom will propose that
poetic meaning is impossible in a fallen world. In a short but revealing
treatment of de Man’s criticism, Miller writes that allegories are always
narratives spread on a temporal scale; he picks out this quotation from “The
Rhetoric of Temporality” as instrumental:

In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to

coincide with the substance, since the substance and its
representation do not differ in their being but only in their extension:
they are part and whole of the same set of categories. Their
relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind,
and in which the intervention of time is merely a matter of
contingency, whereas, in the world of allegory, time is the originary
constitutive category. . . . It remains necessary, if there is to be
allegory, that the allegorical sign refer to another sign that precedes
it.14

A crucial difference between Bloom and de Man is the way they use terms
like part and whole, inside and outside, early and late. De Man extends
Nietzsche’s claim that cause and effect are actually reversible fictions like
subjectivity and objectivity: “we pair the polarities outside/inside with
cause/effect on the basis of a temporal polarity before/after (or early/late)
that remains un-reflected.”15 In Bloom’s criticism part/whole,
outside/inside, early/late, appear as binaries in his map of misreading; they
are imagistic figures that help the practical critic to apply his revisionary
ratios to a text that has a diachronic relationship with a precursor text, “An
image is necessarily an imitation, and its coverings or maskings in poetic
language necessarily center in certain fixed areas: presence and absence,
partness and wholeness, fullness and emptiness, height and depth,
insideness and outsideness, earliness and lateness.”16 Thus, the precursive
text exists anterior to the text that displays the anxiety of influence, which
willful ignorance “is the trespass of a poetic repression of anteriority.”17
Anteriority exists in de Man’s mind as an allegorical figure for a linguistic
structure that lacks a transcendental center: “it is of the essence of this
previous sign to be pure anteriority.”18 Tradition is in a de Manian sense
Bloom’s allegory, since when Bloom states there is no end to influence, the
ensuing ricochets seem akin to anxious repetition on a temporal but
referentially diachronic scale, in which “every intertextual confrontation
seems as much an abyssing as any other”; however, when Bloom identifies
Shakespeare as the center of the canon, he is no post-structuralist.19
Bloom’s Scene of Instruction begins with the state of clinamen and the
rhetorical figure designate for this revisionary ratio is irony. But The
Anxiety of Influence lists six rhetorical tropes in all and applies them to any
belated poem’s stance with regard to a (composite) precursor’s poetic
discourse. Bloom seems the remote cousin of de Man to the extent that his
revisionary ratios make use of readily identifiable rhetorical figures, and
inasmuch as they are recommended as a form of diachronic practical
criticism. Yet, despite the more self-consciously philosophical stance of de
Man, an element of deconstructive nihilism creeps into Bloom’s work,
when he states that meaning is not possible in the fallen world. The
fractured shards of poetic echoes that exist in a poem stand for the departed
presence of Yahweh in Bloom’s theoretical readings; their referential aspect
equates to the Bloomian aporia: a godless world, or as Bielik-Robson
argues, “Bloom is so thoroughly immersed in the reality of the Fall that he
can offer us no clear way out, pointing unambiguously in the redemptive
direction.”20 Bloom often complains that his theory of reading is weakly
misread when reduced to the agon of egos rather than being understood as
an intrinsically textual phenomenon, and yet herein lies the main difference
between Bloom and de Man, since Bloom is a human looking for signs of a
departed god, whereas de Man’s criticism is merely ironic, “I intend to take
the divine out of reading.”21 It is instructive to correlate their respective
definitions of irony with specific reference to the Bible. Here is the secular
de Man on precisely the question of biblical deconstruction from the
Moynihan interview: “There are always ironic readings possible, though
just what such a reading of the Bible would be I’d prefer not to think
about.”22 That said, de Man emphasizes to Moynihan that “there is no final
authority.”23 Indeed, de Man mentions that the attempt to control is
characteristic of all fundamentally theological modes of reading and that
such commentary, with its illusory hermeneutic patterns of totalization, is
open to demolition. There is no more burning contemporary issue than the
ironizing of Deity, especially in cartoons, since these break the injunction of
the Second Commandment. De Man is not at all interested in irony
(dramatic or narrative) and states that deconstructive irony is a break, an
interruption, a disruption, a moment of loss of control, madness even, but
“not comedy.”24 His reflections on the function of irony indicate how little
of a totalizing fascist propagandist he was in later life; his thoughts are best
contrasted to Bloom’s in The Book of J, where Bloom searches for the best
figure to describe the putative author of the earliest strand of Genesis and
one by one dismisses the traditional usages of the word irony:

“Irony” goes back to the Greek word eiron, “dissembler”, and our
dictionaries still follow Greek tradition by defining irony first as
Socratic: a feigned ignorance and humility designed to expose the
inadequate assumptions of others, by way of skilled dialectical
questioning . . . the use of language to express something other than
supposed literal meaning, particularly the opposite of such meaning,
and also the contrast or gap between expectation and fulfillment . . .
dramatic irony or even tragic irony, which is the incongruity between
what develops in a drama or narrative and the effect of what develops
on adjacent words and actions that are more fully apprehended by the
audience or readers than by the characters. . . .25

From Bloom’s perspective the J-Writer specializes in representing “when

altogether incommensurate realities juxtapose and clash” and because “J is
at once the greatest and the most ironic writer in the Hebrew Bible.”26
Bloom’s incommensurate-realities center on “representation of Yahweh as .
. . human-all-too-human,” which breaks the Second Commandment.27
In de Man’s view all texts carry the allegory of their own linguistic
moment, akin to what Fletcher calls “the criterion of increasing constriction
of meaning, by which we recognize the iconographic significance of the
agent,” or the one-trick narrowness of the gibe that boa-deconstruction
always results in the same linguistic destruction of humanistic presence.28
Bloom summarizes this as when the causal fictions of humanism become
cumulative errors because as linguistic tropes text and psyche are
interpreted as ironically reversible: “Influence, for de Man as for Nietzsche,
is such a causal fiction but I myself see influence as a trope-of-tropes . . .
that surmounts its own errors.”29 In his review of The Anxiety of Influence,
de Man asserts that no theory of poetry is possible without a truly
epistemological moment, when patterns of error are rooted in reader and
text: “from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are
governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models.”30
Even the interplay between literal and figurative meaning within a single
word becomes appropriated by de Man as evidence of the deconstructive
virtue of Bloom’s manifesto of poetry, since a single stray echo also has a
grammatical function within the ephebe’s poem, for example, in Bloom’s
Miltonic reading of Tintern Abbey, the possessive phrase “blind man’s
eye.”31 Between the mirror and the lamp or tropes of limitation (clinamen,
kenosis, and askesis) and tropes of representation (tessera, daemonization,
and apophrades) there is a moment of uncertainty; de Man’s definition is
that between “rhetoric as persuasion and rhetoric as a system of tropes . . .
there falls an aporia, a figuration of doubt, which may be the principle of
rhetorical substitution itself.”32 It is as well to recite Bloom’s definition
too: “Between theology (system of tropes) and belief (persuasion) there
comes always the aporia (figuration of doubt . . . necessity of misreading)”;
Bloom classifies theology as ethos and conversion as pathos; to him logos
is the potentially godless dynamic between ethos and pathos.33 Allen has
persuasively argued that A Map of Misreading answers de Man’s criticism,
that language has priority over the subject; therefore, Bloom responds by
asserting the interpretive totality of tradition, in which he includes himself
and his opponent as well as the text under deconstruction.34 Bloom
suggests that for de Man “the linguistic model usurps the psychological one
because language is a substitute system responsive to the will, but the
psyche is not.”35 The main difference between Bloom and de Man is that
Bloom argues that the strong poet or reader starts by misreading and
therefore the poet’s will-to-power, the clinamen of free-will, functions as a
willful re-interpretation of all reality.36 Influence is consequently rendered
as a whole range of psychological and tropological relationships between
one poem and another; to concentrate upon the latter as an example, Bloom
depicts influence as a sixfold trope that subsumes six major tropes—irony,
synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor, and metalepsis.37 De Man’s
reduction of all meaning to irony ostensibly destroys meaning but
apparently not the complicit communicable meaning of each individual
statement, or the palpable irony upon which his deconstructive stance
depends. Furthermore de Man’s review of influence depends on influence
being interpreted as merely metaphorical, a development of his insight that
all criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, the irony that a text refers
diachronically to its predecessor text and beyond this toward the agonistic
totality of tradition’s abyss.38 But in Bloom’s system, poetry would seem
discursive; if the poet fails to repress his origins, then a sense of self-irony
afflicts the poet, and like Keats they are liable to give up writing the overly
Latinate Hyperion, in other words: “we can never say too often that irony
implies the potential defeat of action, defeat at the hands of introspection,
self-consciousness.”39 In Allen’s opinion, Bloom’s assertion that a trope is
just as much a concealed mechanism of defense, as a defense is a concealed
trope, transforms de Man’s focus on the epistemological moment in literary
texts into a category mistake: “Bloom establishes the interdependence of
trope and defense, an interdependence which reasserts the validity of the
language of poetic psychology over the deconstructive criterion of
language.”40 Because Bloom argues that poetry is a discursive and not a
linguistic mode, there is, from his perspective, a psychological as well as a
linguistic tension at work in poetry, and therefore only the absenting of the
psyche from poetry reduces poetry to semantic tension, to interplay between
literal and figurative meanings.41
In his reply to de Man’s criticism that language speaks and not the
subject, Bloom turns to Wittgenstein, who reportedly said that the primal
scene has the attractiveness of giving a tragic pattern to one’s life, a
mythology that has been imposed upon one.42 Bloom responds that the
artist, as Nietzsche taught Yeats, is truly the antithetical man, with his
personality set against his character, but there is nothing antithetical about
the Primal Scene.43 Rather, Bloom sees the primal scene as a solipsism that
represses the precursor’s influence, a mirror that selfishly reflects the self
and the aporia the converse, or those dramatic moments when the ephebe
stares at tradition darkly: “the aporia, is necessarily an epistemological
moment, with the authority to deconstruct its own text, that is, to indicate
the text’s cognitive awareness of its own limit as text, its own status as
rhetoricity.”44 The Primal Scene is the place of the Imagination; thus, the
aim of primitivistic imagination is not so much libertarian as to establish
fixed limits, “as a psychological protection against the chaos of the
surrounding world.”45 Bloom’s Vichian rhetoric produces this somewhat
blunt formula: “If you can know only what you have made, then if you
know a text, what you know is the interpretation of it that you have
made.”46 Bloom asserts the de-idealizing formula that poets actually think
in such agonistically reductive terms as “where it, the precursor’s poem, is
there let my poem be.”47 Bloom’s stance is here a diachronic position
pragmatically identical with de Man’s synchronic insistence on logocentric
meaning being dead, and hence Bloom concedes that poetic meaning is
radically indeterminate because every reader’s relation to every poem is
governed by a figuration of repressive belatedness that clears away the
traditional past.48 Bloom is not interested in the arbitrariness of post-
structuralist truth as much as the will to truth understood as the play of
poetic diction: “the play of the signifier is answered always by the play of
the signified” because the “poet’s will over language” is constituted by
“endless interchanges of denotation and connotation.”49
Bloom champions the psychological aspects of influence: “influence
remains subject-centered, a person-to-person relationship, not to be reduced
to a problematic of language.”50 But Bloom insists that he is not “an
essentialist humanist,” and that The Anxiety of Influence has been weakly
misread because “influence-anxiety does not so much concern the
forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play,
poem, or essay.”51 Bloom then states that influence anxiety may or may not
be internalized by the later writer, but that this hardly matters since the
strong poem is “the achieved anxiety.”52 Again in The Western Canon,
Bloom claims Freudian-Oedipal rivalry represents a weak reading of his
work and praises de Bolla’s apt summary of his intentions:
 For Bloom, “influence” is both a tropological category, a figure
which determines the poetic tradition, and a complex of psychic,
historical and imagistic relations . . . influence describes the relations
between texts, it is an intertextual phenomenon . . . both the internal
psychic defense—the poet’s experience of anxiety—and the external
historical relations of texts to each other are themselves the result of
misreading, or poetic misprision, and not the cause of it.53

It is hard not to view this textual emphasis as a hangover from New

Criticism, although the distinction I would make is to underline that
Bloom’s theories are also a mode of autobiography with the corollary
observation that Bloom does not view selfhood as a purely textual matter.
Bielik-Robson’s recent reading of Bloom meditates upon willful lying in
Bloom’s theoretical writings, but from a perspective that reduces selfhood
to a problematic of language, an idea perhaps borrowed ab initio from de
Man: “The self which was at first the center of the language as its empirical
referent now becomes the language of the center as fiction, as metaphor of
the self.”54 Drawing upon Nietzsche, de Man further argues that “by
calling the subject a text, the text calls itself, to some extent, a subject. The
lie is raised to a new figural power, but it is nonetheless a lie.”55 The
Nietzschean illusion that allows selfhood to originate would seem the
central point of Bielik-Robson’s account of Bloom: “Having no Vision of
one’s own, no inner truth to tell, no ready salvation for the fallen, repetitive
world at hand, no background for his individualistic hubris—the subject can
nonetheless resort to lying.”56 Nevertheless, Bielik-Robson discerns the
link between painful moaning and linguistic meaning in Bloom’s
contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism, wherein Bloom objects to
those de Manian “knights of chastity,” who dismiss from their reading
processes “all traces of ‘moaning’ from the sterility of ‘meaning’.”57 As a
gifted Jewish scholar, Bielik-Robson is concerned with the figure of
wrestling Jacob and notes that Yahweh is a “non-mythical deity whose
essence is not the crushing power of fate, but the pure energy of will.”58
Unlike de Man, Bielik-Robson does not combine the death of the author
with the death of God, and therefore she finds “anti-Semitic innuendoes” in
The Birth of Tragedy, where the Judaic myth of the fall exhibits deception,
suggestibility, concupiscence, a whole series of feminine frailties with the
Nietzschean conclusion that in comparison to the Promethean sin, “The
Aryan nations assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female
gender.”59 Bloom’s response to de Man’s review of The Anxiety of
Influence revolves around the Nietzschean irony that “Art treats appearance
as appearance; its aim is precisely not to deceive, it is therefore true” and de
Man’s parallel irony that “error cannot be distinguished from
imagination.”60 Blake would reply that imagination is the human condition
or state—and Yeats that it corresponds to the transmundane thirtieth phase
of his deterministic lunar horoscope—Bloom synthesizes these two
positions as a fiery wrestling match against over-determination. Blake
thinks memory should be purged, not inspiration; Bloom, on the other hand,
asserts that, technically speaking, memory equates to where the daemon of
influence lurks. Blake did not want Roman and Greek models and yet an
unusual perspective on influence is provided by Tertullian’s “On Idolatry”
where the claim is made that the devil is the father of art, since in his
iconoclasm the Church Father found statuary contaminating: “In Greek,
eidos means form. It has a diminutive eidolon, like our formula from form.
So every ‘form’ or ‘formula’ has a claim to be called ‘idol’.”61 St Paul is
cast as the bad guy in Bloom’s writings because he demonizes the
divinatory daemon of Socrates as described by Xenophon and advises all
good Christians to put on their armor of God against spiritual wickedness;
therefore, if daemon is swapped for devil and Platonism for Christianity
then everything falls into place, since the daemonic intuitions of the
Socratic unconscious would be extirpated by rationality and hence replaced
by the unswerving truth of the eternal forms.62 The breaking of form
confirms that the anxiety of influence is intrinsically rhetorical, even to the
extent that ingenuity and will-power resist the over-determining models
against which the artistic unconscious struggles. Bloom demands that we
are not complicit in the over-idealization of poems as somehow beyond
influence and yet insists that deconstruction is rhetorical complicity itself.
Bloom insists the psyche is not a text but is uncomfortable with the idea
of essentialist humanism; he writes that to Blake nature is delusive,
potentially entrapping and wholly foreign to human imagination and
suggests that “Coleridge lay down to sleep upon the Organic analogue as
though . . . a Beulah couch.”63 Bloom’s attack on the organic analog has a
political dimension; Terry Eagleton writes that Heidegger can be fruitfully
contrasted with de Man: “Heidegger never unequivocally recanted his Nazi
past. . . . De Man remained silent. . . . It is possible to read de Man’s post-
war work as an extreme reaction against the politics of Being. . . . In the
later de Man, all notions of language as replete with Being, of signs as
organically related to things, are denounced as pernicious
mystifications.”64 He further remarks that Heidegger’s “apocalyptic
conception of teleological time brimming with destiny is steadily drained
by de Man to the empty, broken temporality of allegory.”65 Norris suggests
that de Man’s later deconstructive work evolved “as a form of ideological
critique directed against precisely that seductive will to treat language and
culture as organic, quasi-natural products rooted in the soil of some
authentic native tradition.”66 Kate Soper’s account of nature and Nazism is
equally relevant: “Romantic conceptions of ‘nature’ as wholesome
salvation from cultural decadence and racial degeneration were crucial to
the construction of Nazi ideology, and an aesthetic of ‘nature’ as a source of
purity and authentic self-identification has been a component of all forms of
racism, tribalism and nationalism.”67 The theme of degeneration and
renewal is clearly visible in de Man’s war-time writings: “‘Leaving aside
questions of supremacy . . . things had come to such a point of
decomposition and degeneration that the will to change must exist before
everything else.”68 The great paradox of extremist right-wing politics is
that a too precious love of country should ever be associated with the fool’s
gold of hatred for neighboring countries together with the xenophobic
persecution of immigrant groups. Eric Hobsbawm adds the endogamous
ideal of national purity to the patriot’s paradox and, in so doing, crystallizes
one of the main shibboleths of National Socialism. The most notorious of
de Man’s writings has to be “Jews in Contemporary Literature.” This latter
was the article that caused Derrida to lament “the wound I right away felt . .
. an anti-Semitism that would have come close to urging . . . the most
sinister deportations.”69 Derrida refers to this “terrifying” passage that does
not view Nazism as foreign to Flemish culture:

If our civilization had let itself be invaded by a foreign force, then we

would have to give up much hope for its future. By keeping, in spite
of semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact
originality and character, it has shown that its basic nature is healthy.
What is more, one sees that a solution of the Jewish problem that
would aim at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe
would not entail, for the literary life of the West, deplorable
consequences. The latter would lose, in all, a few personalities of
mediocre value and would continue, as in the past, to develop
according to its great evolutionary laws.70

Derrida excuses de Man on the grounds that he was a young man affected
by a desire to please Henrik de Man and because at the start of their
occupation the Nazis inveigled to portray themselves as sympathetic to
Belgian nationalist interests, which appealed to de Man’s youthful
prejudices. The iconoclastic issue is one of totality, since de Man’s later
work has the virtue of repudiating totalitarianism, as Hartman declaims:

His turn from the politics of culture to the language of art was not an
escape into, but an escape out of, aestheticism: a disenchantment with
that fatal anesthetizing of politics, blatant in his own early writings,
that gave fascism its false brilliance. De Man’s critique of every
tendency to totalize literature or language, to see unity where there is
no unity, looks like a belated, but still powerful, act of conscience.71

In response to the inevitable journalistic squib “deconstruction is fascism,”

Derrida answers that deconstructive strategies are being employed
“precisely to deconstruct the foundations of . . . totalitarianism or of
Nazism, of racisms and authoritarian hierarchies in general.”72 Although
Derrida sidesteps an overt definition of deconstruction, he glosses that it is a
strategy “for assuming the necessity in which any discourse finds itself to
take account of the rules and of the determined forms of this or that
rationality which it is in the process of criticizing or, especially, of
deconstructing.”73 Derrida’s synopsis is singularly apt, since Bloom’s essay
“‘To Reason with a Later Reason’: Romanticism and the Rational” more or
less forms the kernel of the present text from which springs my
interpretation of Bloom’s bad dream of the covering cherub pressing down
upon him like the counterpane; here Bloom argues that poems like “Ode to
Psyche” and “Resolution and Independence” conduct their polemics against
the rags that masquerade as the rational coverings of imagination: “The
enemy within, for both poems, is what Blake called the Spectre, the isolated
selfhood, rationalizing its fears of death and deprivation into a morality of
natural confinement.”74 Derrida responds to those who accuse
deconstruction of being a form of Humean skepticism and hence chasmic
nihilism, while Bloom’s rebuttal of the enemy within is directed against
what Blake personified as the Idiot Questioner or the soul of rationalism
personified as a personal form of despair.75 If you cynically think all roads
lead to a Roman triumph, then, and precisely then life triumphs over the
individual. In “Shelley Disfigured,” the Bonepartist ideal is one that de Man
ironizes and he does so very much in the spirit of a statue of Stalin toppling:
“to monumentalize . . . would be to regress from the rigor exhibited by
Shelley which is exemplary precisely because it refuses to be generalized
into a system.”76
Kierkegaard once wrote that “it can be just as ironic to pretend to know
when one does not know as to pretend not to know when one knows that
one knows.”77 The first part of this witty reversal might be said to cover
the nastiness of those who attacked deconstruction as a form of nihilistic
Nazism, while the second part applies perfectly to de Man’s lame excuse
that he jacked in his journalism, when Nazi thought-control made it
impossible for him to any longer express himself freely.78 In rebuke to the
latter evasion, Derrida aptly ferrets out the following quotation from
Allegories of Reading: “the text can never stop apologizing for the
suppression of guilt that it performs.”79 Derrida examines the phrase
“nameless avengers” and infers “Nameless? Minus the crime, (almost)”
only to project de Man’s putative guilt complex onto a phrase from
Rousseau’s Confessions: “If this crime can be redeemed . . . it must be . . .
by forty years of upright and honorable behaviour.”80 The nameless crime
was Churchill’s dark allusion to the Holocaust, as Derrida well knows. My
feeling is that from the perspective of the clement Victor Frankl, de Man’s
moral character would not be thought fascist; of the two conflicting de
Mans the last one to speak was anti-totalitarian. Derrida compares de Man’s
writings to a seashell, and this beautiful image at once alludes to a passage
of dramatic irony in a war-time review of a novel written by Montherlant:
“When I open the newspapers and journals of today, I hear the indifference
of the future rolling over them, just as one hears the sound of the sea when
one holds certain seashells up to the ear,” whereas in a passage in The
Rhetoric of Romanticism we find the repudiation of the same image: “a
beginning implies a negation of permanence, the discontinuity of death in
which an entity relinquishes its specificity and leaves it behind, like an
empty shell.”81 De Man writes that the image of the shell in Yeats’s The
Wanderings of Oisin is granted the “main faculties of conscious mind, and it
has received them from a mere figure of speech.”82 The discontinuity of
subjectivity and nature and its projection onto the shell of language seems a
very beautiful image to apply to Derrida’s dead friend, since seashells haunt
the listener with the sounds of the sea. Seán Burke writes that de Man was
haunted by harrowing scenes of the Holocaust and waves us toward this
passage in de Man’s later prose: “certain scenes or phrases return at times to
haunt me like a guilty conscience.”83 Burke ponders whether de Man was
trying to “redress and retract the ideology reflected in his war-time
journalism,” or “attempting to obliterate his own history.”84 He concludes
that de Man has “come to life as a biographical figure with a chilling and
tragic intensity.”85 But how anti-biographical it is to wash away the past; to
let what is repressed sublimate on the escapist American shore as mockery
of language, conceived as a shell devoid of its humanity. The chiasmus of
his nationalist writings and his later anti-totalizing/anti-totalitarian stance
indicate Prospero intent upon repudiating a thing of darkness. That de
Man’s demons were never openly faced down in a public confession is the
tragic thing; he probably saw his post-structuralist writings as an attempt to
destroy the intellectual foundations of totalitarianism forever.
 To think so is to respond intellectually and hence to find de Man, the
diffident colleague of Derrida, not guilty, but not everyone is convinced;
Barbara Johnson’s emotional reaction would seem symptomatic of an
almost Nazi logic of purification, the vomiting of a name: “It was as though
the milk of de Man’s writing, which I had already drunk, had turned to
poison.”86 Such nausea reminds of R. S. Thomas’s most notorious poem,
“It Hurts Him to Think,” in which the Welsh poet sardonically writes that
he sucked in the English language with his mother’s infected milk, “so that
whatever/I throw up now is still theirs.”87 A short comparison of Thomas
and de Man makes for an intriguing close to this discussion since their
posthumous reputations revolve around what Marxists call the national
question. Publicly, Thomas propagandized on behalf of Welsh nationalism,
but behind the scenes he married an English woman, refused to teach his
only son, Gwydion, Welsh, and sent him to Shrewsbury Public School.88
Evelyn Barish accuses de Man of being a duplicitous figure, who cannot be
absolved from covering up crimes such as bigamy and anti-Semitism; she
relates that the younger de Man’s reviews went with the collaborationist
flow and were opportunistic.89 Similarly, Thomas’s organic nationalism
with its blood-and-the-soil rhetoric played to the gallery and hence pleased
extremist sensibilities within the Welsh academy.90 However, Peter Brooks
defends de Man by arguing that his ever-changing philological
interpretations resist simplifying systematization, but then glosses that de
Man’s mature output “is united by a suspicion of ideology as a
mystification that takes the seductions of rhetoric as something in which to
believe.”91 Unlike de Man, Thomas never made guilty “reparations” for his
hypocritically nationalist utterances with their mystical celebrations of
Christ-like figures; his autobiography was entitled Neb (No one) and
Gwydion states that its third-person narrative was his father’s way of
“shedding responsibility”.92 Hartman is circumspect with regard to
Derrida’s insight that there is an odd complicity speaking unconsciously
from de Man’s almost confessional readings of Rousseau, although he too
rejects the journalistic jibes: “Though many statements in de Man’s later
writings echo differently in the mind when read against the disclosed
biographical background, I cannot discern a deliberately masked
connection, a use of theory to occult virulent or nihilistic ideas.”93 Hartman
writes that he had naively considered de Man a refugee scholar and that
England was his own first place of refuge where he learned a passion for
words. It seems odd that two of the deconstructive quintet, who contributed
to Deconstruction and Criticism, were European émigrés, while Derrida
was a visitor from France. Bloom himself was a second-generation
immigrant, and we should note that three of the five were Jewish wanderers
involved in negotiating textual labyrinths and a fourth estranged from his
European self. One perceives in this ironic discourse of shatter and piece
together the shadow not just of the fallen world, but of the Holocaust as
well.
 4

Bloom and New Historicism

John Harwood begins his book, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of

Interpretation, with this Swiftian prolegomenon: “I apprehend some curious
Wit may object against me, for proceeding thus far in a Preface, without
declaiming, according to the Custom, against the Multitude of Writers
whereof the whole Multitude of Writers most reasonably complains.”1
Harwood does not refer directly to Bloom but instead to the legions of
modern interpretive angels that inhabit the academy, which he supposes are
more populous than drops of dew. Bloom studiously rereads A Tale of a Tub
every year on the grounds that “Swift audaciously plays at the farthest
limits of irony, limits that make satire impossible, because no norm exists to
which we might hope to return.”2 Swift’s witticism provides a discursive
introduction for easily the most controversial phase of Bloom’s literary life,
that is that of his quarrels with Feminist, New Historicist, and
Multiculturalist “commissars.” Bloom figures the “Resenters” as Trinculos
and Stephanos freeing Caliban from bondage to Prospero.3 Thus, I chart the
reefs and sandbanks of Bloom’s tempestuous relations with these new-
fangled denizens of the American academy, or as he laments with nostalgia
for the Holofernes-like clerics of New Criticism: “I would as soon be
surrounded by a secular clergy as by a pride of displaced social workers.”4
My discussion traces the roots of representative New Historicists and then
branches out toward Feminism and Multiculturalism; it examines the
perceived conservatism of The Western Canon and Bloom’s transformation
into the Urizenic defender of the canon. Given that Bloom never
specifically refers to his opponents by name or treatise, I briefly explain
what it is he reacts against and venture the argument that his response
revolves around the dialectic of animalism and abstraction, which is how
De Quincey characterized Caliban and Ariel.5 In other words, I oppose
Bloom’s interest in unconscious creative energies to the abstract social
energies proposed by the doyens of New Historicism.
Marjorie Levinson commends Bloom for teaching her generation how to
think its subject, but pays him this back-handed compliment: “the defensive
tone and polemical tactics of this new historicist criticism confirm the
syndrome Bloom himself conceived: the anxiety of influence.”6 Bloom
smashed the New Critical icon by diachronic comparison; Levinson’s
ephebes wrote his name on potsherds and ostracized the Callicles of Yale.
Levinson famously argues that Wordsworth’s visionary imagination
excludes the vagrant-poor as reported in contemporary descriptions of
Tintern Abbey, despite the fact that Wordsworth writes sensitively on the
topic of vagrants elsewhere in Lyrical Ballads. Nevertheless, I confess a
sneaking liking for her reading because she highlights the comforting sense
of peace that Wordsworth derives from visiting the ruins of the Catholic
faith, a lost sense of European unity that iconoclasm shattered. Thus, those
exponents of that branch of Marxism broadly definable as New Historicism
compare literary texts to other synchronic texts: letters, journals,
manuscripts, memoirs, etc. Biographical material and indeed the means to
produce the same became the meat and drink of literary critics from the late
1970s onwards. A huge influence on this shift in sensibility was Raymond
Williams, who, in “Culture is Ordinary,” opposes the experiential defense of
high culture espoused by the scientifically rigorous criticism of Leavis that
art and culture are desperate survivors against the cheapening effect of
mass-industrial vulgarity and machine-age barbarianism.7 Another high-
profile historicist, Jerome McGann, draws upon Bakhtin’s arguments that
works of art do not stand alone in splendid isolation; they participate in the
flow of social life, and reflect the economy of interactions that McGann’s
Marxist analysis figures as the bibliographical reception of the literary text
in society over time. Stephen Greenblatt utilizes much the same rhetoric to
justify his documentary usage of historical anecdote; he argues that the
anecdote determines the destiny of a specifically historiographic integration
of event and context since, as the narration of a singular event, the anecdote
is the literary form or historical genre that uniquely refers to the real.8 The
socio-economic determinants of meaning became so important that
McGann exhorts his readers: “I do not see how we can reciprocate the
transcendence of Romantic verse, or feel anything but shame when we read
such poetry.”9 Transcendence McGann redefines as false consciousness:
“One of the basic illusions of Romantic Ideology is that only a poet and his
works can transcend a corrupting appropriation by ‘the world’ of politics
and money.”10 Greenblatt goes further than the heartily poetry-centric
McGann by promoting “the imaginative force of the non-literary,” and this
is because he participates in a Williamsite shift “away from criticism
centered on ‘verbal icons’ toward a criticism centered on cultural
artifacts.”11 He enthusiastically promotes the historicity of texts and the
textuality of history such that ground and figure, text and history
continually shift with each anecdote provoking a further
contextualization.12 Greenblatt underpins his notion of criticism by
anecdote with reference to Auerbach:

Dante’s mixing of styles and his insistence upon the everyday even in
the midst of the sacred is linked . . . to figural realism. . . . Figura . . .
allows both for the overarching divine order in which everything that
exists is ultimately fulfilled and for the historical specificity of each
particular event. . . . The influence is most striking in the adaptation
of Auerbach’s characteristic opening gambit: the isolation of a
resonant textual fragment that is revealed . . . to represent the world
from which it is drawn and the particular culture in which that work
was produced and consumed.13

He seeks to copy the methodology rather than the spirit of Auerbach’s

reading of how Dante appropriates the rational Greek properties of Homer
and the elliptical Jewish eschatology of Genesis, insofar as “the fiction of
the Divine Comedy is that it is not a fiction.”14 With ever a keen eye for a
key quotation, Greenblatt reproduces this absorbing point of comparison
from Mimesis that outlines two unlike styles, the Greek and the Hebrew:
 . . . on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform
illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in
the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of
historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other
hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure,
abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, “background”
quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation,
universal-historical claims, development of the concept of historical
becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.15

Greenblatt’s striking phrase “life-world in that moment” comes from a

combination of uninterrupted Greek connections and the suggestive Jewish
influence of the unexpressed that needs historicist intervention to be
understood lest it remains repressed. In this binary-inverting circumstance,
of giving the historical losers a voice, it is as well to digest Bloom’s
commentary upon Auerbach:

Dante could have relied upon Virgil’s Epicurean consciousness of

pain, with its deep awareness that the cosmos and the gods were
unreasonable, as an intimation that Virgil needed Christianity.
Instead, Dante strongly misread Virgil as a believer in a rational
cosmos. But Dante, Auerbach, and Saint Paul, cannot really have it
both ways at once. You cannot say that Virgil in Dante’s Comedy is
the historical Virgil, but then again is not. . . . As soon as Virgil or
Cato, Moses or Joshua, becomes less significant or real than Dante or
Jesus or Saint Paul, then the Aeneid and the Hebrew Bible also
becomes less significant. . . . Instead of the Hebrew Bible . . . we get
that captive work, the Old or indeed senescent Testament. . . .16

I detect the figure of chiasmus in this argument since, while Dante’s epic
represents an instance of aesthetic triumphalism, in Bloom’s view, the
triumph of the internalized Kingdom-of-Heaven Testament over the
Promised-Land Testament represses the fact that the New Testament is
actually a work of considerably less vitalism and representative of aesthetic
decline. The glaring irony is that Bloom speaks for the Jewish dispossessed.
 Poetry is written by losers and history by winners; a truism that does not
please what Bloom calls the revolutionary pretences of historicists intent
upon speaking “for the insulted and the injured of the world,” and which
Jeremiad of flatulence causes his enemies to call him conservative.17
McGann discovers reactionary ideology in Abrams and Bloom, even
though the latter chooses Hazlitt to illustrate his argument in the
“Prometheus-Rising” preface to The Visionary Company because the radical
journalist kept “his faith in the Revolution and even in Napoleon long after
every other literary figure of the time had turned reactionary.”18 Due to
Bloom’s synopsis of decline, an obvious parallel to draw is with Byron’s
Romantic literary lower empire that self-consciously felt inferior to the
Renaissance, or as Yeats recapitulates this idea in Three Movements:

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;

Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand? (CP, 271)19

Bloom’s diagnosis is more than just aesthetic loss, since he accurately

postulates “the temper of poetic imagination is peculiarly and favorably
responsive to the thwarting of political hope, and Shelley and Keats and
Byron gained immensely by their good fortune of having the era of
Metternich and Castlereagh to contend against.”20 What McGann identifies
as “an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations”
blossoms into a powerful dissection of Abrams’ essay, “English
Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” and by default Bloom’s “The
Internalization of Quest Romance.”21 McGann employs the pejorative
word “reactionary” because in their work the dashed Romantic hope of
social melioration becomes the opium of the masses; thus, the displaced-
religious discourse that Abrams and Bloom apprehend is likened to the
Sugar Candy Mountain of Old Moses, an excuse to postpone revolutionary
empowerment until the next life. McGann’s rhetoric is actually great
criticism when inverted; he suggests that the Romantic ideology is more
symbolic than allegorical because Romantic spiritual freedom comes
precisely from symbolic experience, since in allegory we are told what to
experience.22 Coleridge explains this dualism well when he writes:

Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-

language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of
the senses . . . a Symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the
Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the
Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal
through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality it
renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as
a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.23

How brilliantly the phrase picture-language would capture the spirit of

Blake’s illuminated manuscripts and their visionary themes were we but to
alter Coleridge’s definition of allegory just slightly by amending the phrase
the “objects of the senses,” until it read “visionary objects,” then here I
think, we would find a suitable description of Blake’s etched-by-acid giant
forms. Blake might say to McGann that allegory is addressed to the
intellectual powers but hidden from the corporeal understanding, where the
latter is an empirical approach that is not open to vision and the former the
irony of any reader’s powers of self-integration.24 If literature becomes
secular scripture and canonical literature a particular that displays universal
qualities, then Bloom’s distinction between period pieces and canonical
permanence reads not unlike Coleridge’s preamble minus the illusion of
unity. Bloom’s version of aesthetics insists that canonical literary works
pretend that they possess originality. But this unprecedentedness is in fact
an allegory of their anxious relationship with other works of art that possess
universal qualities, which have to be seen as symbolic of their placement
within the canon.
I cannot conceptualize the dreamt-of proletarian Utopia of Marx as
anything other than a recapitulation of Paradise and Elysium, the Fortunate
Fields alluded to in Wordsworth’s “Prospectus,” inasmuch as they both
represent failed prophecy become the profound anticlimax of the guillotine
and the gulag, similar in kind to the dystopian “republics” of modern Iran or
Korea. Marxists fall back on Karl Popper’s prediction that there can be no
historical generalizations: “the most careful observation of one developing
caterpillar will not help us to predict its transformation into a butterfly.”25
Were we to reconstrue the life-cycle of the poet in terms of caterpillar,
chrysalis, and imago, rather than as contraction, shattering, and restitution,
then we would break this Marxist fantasy on a wheel of predictive allegory.
McGann and Greenblatt relate their embarrassment that Marx thought the
Greeks possessed an eternal charm because they were the childhood of
humanity, one that will never return; yet, in so postponing Utopia, Marxists
become mired in Promethean ideology and more subtly the Christian
myth.26 The desire of McGann to escape the Romantic ideology would
seem an intriguing move given that another Marxist historian, Hobsbawm,
defines the Romantic period as ending in 1850, in which case the question
arises: in what way does McGann’s The Romantic Ideology, modeled on
The German Ideology, a text that was written in or around 1845, remove
itself from the self-representations of the Romantic era? The concept of the
spirit of the age is just as symbolic of the times as Bloom’s canonical
crown-jewels are said to be metonymic of tradition; the difference is that
Bloom dismisses as rhinestone period pieces what Greenblatt covets as
anecdotes. This point is well illustrated by the Shakespearean
prolegomenon to Fearful Symmetry:

Gonzalo: How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green!
Antonio: The ground indeed is tawny. (II.i.53-4)27

Antonio acts as a cynical foil for Gonzalo’s appreciations; Prospero’s isle is

visionary; it amplifies the personality of the beholder: Bloom celebrates
twanglings, Greenblatt political wranglings. New-Historicist critics cannot
permit themselves to be univocal propagandizers for an ideology; they
delight in unpicking the strands of competitive ideologies; the ground is
never just tawny or green, it is always self-reflexively green and tawny,
figure and vehicle, skull and ambassador. Gonzalo embarks on his utopian
speech on the topic of an ideal commonwealth, in which there would be
“No sovereignty,” only for Sebastian to undercut him with the rebuke: “Yet
he would be king” (II.i.154-5). The problem is exactly that of conservatism;
the phenomenon of the working-class Orc becoming a bourgeois Urizen,
since New Historicism would seem a watered-down version of Marxism,
“we were from the beginning uncomfortable with such key concepts as
superstructure and base or imputed class consciousness, we have found
ourselves . . . slowly forced to transform the notion of ideology critique into
discourse analysis.”28 In Learning to Curse, Greenblatt mentions surplus
value in a similar list of missing Marxist doctrines and this is significant
because, as Bloom argues in The Western Canon, “The institution that
sustained me, Yale University, is ineluctably part of the American
Establishment, and my sustained meditation upon literature is therefore
vulnerable to the most traditional Marxist analyses of class interest.”29
Bloom turns this self-assessment into class-conscious criticism of his
middle-class critical brethren: “I am a proletarian; they are not.”30 He
accuses his enemies of liberal self-hatred: “the high bourgeoisie being
unable to stand its status as the high bourgeoisie.”31 Bloom’s politics are
closer to communism than those of a Delingpole: “If they wish to alleviate
the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretentions,
let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and
economically and in a humanitarian spirit.”32 But this is to overlook
Greenblatt’s bien-pensant radicalism, his bourgeois-friendly version of
Marxism.
Bloom preaches that historicism “is a kind of idolatry” because it
represents an obsessive worship of things in time, but underlines that we
should read by inner light.33 He emphasizes that for the critic, if not the
poet, or Irish novelist, “the proper attitude to take toward Shakespeare . . . is
indeed awe, wonder, gratitude, deep appreciation.”34 Bloom’s gnosis is
nowhere more evident than in the phrase, “mighty Demiurge, economic and
social history”; he knows that historicists are inspired by Foucault, who
redefines ideology as networks of power.35 Drawing upon Hayden White’s
research, Bloom argues that Foucault was blind to his own metaphors; the
social energies that Foucauldians find represented in texts are vague
metaphors for authority and hence unquantifiable. In opposition to Bloom’s
insight that poets write fictions of duration, Foucauldians like Greenblatt
propose that “our effort is not to aestheticize an entire culture, but to locate
inventive energies more deeply interfused within it.”36 The metaphor of
energy intends that anecdotes will carry the past into the present and that, as
discourse analysis, the relativistic anecdote becomes a transcendental
signifier, as the Neo-platonic reference to “Tintern Abbey” indicates.
Gallagher and Greenblatt promote an interest in “tracking the social
energies that circulate very broadly through a culture, flowing back and
forth between margins and center,” their counter-histories “pressing up from
below to transform exalted spheres and down from on high to colonize the
low.”37 They propose to rip off the Foucauldian mask of social energies
understood as consent showed toward the dominant institutions in civil
society and therefore the ideological hegemony of said institutions.
Ironically, Greenblatt was attracted to that aspect of Foucault that perfectly
describes Bloom’s status in the academy post the publication of The
Western Canon: “Foucault presented the anecdotes in the historical archives
as residues of the struggle between unruly persons and the power that
would subjugate or expel them.”38 His eminent and emanatory theories
were opposed by a persecuted gnostic.
In riposte to Greenblatt, Bloom argues that the Shakespearean self is the
given, subject to subsequent mutabilities, and guarantees agency, while for
Foucault the self is fashioned by the mask of social energies.39 He argues
that hidden behind the mask of intellectual autonomy Shakespeare’s
universalism always defeats his critics, “scholars who wish to confine
Shakespeare to his context—historical, social, political, economic, rational,
theatrical . . . are unable to explain the Shakespearean influence on us.”40
For Bloom, Shakespeare invents the confrontational self: “the self in its
quest to be solitary and free ultimately speaks with one aim only: to
confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join
greatness to greatness, which is the basis for the aesthetic experience once
called the sublime: the quest for the transcendence of limits.”41 For
Greenblatt, Shakespeare reflects the discourse of colonialism; he indicates
that The Tempest holds up a mirror to empire, in which island-state Caliban
is Prospero’s sole subject, “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my
mother,/Which thou tak’st from me” (I.ii.331-2). The center-piece of
Greenblatt’s “Learning to Curse” would seem Caliban’s retort: “You taught
me language; and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse” (I.ii.362-3). The
main thread conveyed by this quip that forces Prospero to respond with the
bullwhip-crack threat of punitive cramps is that Caliban’s faux Indian
language was deficient or non-existent, which point is well illustrated by
Miranda’s complaint that before she taught him English he would gabble
like a thing most brutish. Greenblatt emphasizes that Caliban represents the
darkest European fantasies about wild men: “Caliban is deformed,
lecherous, evil-smelling, idle, treacherous, naive, drunken, rebellious,
violent, and devil-worshiping.”42 Prospero later acknowledges this thing of
darkness in a less than repressive Pauline fashion, though Greenblatt intuits:
“he is claimed as Philoctetes might claim his own festering wound.”43
Bloom writes not just that historicists ignore the intrinsic beauty of
Caliban’s natural poetry, but that “Dryden accurately observed that
Shakespeare ‘created a person which was not in Nature’, a character who is
half-human cannot be a natural man, whether black, Indian, or Berber (the
likely people of Caliban’s mother, the Algerian witch Sycorax).”44 He
flatly denies that The Tempest is concerned with colonialism or colonial
guilt and interprets Prospero’s decision to drown his books in the bay as an
anxious answer to Marlowe’s Faustian reference to burning his grimoires,
“Prospero is Shakespeare’s anti-Faust.”45 However, Bloom parallels
Greenblatt’s insights in giving Montaigne’s essay on the Cannibals as a
likely source text for the play since Caliban is an anagram of Cannibal.
Bloom thinks that the play is a visionary comedy replete with a Yahoo-
Caliban, whom Bloom relates as the revolutionary anti-hero of modern
directors, in spite of the fact that so many poets, Auden and Browning
among them, have been attracted to what Greenblatt disappointingly calls
the “opacity” of Caliban’s language:

I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;

And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset; I’ll bring thee
To clustering filberts, and sometimes I’ll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. (II.ii.161-6)
Greenblatt means that Caliban’s language has concrete lucidity as a
civilized means of communication, that it cannot be dismissed as
transparently barbarous in the sense that the Greeks initially used the term,
that is to signify babbling mispronunciation.46 Verbally at least,
Greenblatt’s terminology reminds of two Blakean categories, the limit of
contraction and the limit of opacity, which Bloom recapitulates as the states
of Adam and Satan. But I lean toward Greenblatt here because the
presumed status of Caliban as a pre-linguistic natural man or unfallen-
innocent ripe for colonization, which Bloom tries to belie, marks him out as
sharing the status of Tharmas: “the innocence, pre-reflective, of a state
without subjects and objects, yet in no danger of solipsism, for it lacked
also a consciousness of self.”47 Bloom mentions that Caliban is depicted by
Browning as a child: “Caliban’s essential childishness, a weak and plangent
sensibility that cannot surmount its fall from the paradisal adoption by
Prospero.”48 Browning’s creation monologue with its “he made” refrain,
coupled with Auden’s poetic identification with Caliban’s “nightmare of
public solitude” in The Sea and the Mirror, hints at the closeness of all
these analogs to Bloom’s own anxious allegory, the modern Caliban of
letters gloomily cursing the precursor Prospero for making him learn a
paradisal but entrapping language: the colonizing force of influential
language.
In his seminal essay, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in
Our America,” Roberto Fernández Retamar adopts Caliban’s name, when
taken for a misspelling of Carib, as symbolic of Latin American studies. He
proclaims Caliban as “our” culture and history, even in the act of asserting
that the European university needs to be replaced by the American
university, an example of the most sublime Emersonian anxiety of
influence.49 Bloom would perhaps underline the world-wide appeal of the
bard’s will-to-power here, or else oppose this charisma to the insight that
multiculturalists endow their victims with “a sense of their
victimization.”50 He refers to multiculturalists dead set against dead white
European males, the hackneyed image of quilt-making feminist
cheerleaders, and “African-American and Chicano literary activists,” as
self-begot Adams, who forget that canonical strength is an amalgam of
“mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge,
exuberance of diction.”51 Retamar is absorbing precisely because he asks
not only, “Can you do anything else but curse in this alien language,” but
also “Have you not thereby already recognized the cultural superiority of
the colonizer?” As Frederic Jameson summarizes in his Foreword to
Caliban and Other Essays, “the double-bind is reversed in the second essay
in this collection, in which the ‘curse’ must itself be dismantled, and the
‘black legend’ of the Spanish conquerors as racist and inhuman is itself
stigmatized as what is often today called ‘inverted racism’.”52 In a book
that addresses the symbolism Caliban holds for Caribbean writers, Paula
Burnett argues that Derek Walcott rejects both “the literature of
recrimination (of the descendents of the slave) and the literature of remorse
(of descendents of the colonizer) because they remain locked in a
Manichean dialectics, reinscribing and perpetuating a negative pattern.”53
Walcott’s vision is a peace-map of good sense that threads the cussed
Bloom-Greenblatt impasse of reaction and resentment, an exit from the cul
de sac of feeling embarrassed about the privileged status of literary
criticism, and hence the pick-sore need to work through colonial guilt.
Despite Bloom’s provocative language, multiculturalists and historicists
rely on the same basic imaginative leap; they all compare texts, while
looking for new parallels. Often the point being made by either Greenblatt
and Bloom, or Bloom and Retamar, is surprisingly similar; for example,
Ricks argues that Bloom threatens the ephebe with a sense of victimization.
Bloom’s influence on The Madwoman in the Attic has been highlighted
elsewhere; thus, another point of comparison with Feminist thought is
needed.54 To this end, the figure of Ariel from Sylvia Plath’s eponymous
poem provides an excellent Shakespearean analogue since the poetess is not
one of Bloom’s favored canonical authors: “It is unwise to quarrel with
Plath’s artisans, because one can never be sure precisely what the
disagreement concerns. I have just reread Ariel, and confess myself moved
by the quality of pathos the book evokes. And yet I remain unpersuaded
that Ariel is a permanent work.”55 Bloom claims that while Plath was “a
touch too anxious to appropriate the Holocaust for her personal purposes . .
. for me the issue is elsewhere, and is always aesthetic.”56 The problem is
that Bloom’s own sense of cultural allegiance keeps asserting itself.
Moreover, I simply do not agree that we should read nothing but well-worn
canonical authors like Shakespeare and Austen, since how can we judge
unless we first read a text for ourselves? If you do not sit down to read
Ariel, then how can you know whether or not to include it on a reading list?
Bloom himself champions the obscure writers of medieval Kabbalah, texts
that I would not otherwise peruse; he shows a marked Jewish bias that is
never far below the surface of his library-cormorant reading habits. Can I
complain that Feminists like Elaine Showalter thought not enough books by
women writers were being taught because such texts are not to the taste of
male critics? That said, feminists sometimes speak the same language as
Bloom, albeit from an estranged perspective: “Sweeping modifications in
the canon are said to occur because of changes in collective sensibility, but
individual admissions and elevations from ‘minor’ to ‘major’ status tend to
be achieved by successful critical promotion, which is to say, demonstration
that a particular author does meet generally accepted criteria of
excellence.”57 In the same essay, Lillian Robinson reflects on Nina Baym’s
aesthetic judgment that all but forgotten but then resurrected feminine
authors are sometimes substandard aesthetically speaking: “re-examination
of this fiction may well show it to lack the esthetic, intellectual and moral
complexity and artistry that we demand of great literature.”58 Just as
Greenblatt advances an argument for counter-histories, Robinson
champions a counter-canon based on inclusionary terms and crucially
challenges the dominant white-male canon on the grounds that aesthetics
are culture-specific: “when we turn from the construction of pantheons,
which have no prescribed number of places, to the construction of course
syllabi, then something does have to be eliminated each time something
else is added, and here ideologies, aesthetic and extra-aesthetic, do
necessarily come into play. Is the canon and hence the syllabus based on it
to be regarded as the compendium of excellence or as the record of cultural
history?”59 Her argument resembles that of Bloom proposing that there is
an anxiety of choice when choosing whom to read because so many names
present themselves on the bookshelf: “American poetry in the twentieth
century is immensely rich in women of genius: Gertrude Stein, Hilda
Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Léonie Adams, Laura Riding,
Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Amy Clampitt, and several living
poets.”60 Bloom is not the only critic who makes the point that it is creative
energy and not social energy that counts; Linda Bundtzen says
“Shakespeare’s Ariel is neither male nor female, so the divine activity of the
poet . . . is pure energy . . . when the woman is given over to the apocalyptic
fury of her muse, she is not subject to her female roles.”61 Here writerly
creative energy counters Foucauldian social energies; Plath’s appropriation
of what Coleridge called the Proteus of the fire and flood helps define her
obsession with patriarchy in the form of father-substitutes.
Ultimately, the colonizing force of totalizing metaphors needs to be
emphasized. Allen notes that Bloom’s poetics of conflict would seem
conducted “in the name of a strictly poetic power or energy” so strong
certain monumental writers function as end-stops that like Shakespeare
influence tradition more than tradition influences them.62 Greenblatt would
insist to the contrary that “There can be no appeals to genius as the sole
origin of the energies of great art.”63 Bloom makes the useful distinction
between intertextuality and intratextuality to distinguish between historicist
poetics and influential poetics; however, McGann would challenge that
there is always an ideology to be found lurking behind an aesthetic: “Does
anyone think that ‘the aesthetic’ is ‘not among the ideologies?’”64 His
daemon Marx lurks in the eye of the revolutionary storm, or as Eagleton
argues, the aesthetic lies “at the heart of the middle class’s struggle for
political hegemony.”65 Bloom responds that “Marxists are perceptive in
finding competition everywhere else, yet fail to see that it is intrinsic to the
high arts.”66 According to Greenblatt Renaissance “self-fashioning . . .
involves submission to an absolute power,” a control mechanism whose
recurrent model was the imitation of Christ, but, if we interpolated Marx for
the ideal Christian form, then Bloom’s diagnosis of resentful Modern self-
fashioning would seem thoroughly mimetic of the Jekyll and Hyde of
puritanical materialism, or else wounded narcissism.67 Foucault writes
admirably on the subject of how networks of power perforate modern
societies in decussated interstices that he nevertheless clumsily renders as
social energies rather than individuals collaborating in the regimes of
technological societies. Another Caribbean writer, Aimé Césaire, views
Ariel as the archetypal colonial collaborator, a sell-out to the ruling
ideology, who chooses to passively reflect the dominant power’s discourse
like an automaton, excepting that moment when Prospero’s malignant thing
demands freedom with a measure of free-will. Ironically, Greenblatt writes
that dissent is possible even without apparent personal autonomy being
freed from the over-mastering Frankensteinian agency of social energies:
“the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be
bound up with collective, social energy; a gesture of dissent may be an
element in a larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize the
order of things may turn out to subvert it.”68 Greenblatt’s synopsis
repudiates individual agency, not to mention creative genius; it absolves de
Man just as readily as the post-structuralist death of the author. But are
Greenblatt’s words those of a Marxist-bourgeois intellectual actively trying
to subvert his co-opted status as a member of the Coleridgean class, or
merely someone passively reflecting the Foucauldian ideas that were
around at the time? The differing definitions of the word energy would
seem the nub of the matter since, whereas Greenblatt views class divisions
as social energies, Bloom is more Nietzschean; his definition of energy
refers to individual will-power, the desire for personal betterment, survival
even. In a sweeping generalization, Bloom writes that the School of
Resentment teaches social selflessness, whereas self-reliant reading is a
solitary, elitist, and selfish activity, agonistic writing becomes an act of
individuation to augment one’s growing inner self, the diary-writing that
O’Brien tries to crush.69 Eagleton bewails that solitary reading curbs any
disruptive tendency to collective political action, but I have ever found that
sedentary toil adorns the mind with ready arguments to oppose the
egregious browbeating didacticisms of Marxists. Bloom melodramatically
bewails that the American academy has become prey to the ferocious
indictments of those who accuse others of being sexist and racist by the
Orwellian witch-hunters of words and advises his readers to clear their
minds of politically correct cant.70 Christopher Rollason relates that once,
while addressing a room full of academics at the University of California,
Bloom’s views were deemed so politically incorrect that the whole room
started shouting: “Racist! Fascist!”71 I do not think Bloom’s views are
racist (he loves Ellison’s The Invisible Man and Cervantes) and certainly
they are not fascist, elitist yes, but this is how he is widely viewed by
America’s cultural clerisy, an academy he thinks infiltrated by Gramscian
Marxists intent upon politicizing their students.72 Still, his detractors are
inconsistent. If Bloom asks the sublime agonistic question: is one work
better than/less good than another; then this form of qualitative assessment
is merely what critics do day in day out, or as Burke adumbrates: “Often,
literary criticism is merely advice to customers, as with book reviewing; or
it is like the academic grading of examination papers.”73 As to Bloom’s
argument that the sheer volume of literary works written means that there is
an anxiety of choice, I respond by noting that departments of English have a
hard-sell habit of persuading Malthusian numbers of students to take post-
graduate degrees, each of these youthful Ferdinand drudges hoping they
will thereby gain an elusive academic career, which leads to the all-too-
familiar phenomenon of the Marxist Professor delivering set-piece lectures
on social problems in Dickens, while his exploited research-students inhabit
bedsits in Toxteth.
 5

Bloom and Judaism

It is my intention to catalogue the most salient references that Bloom makes

to Judaism starting with a brief consideration of his family background and
then proceeding to a chronological reading of his books of criticism thought
of as spiritual autobiography. The dénouement of Bloom’s religious
development takes us from Orthodox Judaism to atheism, and hence
metaphysical materialism to Kabbalistic speculation that Bloom identifies
as a form of Gnosticism. Bloom uses his critical nous to escape being over-
determined by his Orthodox upbringing but nevertheless turns to the
Kabbalistic scholarship of Gershom Scholem. It needs to be emphasized
that this survey is more concerned with how Jewish theology manifests
itself in Bloom’s criticism than defining the fundamental tenets of the
Hebraic faith; however, near the close of this discussion, I turn to the
principles of Maimonides because Bloom calls into question so many
orthodoxies in The Book of J. My argument is half-predicted by Lindsay
Waters’ observation that “Bloom is always asking what it would mean for
America to have a spiritual life that is not identified with or rooted in
organized religion.”1 Bloom subjects the writings of those charismatics
within Hebraic culture that influenced his psychology and beliefs to
rationalistic introspection, and yet his Jewish nostalgias are surprisingly
reticent. Despite all the aesthetic posturing, the said referents remain
emotionally transcendent. Therefore, I am also half-convinced by Peter
Morris’s assessment that “it occasionally seems—with the early reliance on
Buber, later on Freud, then finally on Gnosticism and Kabbalah—that
Bloom is trying hard to prove that the canon of English poetry has always
been, at heart Jewish.”2 Bloom is bookish and belongs to the culture of the
book but also the Yale university library; in terms of his readings of
Romantic poetry, he delights in discovering Jewish influences and finding
Judaic analogies. Thus, I expand upon Morris’s insight that Bloom’s
criticism of Gentile poetry is heavily reliant upon Jewish models, but with
the caveat that he picks and chooses and just as frequently discards. In
particular, Bloom cherishes those Jewish writers who usurp the authority of
the J-Writer and hence redefine what it means to be a Jew in their own
terms. Pragmatically, this means Bloom canonizes those writers with the
intellectual power to create their own ephebes by means of overcoming a
sense of paternal anxiety, the familiar interplay of divination and idol-
shunning.
Bloom figuratively swims as a Jewish Gnostic fish in the sea of
American Protestant culture, a problem that has “everything to do with the
difficult definition of being American, and the impossible definition of
being Jewish.”3 Equitably, he responds to the anti-Semitic commentary of
Jung: “the Jew as a relative nomad has never created, and presumably will
never create, a cultural form of his own, for all his instincts and talents are
dependent on a more or less civilized host people.”4 Deplorable though
Jung’s comments are, Sansford Pinsker nonetheless writes that a sense of
alienation can be expected from a Jewish intellectual hailing from New
York:

To be formed by such a world, by its grinding poverty and parochial

limitations, its seductive warmth and abiding sense of the past, meant
that one looked at mass American culture as an outsider, fully
credentialed in marginality and finely attuned to alienation. This saga
has been with us nearly as long as our century—sometimes
powerfully evoked, but of late growing increasingly threadbare.5

In The Image of the Jew in American Literature, Louis Harap notes the
Jewish clothes-seller as a prodigious stereotype that mocks American
Jewry, which observation threads the needle of this reminiscence: “My own
memories of my father, a taciturn and restrained man, begin with his
bringing me a toy scissors for my third birthday in 1933, when the
Depression had left him, like many other garment workers, unemployed.”6
Bloom neither followed in his father’s footsteps, nor became devoutly
observant like his mother, but instead identified with the scandalously
epicurean Elisha ben Abuya, who never tired of singing Greek songs and
who, moreover, decided there was no spiritual reward for the virtuous.7
Bloom’s one Platonic virtue is that of reaping the vicious epicurean rewards
of reading and, indeed, the negative capability of almost losing himself
completely as he gets inside a poem: “I want to bring the whole of me to it.
. . . I want to be totally lost and absorbed in it . . . though at the same time, I
want to maintain my critical faculties.”8 He wants to fall in love, itself a
troubadour phrase indicating a Cathar-Gnostic revision of Genesis;
therefore, Bloom wishes to be seduced but does not read passively,
“Criticism starts—it has to start—with a real passion for reading. . . . You
must fall in love with what we used to call ‘imaginative literature’. And
when you are in love . . . you pass into the agonistic mode.”9 Agons are
Nietzschean to the extent that Bloom argues every word we read is a bias or
inclination, the perfect antithesis of disinterested study: “Nietzsche
inaugurated the modern recovery of Greek agon, and it is now accepted by
classical scholars as a guiding principle of Greek civilization. . . . Western
culture remains essentially Greek, since the rival Hebrew component has
vanished into Christianity, itself indebted to Greek genius.”10 The Greek
Testament usurps the Jewish Testament, and in a similar fashion the Jewish
culture of the book became displaced as a love of reading the poetry and
writing the literary criticism of Christendom; Bloom remarks that he “long
since had found my Bible in the poets and my Talmud in the literary
critics.”11 The immersion of the Jewish ego in American society is a
troubling topic that Bloom has a habit of returning to, and it is worth
mentioning that Greenblatt has the same cultural allegiance as Bloom and
was one of Bloom’s students:

If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs,

values, and habits of the majority, then American Jews are leagues
beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country.
I can no longer know . . . which of my many students are more-or-
 less Jewish. . . . Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain
. . . I am about to commence my fifty-fourth consecutive year of
teaching at an institution that once made me uncomfortable because
of my social and religious origin.12

Moynihan renders this vague sense of discomfort thus: “there is also the
matter of Bloom and Hartman being hired at Yale at the same time in the
1950s and being put in a basement office by their old Yankee overseers. . . .
The office walls were crawling with silverfish.”13 William Deresiewicz
maintains that in those days Yale was much less politically correct, “I have
seen a picture of the department from back then, and it looks like a game of
What Doesn’t Belong: a lot of WASPs, one woman, and Harold Bloom.”14
Evidently, Bloom only gained tenure by publishing prolifically and because
Frederick Pottle spoke on his behalf at the decisive meeting; W. K. Wimsatt
regarded him as a loose Longinian cannon. Bloom reminisces that he
“survived by subduing my gentle nature and teaching my barbarous
students with an initial aggressivity and hostility that I now scarcely can
credit, so contrary was it to my mild and shy Yiddishkeit.”15 The treatment
of Bloom and Hartman is deeply reminiscent of Karl Shapiro’s poem
“University” which states that mid-century the Jewish collegiate
community were to be shunned: “To . . . avoid the Jew /Is the
curriculum.”16 Bloom’s mentor at Cornell, Abrams, recalls the dying away
of anti-Semitism in American colleges that had once operated a quota-
system aimed at keeping the number of Jewish students to a minimum: “By
the end of the war, in part as a result of growing information about the
Holocaust and of Jewish participation in the armed forces, the earlier
animus against adding Jews to college faculties had greatly weakened. . . . I
never felt any prejudice at Cornell.”17 It is intriguing to note that Abrams
wanted to be free of his father’s orthodoxy without having to espouse
something else.18 In Abrams’ opinion, Bloom’s theory of reading is “all too
human, for it screens out from both the writing and the reading of ‘strong’
literature all motives except self-concern.”19 Bloom’s theories are far from
those redemptive transformational displaced religious longings his mentor
described in Natural Supernaturalism; for Abrams Bloom “compels us to
face up to aspects of the motivation to write and misread poems—self-
assertiveness, lust for power and precedence, malice, envy, revenge—which
canonical critics have largely ignored.”20 Bloom’s power as a close-reader
of Gentile poetry was critical in raising him out of his ghettoized
beginnings; thus, celebrated vignettes like the following complement
Abrams’ assessment: “Disabuse yourself of the lazy notion that any activity
is disinterested, and you arrive at the truth of reading. . . . When you read,
you confront either yourself, or another, and in either confrontation you
seek power. And what is power? Potentia, the pathos of more life, or to
speak reductively, the language of possession.”21 More life equates to
Bloom’s resolute Jewish sublime, although power alludes to Nietzschean
will-to-power, which is subtly contained in the partly unconscious ego’s
existential confrontation with the text being read. Bloom again turns to
Nietzsche, when he denigrates St Paul: “What he wanted was power; with
St. Paul the priest again aspired to power,” since, as Bloom notes, Paul it is
who conducts a successful agon with Moses: “his misrepresentation of
Torah was absolute.”22 The will-to-power of Bloomian reading is open to
existential analysis because, as Jonas underlines, it signifies the death of the
Jewish God, and in Emersonian terms, the self-reliance of the agonistic
individual upon his own ingenuity. It figures the language of possession and
I am tempted to add the syncretic fusing of the spirit of Protestant
acquisitiveness to Jewish notions of agon such as the heel-clutching figure
of Jacob; it wants more. Bloom very much shares in the spirit of capitalism
—all his books are marketed with a fiscal motive, however, charitable.
These paternal endeavors are well-focused with reference to Bloom’s
thoughts upon Defoe’s penchant for puritan industry: “Defoe’s protagonists
are pragmatic and prudent, because they have to be, there is no play in the
world as they know it.”23
If culture is the lived part of religion, then Bloom’s religion would seem
reading: “I read incessantly from the time I was three years old.”24 Small
wonder then that Bloom asserts Jewishness equates to the culture of the
book, but laments that bookishness declines: “it seems to be diminishing . . .
a falling-away from text-centeredness.”25 Bloom sometimes reveals his
fascination with Judaism thought of as a nomadic cult moving with the
currents of time, inwardly opposed to the spatial orientation of state power.
This internalized religious difference accords with Bloom’s Gnostic thesis
that “signification tends to wander. . . . Meaning . . . wanders wherever
anteriority threatens to take over”; thus, his meta-narrative of belated
misreading parallels the condition of exilic Jewry, in which historical
meaning equates with nomadic anteriority to Zion.26 Furthermore, Bloom
sees Freudian dynamics as based upon “Jewish myths of Exile”:
“psychoanalysis becomes another parable of a people always homeless or at
least uneasy in space, who must seek a perpetually deferred fulfillment in
time.”27 The wandering Jew and the Jew of extraordinary intellect are
listed by Harap, along with the parodic figure of the vengeful Shylock and
the covetous Fagin, as stock Jewish characters in American fiction. Bloom
himself promotes the first two of these images as applying to himself, the
quickest reader in the west and also the quickening theorist of reading, who
powerfully concentrates upon the idea of wandering signification. Bloom
elides significant historical dates like the two Immigration Acts of the
1920s that ended the “greenhorn” society, the heydays of the Yiddish
ghettos, instead asserting his prognosis that American culture and Jewish
culture cannot differ much and that American culture is an eclectic culture,
such that “we know that we are not in Exile.”28 This “at-home-ness” comes
at a price, since he writes that America “is a concept with much Puritanism”
and that “Jewish assimilation in America was frequently a process of
somehow becoming more Jewish by assimilating to Puritan Hebraism and
its Election theology.”29 Bloom’s obsession with text-centeredness
connects to his intuition that Calvinism, with its elective hypothesis and its
return to the early and less Romish form of Christianity, is “congenial to the
spirit of Judaism.”30 Bloom’s own return to earliness identifies the Yahwist
as “the first crucial author of the Torah,” adding that “nearly every other
Biblical writer took J as his point of origin.”31 Tyndale’s English
translation of Genesis is certainly not part of what Bloom regards as Jewish
facticity, the “continuity of ancestors,” all those “Jewish mothers” that
“have given birth to Jewish daughters and sons for perhaps one hundred and
fifty generations.”32 Bloom sarcastically remembers a door-to-door
salesman hawking Yiddish Christian Bibles, which guides me to the
judgment that, while Bloom became Americanized, his criticism remains at
a deep level Judaic; and to the degree that “the American Religion . . .
masks itself as Protestant Christianity,” indeed, Bloom calls himself “an
unbelieving Jew of strong Gnostic tendencies.”33
The phrase Jewish Gnosticism calls the name Gershom Scholem before
us, and Bloom has written, “in our post-Holocaust time, the unknown God
of Scholem, contracted and withdrawn from our cosmos, seems more
available than the normative God of Akiba and Maimonides”; thus
Scholem’s writings “provide the basis for another Jewish Gnosis, perhaps
the inevitable religion of Jewish intellectuals for whom the doctrine of
Akiba is dead.”34 The doctrines of Akiba, Bloom controversially describes
as “normative Judaism”; Akiba’s putative ordering of Mishnah constitutes
what Bloom’s Gnosticism rebels against, the Mishnah being the rabbinical
codification of the Oral Law.35 Normative Judaism Bloom defines as the
religion of the Oral Law, “the strong interpretation of the Bible set forth by
the great rabbis of the second century of the Common Era.”36 In the
following instance, Scholem juxtaposes an Orthodox conception of the
Second Commandment with Valentinus: “the famous passage in the
Mishnah which forbids the questions: ‘What is above and what is below?
What was before and what will be after?’ refers to theoretical speculation in
the manner of the Gnostics, who strove after ‘the knowledge of who we
were, and what we have become, where we were or where we are placed,
whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed’.”37 A central figure in this
discussion is the Kabbalistic regressive implosion of God into the Gnostic
abyss; Scholem writes that “mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss;
on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it
proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that
will span it.”38 Bloom sometimes claims that he does not believe in myths
of decline but often contradicts himself: “we know less than Blake and
Wordsworth knew, even as they knew less than Milton.”39 Bloom’s
conception of history as aesthetic decline parallels this vignette by Scholem
on the topic of religious history:

All monotheistic religions possess a distinct conception, one might

call it a philosophy, of their own history. In this view, the first
revelation expressing the fundamental contents of a religion is the
greatest, the highest in rank. Each successive revelation is lower in
rank and less authoritative than the last. Such a conception forbids a
true believer to place a new revelation on a level with the great
revelations of the past and obviously creates a serious problem for
the mystic, since he imputes enormous value to his fresh, living
experience.40

Monotheistic is a word readily associable with Milton’s organ note and the
following quotation accurately approximates Bloom’s reading of the
Romantics’ anxious intertextual relationship with Milton, as Bernard
McGinn notes,

Scholem advances a three-stage model of religion . . . he claims that

religion begins with a mythical foundation stage in which no gap is
discerned between the gods and humans. Religion then moves onto a
classical phase which destroys this harmony by establishing a
polarity between God and human in which God founds institutional
“religion” by addressing humans in revelation and demanding their
obedience. The history of institutional religion, however, shows the
possibility of a third, or “romantic” phase, in which mysticism,
understood as “direct contact between the individual and God,” seeks
to revive the original unity of mythic consciousness.41

Here is the seed for Bloom’s reading of the earliest passages of Genesis
ascribed to the J-Writer but minus the thesis that normative Judaism has
been manufactured from what were essentially folk tales, and here also is
Bloom’s surmise that Gnostic Jews in Alexandria “were seeking to revive a
more archaic Jewish religion that the Temple cult had obscured, a religion
in which the demarcation between God and mankind was not a fixed
barrier.”42 Scholem praises the irrational content of Jewish mysticism; he
broke with the rationalist biblical interpreters of the nineteenth century;
Bloom’s conception of poetry as being irrationally precipitated anxiety is
central to his reading of Blake et al. His Jewish concept of misreading
seems similar to Scholem’s commentary upon Pauline Scripture:

The result was the paradox that never ceases to amaze us when we
read the Pauline Epistles: on the one hand the Old Testament is
preserved, on the other, its original meaning is completely set aside.
The new authority that is set up, for which the Pauline Epistles
themselves serve as the holy text, is revolutionary in nature. Having
found a new source, it breaks away from the authority constituted in
Judaism, but continues in part to clothe itself in the images of old
authority, which has now been interpreted in purely spiritual terms.43

Bloom recapitulates this point as radical dualism: “Christians call the

Hebrew Bible the Old Testament, or Covenant, in order to supersede it with
their New Testament, a work that remains altogether unacceptable to Jews,
who do not regard their Covenant as Old and therefore superseded.”44
Bloom’s indebtedness to Scholem manifests itself in the 1970s and helps
focus some of the most salient examples of Bloom’s Judaic critical
leanings, since what begins as a crisis of faith becomes a nascent Jewish
gnosis and ultimately a rational critique of normative Judaism and then of
Pauline Christianity too.
The most obvious evidence for lurking Jewish bias in Bloom’s early
works is the presence of Buber’s It-Thou philosophy in Shelley’s
Mythmaking. In the preface to the Cornell Paperbacks Edition, Bloom notes
a critic who quipped that he wrote with “Buberian spectacles” and another
who “deplored the decadence of American education, which had granted a
higher degree to an ephebe insufficiently versed in Plato.”45 A committed
Zionist, Buber resigned from his professorship at Frankfurt am Main in
protest against the rise to power of the Nazis and later fled to Palestine to
lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Buber espoused an
interactionist version of existentialism, in which man’s relations with reality
are characterized by the concepts of I-Thou and I-It, or as Bloom explicates,
“the God of the Jews is an ultimate achievement of mythopoeic thought . . .
the Jews went completely beyond all natural religion to the revelation of the
myth . . . that there existed a Will of this eternal Thou. The Jewish myth is
the I-Thou relationship in which the I is either God or ‘a kingdom of priests
and an holy nation’ and the Thou, conversely, either this chosen people or
God.”46 Buber speculates that man only displays true being when his I
confronts God; the lesser experience of perceiving a secular world of
relation is relegated to the status of I-It and away from God. Bloom’s
argument is that Shelley abstracts his own mythic structures in the same
way that the primitive Jews formulated their concrete I-Thou relationship
with God. Bloom later dismissed his reliance on these terms as
embarrassing; he argues at one point that the “imagery of myth is thus not
allegorical but anagogical.”47 One of my pet criticisms of Bloom’s reading
of Wordsworth is that he undervalues the concept of wise passiveness,
where passivity allows the nature-worshiper to encounter the shy goddess
Nature. Wise passiveness is the very opposite of iconoclasm, or the
smashing of a riding-crop through a portrait. It follows that I-Thou allows
us to encounter God as long as we allow ourselves to be open to this
dialogue, whereas I-It is Kantian and monologic. Buber’s conception of a
wisely passive meeting with God contradicts Bloom’s later philosophy that
scorns the existence of any god outside the self that in Shelley’s
Mythmaking is associated with the Mammon of the world. But in Buberian
existentialism any willed dialogue with God would collapse into an I-It
relationship because it is counter to the supremacy of Yahweh’s Will. To
translate this revision from Wordsworthian into Blakean terms, Buber
humbles himself before Urizen, whereas Bloom-Orc cries out against the
clyster of this fit and fitted.
An extremely early reference to Gnosticism occurs in Shelley’s
Mythmaking, when Bloom quotes Kerényi: “The only parallel to
Prometheus would therefore be a Gnostic Urmensch, anthropos or Adam
Kadmon.”48 Bloom includes a Jewish pun when mentioning that
Prometheus’s double is Zeus and Shelley’s Zeus “is Blake’s Old
Nobodaddy, setter of limits and circumsizer of desire.”49 The chapter on
“Ode to the West Wind” begins with the information that the King James
“prophet” translates the Hebrew word nabi, and that the prophet is not like
a Greek oracle “but rather a visionary,” a man who sees ethical
consequences of actions most clearly.50 One solution to the puzzle of
Bloom’s outspoken political asides is provided by this adumbration of the
role of the nabi: “Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both
of private & public matters.”51 Bloom immediately links Blake and Shelley
to Numbers 2:24-9 where Moses rebuffs Joshua by saying, “Would that all
the Lord’s people were prophets.” Bloom quotes Buber on the difference
between oracles and prophets: “The oracle gives answers to a situation
which is brought before it as a question by emissaries who ask for
information; the nabi, sent by God, speaks unasked into the biographical or
historical situation.”52 Bloom searches for what is “intrinsic . . . in the
Hebrew tradition” and decides that “Ode to the West Wind” should be
placed in influential interrelationship with “Song of Deborah,” which
Bloom explains as Shelley’s “analogue.”53 Bloom chooses this biblical text
because it treats of the nephesh, or the breath-soul of the singer, “the spirit
breathed into his nostrils by God,” while the singer prays for renewal: “the
spirit falters he therefore calls upon it to rally.”54 Bloom will later argue
that the only figure that is truly non-Wordsworthian in Shelley’s poetry is
the figure of the Car of Light in The Triumph of Life. The Chariot possesses
a long history; it appears in Ezekiel, Revelations, and Paradise Lost before
Shelley and also in Blake’s mythography, although Shelley was unaware of
Blake’s existence. Bloom’s constant juxtapositions of Shelley and Blake
mimic his correlations between Judaism and Romantic poetry in the respect
of trying to detect the presence of the breath of Yahweh almost as if it were
a Romantic presence in the landscape. Here is the key that unlocks the
conceptual strangeness of Blake’s later mythology:

Ezekiel’s vision of the cherubim was taken by Blake as a starting

point for the mythography of “The Four Zoas” (four “living
creatures,” Zŵa, in Revelation’s version of Ezekiel’s vision). The
Four Zoas are the four cherubim, the four faculties of Unfallen Man
or divine Enthroned Man, Albion; Blake named them: first, Luvah
(Orc in time, as opposed to the Unfallen Luvah, the faculty of Love,
the loins of a man’s body, the stars of the fallen universe, the “state”
 of generation, the season of spring, etc.); second Urizen (Satan in
time, faculty of wisdom, the head of a man, the sun in nature, the
“state” of Eden, the season summer, etc.); third, Tharmas (Covering
Cherub in time, faculty of power, heart of a man, moon in nature, the
“state” of Beulah, autumn, etc.); fourth, Urthona (Los in time, faculty
imagination, the body of man viewed as a whole . . . the soul of man,
mountains in nature, the “state” of winter, etc.).55

Bloom notes that Jewish interpretation sees the cherubim as personifying

attributes of God, whereas Blake humanistically imagines a divine man.
Meanwhile, Shelley’s imagery also references “the Ma’asah Merkabah,
Work of the Chariot” with its long mystical tradition of interpretation
“beginning with the Essenes, passing to the Merkabah mystics of Jewish
medieval Spain, and climaxing in the Hasidic movement.”56 In Shelley’s
Mythmaking Bloom is fascinated by examples of Judaism, Gnosticism, and
Jewish mysticism that he finds in Romantic poetry but has not yet
converted to Gnosticism.
In The Visionary Company, Bloom’s reading of Romantic nature poetry
is defined by the Blakean concept of Beulah: “the married land, Beulah, is
the world of Solomon’s Song, where the contract between the Bride and
Bridegroom was renewed.”57 Bloom identifies the married land of Blake
with the marriage of Wordsworth’s mind to nature as portrayed in the
Prospectus to The Excursion; Judaic syncretism manifests itself to the
extent that Bloom adjudges “Blake’s Beulah is Hebraic and Protestant.”58
Bloom’s syncretic attraction to the Romantics is again revealed when he
writes that Blake and Coleridge “believed that in Greek religious poetry all
natural objects were dead, but that in the Hebrew poets everything had a life
of its own, and yet was part of the one life within man.”59 In his poetry,
Blake retells the story of Paradise Lost, Genesis, and Isaiah, which Bloom
links to his interest in tracing the influence of Jewish thought, and ditto
Blake’s invention for his Adam-Kadmon figure Albion an emanation called
Jerusalem and a Spectre called Satan. Likewise, Wordsworth competes
imaginatively with Milton as revealed in his address to Urania in “The
Prospectus to The Excursion,” and hence Bloom writes that “while not so
Bible-haunted as Blake, is himself a poet in the Hebraic prophetic line.”60
Bloom’s discussion of Tintern Abbey contains the “morish” phrase, “Its
burden is more life, survival, imaginative immortality.”61 In Ruin the
Sacred Truths, Bloom notes that “only two books truly mattered to Blake . .
. the Bible and Milton,” but concludes, “I now repudiate my youthful efforts
to Judaize William Blake in a book called Blake’s Apocalypse and in an
earlier work The Visionary Company.”62 Nevertheless, in Blake’s
Apocalypse, Bloom remarks that Albion is “the primordial being, faintly
resembling the Adam Kadmon or Divine Man of Jewish Cabbalist
tradition.”63 Blake’s Apocalypse contains many gestures that claim Blake as
a scion of the Old Testament. Let me give two examples from Bloom’s
chapter on Jerusalem: “Blake turns in Jerusalem to the re-creation in
English terms of the work of Hebraic prophecy” and this “involves a
comparison of England and Palestine, and of Albion and Jacob (called
Israel).”64 He notes that the rhythms of Blake’s verse “resemble the
rhythms of the King James Isaiah and Song of Solomon.”65 Indeed, Bloom
nearly claims Blake for Zion: “in the Marriage, Blake declares himself a
Biblical poet, in the tradition of the later Milton who repudiated the
classical Muses and sought Zion’s springs instead.”66 In this exegesis, the
lens of the Holocaust is cleansed:

The whole of Milton’s heroic testimony is concentrated in this

multiple image, for the garment that must be put off is revealed as
only an “Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit,” to be cleansed from
every human face by self-examination. To cast off the false garment
is to become free of “the Idiot Questioner,” the brooder who squats in
Ulro and whose doubtings ruin poets. “The Idiot Questioner” is one
with the doubts that Wordsworth overcomes in Resolution and
Independence, and with the Remorse cast out by Yeats in A Dialogue
of Self and Soul. He is the shadow haunting everybody, the Covering
Cherub acting as barrier between creative desire and artistic
completion.67
Looking back, Bloom could write of Shelley’s Mythmaking that the subject
of this book is Shelley’s internalized quest to reach the limits of desire, or
the desire of Orc to become Urizen, that of Paul to usurp Moses, which idée
fixe represents the limit of Bloomian opacity, even in his later, less-
normative prose.
Elizabeth Cullingford criticizes Bloom for rejecting the fascist politics of
Yeats as revealed in “On the Boiler,” and yet Bloom’s Eastern European
relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. In his review of Cullingford’s
Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, R. W. Dasenbrock notes that Yeats consistently
had complimentary things to say about Fascist regimes from 1922 to his
death in 1939, and that he was intimately involved with the abortive Irish
fascist movement.68 I find myself in agreement with Bloom’s prophetic-in-
the-Blakean-sense political stance with regard to Yeats’s right-wing and
potentially anti-Semitic allegiances: “The Yeats who wrote eccentric essays
about eugenics, who composed marching songs for an Irish Fascist brigade,
and who loved to go about his house brandishing a Japanese ceremonial
sword—this Yeats can be safely ignored.”69 Bloom writes that quest
romance defines Yeats’s most typical poem: “a dramatic lyric that behaves
as though it were a fragment in a mythological romance, as though the poet
himself as quest-hero undertook continually an odyssey of the spirit.”70 It
cannot be said that Bloom’s stance is insensitive to Yeats’s status as an Irish
poet:

In the Anglo-Irish myths of the hero, Yeats had chosen to find a

model for what he hoped would be a new kind of antithetical quester,
closer to the communal experience than Shelley’s Poet, Keats’s
shepherd-prince or Browning’s Paracelsus. Where Browning recoiled
from the Shelleyan subjectivity, the internalization of the quest, Yeats
entered it, embracing the quester’s natural defeat as a victory, not of
Prometheus or Blake’s rebel Orc, but of a man divided against
himself, natural against imaginative, neither capable of victory over
the other.71

Bloom writes that the Yeatsian quester is divided against himself because he
is half-indebted to a composite precursor that Bloom begins to figure as the
Covering Cherub: “Milton’s Shadow here partly means his influence upon
later poets, for his Shadow, in being identified with the Covering Cherub,
becomes one with everything in the fallen world that blocks imaginative
redemption.”72 Bloom’s authority as a Yeatsian scholar was questioned by
reviewers, or as Sandra Seigal writes, “Yeats appears exceedingly
ideological. The moral tone dominates; judgments abound. What accounts
for this paradox is Bloom’s belief that he is reading Yeats from the point of
view of other poets who are themselves the measure of greatness.”73
Bloom argues that the Irish patriot found two English poetic fathers in
Blake and pre-eminently Shelley, or “the allied influence of Blake, second
only to Shelley’s throughout Yeats’s lifetime.”74 The first chapter of Yeats
outlines Bloom’s developing theory of poetic influence: “The revisionary
readings of precursors . . . are . . . swerves intended to uncover the Cherub,
to free Yeats from creative anxieties.”75 Yeats’s interest in spooks becomes
the repressive haunt of Bloom’s interest: “The winding path is associated
with Blake’s vision of Milton’s Shadow, the Covering Cherub, the burden
of time including the sinister beauty not only of the historical churches but
of Milton’s own poetry, and of the beauty of all cultural tradition.”76
Bloom argues that the source of Yeats’s twenty-eight phases of the moon is
to be found in a Yeatsian commentary upon Blake: “The Cherub is divided
into twenty-seven heavens or churches, that is to say, into twenty-seven
passive states through which man travels, and these heavens or churches are
typified by twenty seven great personages from Adam to Luther.”77 When
Bloom darkly alludes to Yeats’s composite God, he means the esoteric
system outlined in A Vision that purports to offer a horoscope to define the
destiny of each great poet based upon the phases of the moon at his birth.
However, Per Amica Silentia Lunae entertains “another conception of
freedom,” the vaunting flight of their counter-sublime, “their ‘blind struggle
in the network of stars’.”78 Bloom connects this struggle to a host of other
iconic examples in the sublime prose of The Anxiety of Influence, where he
describes the precursor as a baleful greatness “enhanced by the ephebe’s
seeing him as a burning brightness against a framing darkness, rather as
Blake’s Bard of Experience sees the Tyger, or Job the Leviathan and
Behemoth, or Ahab the White Whale or Ezekiel the Covering Cherub.”79
The Covering Cherub, it hardly needs stating, is a Jewish figure, but one
that Bloom marries to Freudian repression. Hence, I applaud the accuracy
of Allen’s insight that Bloom’s reading of Freud in The Anxiety of Influence
and beyond is in the tradition of Lionel Trilling, who praised “Freudian
psychology as being truly parallel to the workings of poetry.”80 In The
Ringers in the Tower, we find Bloom speculating, “that what Blake and
Wordsworth do . . . is closely related to what Freud does” because they
provide “a map of the mind.”81 There is something grisly about Bloom’s
reading of “inescapable” Freud: “the most important page Freud ever wrote
is that ghastly account of the primal history scene, the murdering and
devouring of the totem papa by the primal horde . . . everything follows
from this mad piece of mythological literalism.”82 It is hard to resist
connecting this macabre insight to his Nietzschean argument in The Anxiety
of Influence: “the ancestor of the most powerful tribes have become so
fearful to the imagination that they have receded at last into a numinous
shadow: the ancestor becomes a god.”83 At his most stylized, Bloom
argues, “this God is cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of
a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more.”84 W. J. Bate outlines
that the anxiety of influence is akin to Johnson’s analogy of the influence of
the weather on the imagination and yet the dejected thoughts of Coleridge
are symbolized by a gathering storm. Bloom writes that opium was
Coleridge’s experiential contact with Milton’s Satan and again constative
belief in what looks from a secular perspective like mere superstition
menaces the poet. In fact, it hardly seems like an exaggeration to suggest
that Pauline denial of the body torments the addicted-to-sensual-pleasure
Coleridge, the same fallen Pauline strictures that Blake identifies with the
Covering Cherub. In Bloom’s Calvinistic treatment, it is the archetypal
man, or poetic Adam created by this cultural god, that experiences the
clinamen of a creation-fall: “the poet is our chosen man, and his
consciousness of election comes as a curse; again, not ‘I am a fallen man’,
but ‘I am Man, and I am falling’—or rather, ‘I was God, I was Man (for to a
poet they were the same), and I am falling, from myself’.”85 In Blake’s
Apocalypse, Bloom quotes Rieff to illustrate his understanding of Freud:
“the ego is the outer portion of the id—crystallizing independently as soon
as the infant becomes aware of a physical world different from the self.
Then, onto this acceptance of reality lodged in the perceptual system, are
superimposed the exhortations of society: first embodied in the figures of
the parents and later constituted as part of the personality.”86 In
Deconstruction and Criticism, Bloom re-works Anna Freud by suggesting
that “the ego is the poetic self and the id is the precursor, idealized and
frequently composite, hence fantasized, but still traceable to historical
author or authors.”87 Bloom suggests that what counts in the family
romance “is not, alas, what the parents actually were or did, but the child’s
fantastic interpretation of its parents,” but this seems ironic because he
argues that Paul’s reading of Mosaic Scripture was just such a fantasy and
yet Paul is definitely Bloom’s blind spot.88 Blake’s Covering Cherub is
subsequently identified with the Freudian id, the distinction that Bloom
draws is that Tharmas is a poet’s power of realization, even as the Covering
Cherub blocks realization, or as Bloom puts it, “Tharmas is the unfallen
link between the potential and the actual, what Man wants and what he can
get.”89 The irrationalism at the heart of The Anxiety of Influence is implicit
in this extrapolation that should be connected to the Cherub understood as a
demon of continuity both with Cartesian nature and the precursor, “the dead
are the source of everything we call instinct” and hence “tradition has taken
the place of instinct.”90 The Cherub represents a form of determinism and
thus Bloom supposes, “Discontinuity is freedom,” while the Covering
Cherub victimizes because this figure is a destruction of desire.91 Bloom
derives the Covering Cherub in Blake and the Bible, “what the Cherub
covers is therefore: in Blake, everything that nature itself covers; in Ezekiel,
the richness of the earth, but by the Blakean paradox of appearing to be
those riches; in Genesis, the Eastern Gate, the Way to the Tree of Life.”92
The Covering Cherub also hides the presence of God from the children of
Israel, “the cherubim in the tabernacle and in Solomon’s Temple spread
their wings over the ark.”93 It is no accident that Bloom argues that poems
lack presence in the New Critical or Anglican sense of possessing organic
unity, since “the rabbis took the cherubim here to symbolize the terror of
God’s presence.”94 By uncovering the Cherub, Bloom reveals that at the
heart of the Judaic faith is an absence and one that surprised the Romans
when they stormed the Temple, since there was no idol occupying a place of
centrality, just an apparently empty box.95 The negative theology that
Bloom advocates represents a form of Gnosticism: “the God of the Gnostics
is called the Stranger or Alien God, and has exiled himself from our
cosmos, perhaps forever.”96 Bloom’s theory of reading depends upon
negative theology, or the notion that God is most palpably present because
so suspiciously absent, but married to Rieff’s reading of Freud, in which
forgetting is active and the unconscious almost completely unknowable.97
In this Gnostic theology the shadow of the demiurge that is cultural history
(the Cherub) prevents re-entry into Eden, “So He drove out the man; and
He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming
sword” (Gen. 3.24).98 Bloom’s model of the self resists cloven-fictions and
is monist because poetry arises in the id and fails to make a division
between body and consciousness as is found in Descartes, albeit the
unconscious is a felt but unknown text.99 This said, there is sometimes a
strong element of humanism in Bloom’s writings: “the human writes, the
human thinks . . . defending against another human, however fantasized that
human becomes.”100 Bloom’s irrational figure of the Covering Cherub
shadows this pessimistic vision as “the dark mirror of our egoism and our
fallen condition,” in terms of Whitman’s poetry it takes the form of the
opposition of human nature and carnal sin, and thus, when Whitman
believes in the truth of Pauline Scripture his imagination ebbs.101
However, egoism is the driving force of literary critics too in the respect
that Bloom sometimes seems decidedly uneasy with regard to the influence
of Freud’s Oedipus complex on The Anxiety of Influence: “a Shakespearean
reading of Freud . . . reveals that Freud suffered from a Hamlet complex
(the true name of the Oedipus complex) or an anxiety in regard to
Shakespeare.”102 Bloom reads Freud as a fellow Romantic myth-maker,
the compatriot of Blake and Yeats, although he later attempts to replace
Oedipus Rex with Hamlet the Dane.
The prolegomenon to A Map of Misreading makes reference to
Kabbalah, and to the occupation of Bloom’s father: “As wine in a jar, if it is
to keep, so is the Torah, contained within the outer garment. Such a garment
is constituted of many stories; but we, we are required to pierce the
garment.”103 Bloom bows toward Scholem in his meditation upon
misreading; however, his influence, through interpretations of Zohar, the
founding book of Kabbalah ascribed to Moses de Leon, is, as usual, married
to Gentile sources. In “The Dialectics of Poetic Tradition,” Bloom’s vehicle
is Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, which strongly
associates canon-formation with cosmopolitan learning, although Bloom
puts a negative spin on medieval allusion: “if tradition cannot establish its
own centrality, it becomes something other than the liberation from time’s
chaos. . . . Like all convention, it moves from idealized function to a stifling
or blocking tendency.”104 Bloom reminds that Kabbalah means tradition,
and postulates that Scholem’s formula, “everything not only is in everything
else but also acts upon everything else,” applies equally to literary
tradition.105 Faux singularity is the single most recognizable Bloomian
figure since the simplest answer to what makes a classic is imitation of
other classics. Bloom typically writes with Judeo-Christian duality since
Latin traditio “is etymologically, a handing-over” but a concept that goes
back to Hebraic Mishnah, “an oral handing-over.”106 He argues that poetic
incarnation is a catastrophe relatable to the drying up of the ocean figured
as “the matter of night, the original Lilith or feast that famished and which
mothers what is antithetical to her.”107 Lilith finds a partner with Ananke,
or the goddess who symbolizes the dark Freudian wisdom that the meaning
of all life is preparation for death. Ananke is a feminine version of the
Sphinx but inverted, such that Ananke figures the inexorable return to
nature just as Lilith is a female type of the Covering Cherub, who swamps
the ephebe with the echoing recoil of obsessive influence. From Bloom’s
perspective, poets strive to be antithetical because they seek to escape from
origins; Bloom describes the poet as a figure desperately obsessed with
poetic origins, the subject and object of his or her own quest.108 Yet
Bloom’s origin has duality and it seeps into his American criticism, one
inference being that canonical literature from the west staves off extremist
nationalism. Bloom reveres Curtius partly because the latter begins his book
by “attacking the barbarization of education and the nationalistic frenzy
which were the forerunners of the Nazi regime”; he underlines that his
research “grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western
culture.”109
Bloom is keen to show that the canon is synonymous with book-culture
and thence akin to biblical culture, or rather that the relationship of Milton
to the Romantics resembles that of Torah to belated esoterica, including
Kabbalistic speculations. In A Map of Misreading, Bloom moves his
eclectic theory of influence forward by introducing Jewish Kabbalah to the
debate in the form of Isaac Luria’s speculations that he heralds as “the
ultimate model for Western Revisionism,” and whose “regressive theory of
creation” passes through three main stages: “Zimzum, Shevirath ha-kelim
and Tikkun.”110 Bloom parallels the process of limitation, substitution, and
representation with the aforesaid three phases and applies them to each of
the revisionary pairs of clinamen and tessera, kenosis and daemonization,
and askesis and apophrades. He states that Luria postulated a regressive
theory of creation instead of an emanative one: “Zimzum is the Creator’s
withdrawal or contraction so as to make possible a creation that is not
himself. Shevirath ha-kelim is the breaking-apart-of-the-vessels, a vision of
creation-as-catastrophe. Tikkun is restitution or restoration—man’s
contribution to God’s work.”111 In “The Primal Scene of Instruction,”
Bloom delves ever deeper into Jewish tradition outlining such concepts as
lidrosh, “to seek,” Midrash, “to interpret,” and the Sopherum, or “the men
of the book.”112 He notes that Kabbalah was known as hammer shattering
stone, “the stone being Written Torah.”113 The Kabbalists were anxious
late-comers trying to clear creative space for themselves just as the writers
of Apocrypha and Apocalypses before them were, though Bloom underlines
that these latter wanted original power. This allows Bloom to introduce his
Jewish analogue for the Greek categories of ethos and pathos, since the
“difference between a Talmudic work . . . and an Apocryphal work . . . is
the Hebraic version of the Greek difference between ethos and pathos,”
which is the distinction “separating out all orthodox from revisionist
traditions.”114 Bloom states that origins and ends need to be kept apart and
repeats Mircea Eliade’s argument that “it is the first manifestation of a thing
that is significant and valid, not its successive epiphanies.”115 He echoes
Alistair Fowler’s observation that Milton repeats the word “first” five times,
in the opening few lines of Paradise Lost, which points to an obsession
with priority and belatedness. His example helps to further identify the
Scene of Instruction with Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and its Romantic
epicycles, and hence an important element to note in regard to the Scene of
Instruction is “its absolute firstness, it defines priority.”116 Bloom keeps
adding fresh storeys to his aesthetic tower-of-Babel-as-tradition; thus, the
Scene of Writing is re-founded upon a poet’s election-love, or ahabah, and
hence at the start of every inter-textual encounter; there is an unequal initial
love, where necessarily the giving famishes the receiver.117 The second
phase is re-defined as covenant-love, or chesed, the development of a
persona, which is related to grace and the Freudian concept of antithetical
primal words. The third phase as the rise of an individual inspiration, muse
principle, or ruach, a further accommodation of poetic origins to fresh
poetic aims.118 The fourth phase becomes synonymous with davhar, or
poetic incarnation. The fifth phase is that of total interpretation, or lidrosh.
In the sixth phase, or revisionism, Bloom returns to Luria in order to name a
wholly Romantic accommodation; the esoteric term he coins is gilgul, or
“the reincarnation of a precursor through his descendants’ acts of lifting up
and redeeming the saving sparks of his being from the evil shells or broken
vessels of catastrophe.”119 In Bloom’s continual re-estimation the last truth
of the Primal Scene of Instruction is the self-reflexive irony that “purpose
or aim i.e. meaning—cleaves more closely to origins the more intensely it
strives to distance itself from origins.”120
Bloom writes retrospectively of “my earlier book Kabbalah and
Criticism” saying that the book’s “sole concern was to use Kabbalah, or
Jewish Gnosticism, and Scholem’s analyses as paradigms for a theory of
reading poetry.”121 The secret to understanding Kabbalah and Criticism
lies in Bloom’s throwaway comment that Kabbalah is belated, which
indicates its usefulness as a theoretical mode with which to find analogies
for American poems. It is necessary to provide an extremely brief outline of
Neo-Platonism before adumbrating Bloom’s comparative usage of a belated
theory of creation like Kabbalah. In Neo-Platonic versions of the creation,
the Good is contemplated by Intelligence, such that the world becomes an
emanation of Intelligence’s act of contemplative creation. Bloom notes that
this version of creation combines that of the Priestly Author of Genesis with
the depiction of Deity contained in Plato’s Timaeus. In the latter, the world
of matter is created by a Platonic demiurge, but material creation is
nevertheless still part of the transcendent Oneness that is the Good and its
ideal forms. Transcendent goodness and the fallen world of pain and evil
possess a genealogical relationship with Persian dualism in the sense that
Sammael or Satan operates in the fallen world of matter, while goodness
abides in a strictly non-interventionist capacity beyond the boundaries of
the human world. The Gnostics take this one stage further by claiming that
Neo-Platonic Intelligence was in fact an evil Creator-god, who separates the
fallen world from the Good. The authors of Kabbalah are likened to the
Gnostics because as members of the Galut or Diaspora they are exiled from
Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple. Bloom writes that Kabbalah is
belated because ten sephirot represent an elaboration upon the Neo-Platonic
myth of creation; therefore, instead of the two phases of creation as
portrayed in The Enneads, there are ten different stages or emanations in the
tree of Kabbalah. The inventors of Kabbalah merely elaborated upon
already existing stories of creation and, in particular, that of Plotinus in
order to invent their own “original” creation myth. Kabbalah means
reception and is genealogically related to Neo-Platonic philosophy; thus,
Plotinus’s transcendent hypostases, “the One or the Good, Intelligence, the
Soul,” are introduced as providing unfolding emanatory bridges over the
abyss between Intelligence, Soul, and, ultimately, the natural, or fallen
world of evil.122 Bloom draws an analogy between Freud’s insight that
humans must love an object external to self or else become ill and the over-
flowing of the Good toward the hypostases of an Intelligent-designer, and
the universe so created. The central and most mysterious paradox of
Plotinus is that the One merely divides, but does not lessen or decrease as it
passes into the world of Platonic Ideas or ideal forms, and then into the
region of immortal human souls, and whence, lastly, into the world of
matter. Bloom recapitulates Scholem’s two antithetical doctrines; first,
Valentinus’ what-makes-us-free doctrine and, second, the do-not-dare-
inquire rabbinic reply.123 The rabbis’ stern rebuke directly contradicts the
very idea that man could have secret knowledge of what lies beyond the
reach of the senses, despite the fact that two sections of Jewish Scripture
would seem to display a familiarity with exactly such knowledge, that is
ma’aseh merkabah (the work of the chariot) and ma’aseh bereshit (the
work of creation), which are from Isaiah and Genesis, respectively. The
Kabbalists take the idea that God creates from nothing to mean that God
creates from himself in the sense that God is unknowable and without
representation.124 Bloom notes that in Plotinus emanation is a process out
from God, whereas in Kabbalah it is within God, which sets up the theory
of contraction or catastrophe creation.
Kabbalah is the pursuit of language substitutes for God. There are ten
emanatory Sefirah in the Sephirot tree through which the Divine manifests
itself; these words are derived from the putative sapphire of God’s throne.
The ten are Keter Elyon, the supreme crown, Hokmah, wisdom, Binah,
intelligence, Hesed, love, Din, rigor, Tiferet or mercy, Nezah or endurance,
Hod, majesty, Yesod, foundation, and Malkhut or kingdom. Moses
Cordovero speculated that each Sefirah has a behinot that is six-fold:

1) Concealed before manifestation within the preceding Sefirah; 2)

Actual manifestation in the preceding Sefirah; 3) Appearance as
Sefirah in its own name; 4) Aspect that gives power to the Sefirah
above it, so as to enable that Sefirah to be strong enough to emanate
yet further Sefirot; 5). Aspect that gives power to the Sefirah itself to
emanate out the other Sefirot still concealed within it; 6). Aspect by
which the following Sefirah is in turn emanated out to its own place,
after which the cycle of the six behinot begins again.125

The analogy Bloom draws is that each Sefirah conforms to a poet and each
behinot or discerned aspect to a revisionary ratio as the ephebe works
through his anxiety of influence with reference to the precursive Sefirah.
The garment-making figure of the Bloomian father appears hidden in this
suggestive list of synonyms for the radiant Sefirot: “sayings, names, lights,
powers, crowns, qualities, stages, garments, mirrors, shoots, sources, primal
days, aspects, inner faces, and limbs of God.”126 Bloom mentions that
some Kabbalists termed the Sephirot merely as God’s tools or vessels,
which become broken at each new phase of the catastrophe of creation, and
that, in effect, this acts as a historical metaphor for exile from Israel and
then exile from Spain: “How does one accommodate a fresh and vital new
religious impulse, in a precarious and even catastrophic time of troubles,
when one inherits a religious tradition already so rich and coherent that it
allows very little room for fresh revelations or even speculations?”127 The
Kabbalah is commentary upon Zohar, which was in turn a commentary
upon Jewish Scripture, which means that Kabbalists inherited a psychology
of belatedness, but one that organized the paradoxical homilies of Moses de
Leon and the Oral Tradition into Sephirot and behinot. For Isaac Luria, the
Sephirot were the contractions by which God concealed himself in order to
create new worlds by clearing a space for this concentration-of-Himself-as-
creation to take place.
The second section of Kabbalah and Criticism begins with a meditation
upon Nietzsche’s criticism of the ascetic life as revulsion from bodily
pleasures, and the assertion that Kabbalah is life-affirming because, like the
Nietzschean definition of the artist, it wishes to be different and elsewhere,
and hence desires an end to exile.128 Bloom’s central point is that
Kabbalah stops the movement of the Derridean trace, since it has a
primordial point of origin where presence and absence co-exist by
continuous interplay, or rather God’s will to be present or absent.129 Bloom
then yokes American philosophy in the form of Peirce to Kabbalah by
stating that in the Bloomian-Peircean view a poem is a mediating process
belonging to interpretation and that this is always an evolving act. Peircean
definitions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness are combined with a
summary of Neo-platonic thought, or “immanence in the cause, procession
from the cause, and reversion to the cause—or identity, difference, and the
overcoming of difference by identity.”130 Bloom turns to Iamblichus in
order to define a monad as the cause of identity, a dyad as the instigator of
procession and difference, and a triad as the origin of reversion. Bloom then
notes that poems are not triangular but hexagonal, and after this point, the
difficulty of his most esoteric book slowly dissipates into the familiar six-
fold scene-of-instruction argument. According to Irenaeus the Gnostics
believed that the whole system springing from ignorance was dissolved by
knowledge, which would seem the salvation of the inner man, or the occult
self, that Bloom asserts is separate from the Platonic self that Derridean
discourse assaults.131 Ignorance Bloom parallels with Lurianic Zimzum or
withdrawal and the modes of limitation/contraction, but knowledge with
Tikkun, or restitution, and modes of representation: “The triadic process of
limitation, substitution, and representation, which I shall propose as the
governing dialectic of Post-Enlightenment or Revisionist poetry, is what
Jonas calls a Gnostic concept of happening as opposed to a more orthodox
of Platonic concept of being.”132 Bloom emphasizes that “whereas Neo-
Platonism was a rather conventional theory, in which influence is graciously
received, Gnosticism was a theory of misprision.”133 Bloom adds a further
caveat in that critics themselves are part and parcel of the creative
misprisions or swerves of literary reception and that the “history of poetry
is an endless, defensive civil war,” in which “every new poet tries to see his
precursor as the demiurge,” and yet “to be a strong poet is to be a
demiurge.”134 Bloom writes that for literary purposes emanation means
influence and that Sefirah are analogous to persons, while behinot function
as psychic defenses. With metronomic regularity, he guides his reader
through the analogies to be drawn between behinot and his ratios of
defense. The first behinot in any Sefirah has a hidden aspect before it is
manifested in the prior Sefirah, which indicates that the deepest and most
vital instances of influence are not verbal echoes, image-borrowings or
word-patternings: “A poem is a deep misprision of a previous poem when
we recognize the later poem as being absent rather than present on the
surface of the earlier poem, and yet still being in the earlier poem.”135 The
second behinot occurs when the poem hidden in the earlier poem is
revealed, “which means that we have moved from dialectical images of
presence and absence to synecdochal images of part and whole.”136 The
third behinot attempts to give the illusion of self-sufficiency, and this
unificatory materialization Bloom defines as a mode of metaphor. The
revisionary ratio of daemonization finds an excellent parallel in the fourth
behinot, of which Bloom writes as “the aspect that enabled its precursor to
be strong enough to have emanated the later Sefirah outwards.”137
Dialectically, this ring of Kabbalah is exactly the sublime power that the
ephebe takes on from the precursor, and Bloom underlines its mode is
hyperbole. The fifth behinot is the emanatory power the behinot has to
extend its precursor’s influence outwards, and hence corresponds to
metaphor in which inside becomes outside, but only insofar as this inside
was a prior behinot’s outside. The sixth behinot’s behavior mimics
metalepsis and as such the next behinot of the cycle is set up by the
contraction of the new precursor, before it in turn emanates; therefore,
performing a metaleptic reversal of the fifth behinot’s lateness as its own
earliness. The cyclic aspect of Bloom’s theory is confirmed by this
summing-up: “Cordovero’s theosophical cycle becomes a wheel of images,
or tropes, or defenses, by which one text constantly conducts interchange
with another.”138
The last pages of the second part of Kabbalah and Criticism explore
how Cordovero’s disciple, Isaac Luria, interpreted Kabbalah. Bloom
informs us that “more even than Blake’s parodistic Urizen, Luria’s God is
the ultimate solipsist.”139 This solipsism Bloom reclassifies as the aesthetic
doctrine of “life as art,” or, indeed, criticism as autobiography, and his
human analogy is Pater, a skeptic, whose sense of the experiential was so
emptied out that art had to commence in that void. The “Conclusion” to The
Renaissance becomes a method of demonstrating that modern poetry is
under-determined in concrete meaning to the extent that it is over-
determined in influential terms that provoke defensive levels of abstract
imagery:

In the first, Form is inferior to Content; Form is under-determined,

for the Idea is undeveloped or unspecified, and so imagistic
representation is not wholly appropriate, for such representation must
be specific. In Classical Art, Form and Content are perfectly fitted,
and a determinate idea is represented by a determinate image. In
Romantic Art, the relation between Form and Content breaks down,
 almost completely, because the Idea can no longer be conveyed by
appropriate images.140

From Bloom’s perspective the poems of Stevens refer more to poetic

precursors and metaleptic word-associations than to the object world;
hence, tradition as received by the poet is internalized in a parallel fashion
to abstract metaphors for God undergoing a series of catastrophe creations
like in Luria’s version of Kabbalah. It is worth mentioning here that Bloom
would later castigate Joseph Conrad for the vapid sin of “involuntary
obscurantism” and for writing through the mouthpiece of Marlow that
Kurtz smiled with “indefinable meaning,” even though he praises Conrad
for exceeding “Pater in the reduction of impressionism to a state of
consciousness where the seeing narrator is hopelessly mixed with the seen
narrative . . . awareness that we are only a flux of sensations gazing
outwards upon a flux of impressions.”141 Bloom’s great strength is that he
has the intellectual acumen to unpack difficult works of literature written by
aesthetes; his great weakness is that the technical jargon occasionally makes
his prose obscure, coupled with the fact that his theories are not as relevant
for concrete or primary poetry. Bloom believes that as tradition progresses
the language of modern poetry becomes ever more over-determined, and
hence literal meaning is lost in the wandering of signification that he
ultimately associates with Stevens: “Every poetic trope is an exile from
literal meaning, but only homecoming would be the death of figuration and
so the death of poetry, or the triumph of literal meaning.”142 But he also
means that he is an exile from Jerusalem, and just as European Jewry turned
away from historical events governed by Gentiles, so Bloom turns his back
upon historicisms in one direction and the otiose failure to be precisely
abstract in the other.
Much reference has already been made to Poetry and Repression, so
what follows is limited to those remaining examples that are of interest
from a Jewish angle. Specifically, this means venturing the argument that
Bloom’s treatment of American poetry is decidedly Jewish with the
contrary pendulum swing that American-Jewish poetry seems too Jewish to
be outstandingly American. Even though Bloom speculates that Jewish-
American culture is becoming ever more diluted, his own reading of
American poetry would seem sublimely Jewish. Bloom’s celebrated essay
“The American Sublime” appears syncretically Jewish because Yahweh is
exiled from our cosmos in Bloom’s cosmogony, and when Bloom admires
Emerson’s agonistic figure “I against the abyss” that vacuum corresponds to
the absence of Bloom’s god. We find echoes of Bloom’s Jewish-American
sublime in Nietzsche’s cosmic parable, “Those thinkers in whom all stars
move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound: whoever looks into himself
as into vast space and carries galaxies in himself also knows how irregular
all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.”143 But
this labyrinth of internalized galaxies swiftly becomes recognizable as the
cosmos of Whitman’s poetry, but not without the introduction of the figure
of cleared creative space since “poetic repression brings about the Sublime
wildness of freedom.”144 Though this repression is refigured as a fortuitous
fall that renders the precursor clear as mud, Scholem’s periodization of
religion has become allied to Emerson’s complaint that foregoing
generations beheld God and nature face to face:

. . . we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means

of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of
computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses
have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in
what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which
threatens to absorb all things, engages us.145

Blake would have written cleansing the doors of perception, Coleridge—of

stripping the film of familiarity—but Bloom’s iconoclasm sloughs off the
snakeskin of English lenses; he reads for the self-reliant power of God
within, and hence Emerson begets his own father in a process of “self-
rebegetting.”146 The first idea becomes an initial repression of the primal
scene; this Freudian wisdom is welded to Moses Cordovero: “it is from a
son that a father takes the power, that in turn will enable the son to become
a father.”147 Bloom’s American difference turns out to be an intrinsically
Jewish difference: “This is where I would locate the difference in the
Emersonian or American Sublime, which is closer to the Kabbalistic model
of Cordovero in its reversal between the roles of the fathering force and the
new self of the son . . . the fathering force . . . tends to disappear into the
poetic self or son, rather than the self into the image of the fathering
force.”148 The sublime English latter reminds of Henry IV Part 1, when
Hal apes his father; here the image of the father becomes the same
substance as the son’s immediate self. Or, to take an antithetical example,
the former resembles when John’s Jesus usurps the J-Writer’s Yahweh, and
yet in his ecstatic solipsism Jesus, the Son of Man, cries out that his Father
has deserted him.149 The canon is an essentially Judaic concept in
Bloomian tape-measuring terms; his exemplum from Emerson is Hebraic:
“those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak
in the West.”150 Bloom notes that in Boman “the Hebraic image of
transparency, as a trope for God, sees the divine as being neither in the
world nor over the world, but rather through the world, not spatially but
discontinuously.”151 This distinction fits not just the discontinuous prose
style of Emerson and Bloom’s apprehension of Yahweh as only
discontinuously manifest, but also, Emerson’s will to subordinate nature to
imagination in expressive emulation of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the
handle of being out of doors. Emerson was described by Henry James as a
man without a handle and Emerson himself thought that we are always out
of doors with Shakespeare; Bloom is adamant that the American poet
should overthrow even Shakespeare and that Emerson’s transparent eyeball
metaphor figures the abyss because in this moment of sublimity all that the
self knows is vision and hence becomes discontinuous with history. Bloom
notes Anna Freud’s argument that the sublime obscurity of repression is
reversed as a transparent action, which becomes the return of the repressed,
as in Emerson’s vision: “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see
all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and
parcel of God.”152 In Whitman the cut leaves of grass becomes an almost
boyish oneness with the universe of death as symbolized by the uncut hair
of graves, though instead of transparent-eyeball transcendence, there is
odorless atmosphere and the transparent summer morning of Bloom’s
evening land. Whitman attains discontinuity with the real world by
emptying his mind of outward sensations; he appropriates Emerson’s
visionary metaphors in a Quaker fashion that swaps illusory happiness for
real happiness because Whitman’s material-spiritual sublime merges the
poetry of heaven with the poetry of earth; in moments of vision he blesses
the good and the bad. Song of Myself would seem a declaration of poetic
originality; according to Bloom it afflicts Stevens’ poem The American
Sublime, where Stevens bitterly figures the abyss of the American climate:

But how does one feel?

One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,

The empty spirit
In vacant space
. . . (CP, 130)

Bloom hails Whitman, as Emerson did, as the Central Man, the American
poet proper, but the quotation of sublime poetry that Bloom gives from
Whitman is not a bitter reduction that borders on solipsism, as in the above
quotation from Stevens, but an exciting star-gazing, navel-gazing, sublime
descent into the meteorology of a solitary American selfhood and that self
the particulars of Whitman’s song-dream, the American sublime:

Solitary at midnight in my backyard, my thoughts gone from me a

long while,
Walking the old hills of Judaea with the beautiful, gentle God by my
side,
Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars,
Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring, and the
diameter of eighty thousand miles,
Speeding with tail’d meteors, throwing fire-balls like the rest,
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own mother in its belly,
. . . . (“Song of Myself,” 788–93.)

Bloom writes that this passage from Whitman is reminiscent of

Schopenhauer on the sublime, where lost in the contemplation of the
infinite greatness of the universe, the heavens at night actually bring before
our eyes innumerable worlds and so force upon our consciousness the
immensity of the universe, until the vastness of the worlds which disquieted
us before is annulled by their transcendent dependence upon us. Whitman
fills his cosmological emptiness, and hence Bloom’s Kabbalistic analogy,
with the solitude of American selfhood.
Figures of Capable Imagination boasts an essay entitled “The Sorrows
of American-Jewish Poetry” that I would like to discuss in tandem with
certain ideas in “Jewish Culture and Jewish Identity” from Poetics of
Influence. We have seen that in “Jewish Culture and Jewish Identity,”
Bloom quotes Jung, who asserts that the nomadic Jew will always play the
guest to a host people. Surprisingly, Bloom accepts Jung’s thesis and
advocates that Jewish culture, to the extent that the Jewish Diaspora can
still be considered a people, are to be defined by a text-centered tradition of
literary culture, “if by ‘literary’ one means Biblical and post-Biblical
written tradition.”153 Bloom writes that the concept of study as salvation
was imported into Jewish culture from Hellenic sources, in fact, Plato, and
consequently, he reveals his unease as concerns the difficult-to-impossible
definition of being a Jewish American. Nevertheless, if we accept that
Bloom’s study of literary texts is part of the Jewish culture of the book, then
this melds with the American Protestant tradition of reading by inner light.
But this turning aside from outward culture toward inward regions is
problematized by Bloom, when he quotes Trilling: “This intense conviction
of the existence of the self apart from culture is . . . its noblest and most
generous achievement. . . . We can speak no greater praise of Freud than to
say that he placed this idea at the very center of his thought.”154 Trilling’s
definition of culture needs to be sandwiched next to Arnold’s aesthetic
definition: “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on
all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said
in the world.”155 Bloom even uses the Arnoldian word “touchstones” to
describe Freud and Kafka, whom he elects as modern standard-bearers for
Jewish cultural greatness, pseudomorphic gems inside the seam of German
literature: “I grant the apparent absurdity of touchstones for Jewish culture
whose own Jewish culture was essentially so peripheral, but American
Jewish culture is at least as much an oxymoronic phrase as German Jewish
culture was.”156 Bloom figures America as the land of the westering sun,
which oppositional quality is well-captured by Charles Reznikoff: “My
heart in the East/And I at the farthest West.”157 Bloom comments that all
Jewish identity in the Diaspora is a permanent enigma: “Why do we think
of their cultural achievement as having been Jewish, and what about those
idiosyncratic spirits was incontrovertibly Jewish?”158 Bloom opposes Peter
Gay’s argument that Freud offered only German wisdom by asserting that
“Every close reader of Freud learns that ‘they’ are the Gentiles and ‘we’ are
the Jews.”159 Kafka, by contrast, wrote, “What have I in common with the
Jews?”160 But six years hence this changed to formulations like “we Jews
are not painters. We cannot depict things statically. We see them always in
transition, in movement, as change.”161 I cannot help noticing the
similarity of this statement to Bloom’s comparative, diachronic
interpretation of tradition as an active series of faux isolated texts as
opposed to the New Critical approach which understands texts statically
and in splendid isolation from other texts. When Bloom suggests this
parable as a proof-text of Kafka’s Jewishness and yet universality, he refers
to the Jewish uncanny:

He is thirsty, and is cut off from a spring by a mere clump of bushes.

But he is divided against himself: one part overlooks the whole, sees
that he is standing here and that the spring is just behind him; but
another part notices nothing, has at most a divination that the first
part sees all. But as he notices nothing he cannot drink.162

Bloom mentions that a spring can mean source and origin and that “even if
this was not a Jewish parable when Kafka wrote it, it certainly is one now,
precisely because Kafka wrote it.”163 But would Bloom repudiate a
reading that ostensibly reduces him and his interest in canonical literature to
a cultural context? In answer, I quote Bloom on Bloom: “I stand here, just
past fifty years in age, and worry out loud about the problematics of my
identity, an identity inescapably determined for me by a continuity of
ancestors.”164 Bloom proposes that Jewish identity is not static, since the
“authority of identity is not constancy-in-change, but the originality that
usurps tradition and becomes fresh authority.”165 The ultimate authority
Bloom gives as the J-Writer, while modern writers like Philip Roth must try
and usurp Freud and Kafka as Jewish icons when imagistically defining
their culture—Portnoy’s the id is not the Yid, etc. When Bloom opines that
there has not yet been an American-Jewish culture, he means, “We have a
few good poets . . . but they do not include a Wallace Stevens or Hart
Crane, let alone a Whitman or a Dickinson.”166 Bloom is fascinated by the
“too-familiar incongruity of an overtly Jewish stance being rendered in an
alien idiom.”167 He diagnoses the everything-that-can-happen-has-
happened sorrows of poetic Jewishness thus: “to recognize the self-
truncation, the uneasiness, the inhibiting and poetically destructive
excessive self-consciousness of American-Jewish poetry.”168 But the
aforesaid aesthetic apprehension should be balanced by true love: “The first
secular poets I really cared for were Moishe Leib Halpern, Yankev
Glatshteyn, Mani Leib, H. Leivick,” of which Bloom adjudges Halpern, the
Yiddish Baudelaire, the best.169 The roll call of notable Jewish poets is
extended in “The Sorrows of American Jewish Poetry” to include Jacob
Glatstein, Charles Reznikov, Louis Zukofsky, Delmore Schwartz, Howard
Nemerov, Allen Ginsberg, Karl Shapiro, Irving Feldman, John Hollander,
Samuel Greenberg, and Isaac Rosenberg. Bloom believes that the relative
failures of Jewish writers compel American Jews “to rely upon the cultural
identity of the last phases of Galut, yet we . . . scarcely feel that we are in
Exile.”170 Sometimes in exile, sometimes not, his position wanders but
does not hobgoblin. Nonetheless, Bloom designates Nathanael West as the
“most powerful” Jewish-American writer, even though he lacked “a deeper
awareness that American culture and Jewish culture in America could not
differ much.”171 West was born Weinstein, and Bloom describes him as a
“Jewish anti-Semite” but lists the portrayal of gun-toting violence at the end
of Miss Lonely Hearts as part of a personal American sublime.172 Yet for
all his skill as a writer, West does not impose himself as intrinsically Jewish
since “it will be very difficult for us to recognize ourselves as Jewish
anyway, unless an achievement . . . revises us even as it imposes itself upon
us.”173 Although Bloom can propose that nothing is more self-deceptive
for any Jewish writer than the notion that he can define the Jew, his final
verdict is that Jews constitute “a religion that became a people, rather than a
people that became a religion.”174 Bloom speaks as much for himself as
others when he writes “the increasing enterprise of American-Jewish poetry
is what it must be: persistence in seeking to recover what once our ancestors
had,” and to do this a Jewish writer must confront again “the God of the
Fathers.”175 The Achilles heel for American-Jewish poets would seem
their inability to write about the Holocaust with the horror and authority of
Paul Celan, and yet Bloom’s esoteric criticism, dependent as it is upon the
Nietzschean horror and ecstasy of uncovering origins and ends, elliptically
fulfills this injunction.176
However, to confront the God of his father means confronting the
facticity of received readings of Yahweh, including Protestant readings of
the same. On the topic of Heideggerian facticity, redefined here as the hunt
for Yahwistic being in the life-long situational praxis of reading the canon
from end to end, Bloom has this to say:

In the Heideggerian “hermeneutics of facticity,” our understanding of

the world and of ourselves is limited by tradition and by our factual
circumstance in our history. Instead of the narcissistic ego of Freud,
or the transcendental ego of Husserl, we have the factually existing
ego, a thrown-clear fragment of Being. My own sense of “facticity”
is a blend of the Freudian narcissistic and partly unconscious ego
with a Gnostic or Kabbalistic pneuma or spark, which has been
thrown all right, but not clear or into a possible clearing.177

The symptom of Bloom’s own crisis was the dart of insomniac anxiety that
affected him in the middle of the journey and which alienated him from his
workplace; thus, Bloom further qualifies his toolkit of terms, “Heidegger’s
Faktizität is the modern equivalent of the kenoma, the emptiness into which
we have been and are being thrown. . . . I follow Jonas in so connecting
Valentinus and Heidegger.”178 Bloom’s factual circumstances are
American and Jewish; his work represents a dialogue of Jewish-American
self and Gnostic soul, where soul roughly corresponds to pneuma, and
where his Jewish self/psyche is tormented by the horror of the Holocaust’s
facticity. Bloom cheerfully abhors Heidegger’s Nazi-leanings, but this
overstatement of individuation conceals a debt of influence, since Bloom
redefines what it means to be Jewish in The Book of J and those essays on
Freudian and existential anxiety associated with his fascination with the
influence of Genesis. The thrown-clearness of poetic influence corresponds
to the psychological repression of precursive influence, such that the drive
for originality manufactures its own uncanniness measured as genealogical
distance from Genesis, the contingency of strangeness. It is hard not to push
these ideas into a historical diagnosis because Bloom believes that
normative Judaism begins as an historical response to the destruction of the
Temple by the Romans and because Bloom’s revisionary reading of Jewish
theology owes much to his arbitrary historical status as a post-Holocaust
Jew: “Normative Judaism is a peculiarly strong misreading of the Tanakh
done in order to meet the needs of a Jewish people in Palestine under
occupation by the Romans. What it has to do with 2012, search me . . . it’s a
fossil.”179 Nor will Bloom allow that language speaks to the extent that the
author dies, and the self is smashed to smithereens of discourse, or that
Hamlet is merely marks on a page.180 The point is monumental; great
writers lie themselves into aesthetic being like comets trailing glory;
Bloomian clearing results in the uncovering of the Cherub, and hence
Whitmanian poets know what they have made, that is crisis-lyrics.
Ruin the Sacred Truths boasts material on Genesis, Jeremiah, Job,
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Freud, and
Kafka. There is a leap between Agon and Ruin the Sacred Truths of some 7
years, and the disparity in the choice of subject matter between the two
books tells its own story. In the former Bloom propounds his extravagant
gnostic poetic and applies it with great gusto to his favorite American
authors—Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, Crane, Ashbery, etc., whereas in the
latter his sphere of interest has widened exponentially, the later volume
covers from the earliest part of the Book of Genesis through the Medieval,
the Renaissance, the Romantics and the Modernists right up to a short
cameo appearance by Samuel Beckett. In order to explore the fissures
between Greek and Judaic influences upon canonical literature, the putative
J-Writer and the hypothetical Homer are contrasted in the early part of
Bloom’s narrative. The J-Writer’s chief strength lies in the fact that “he” is
not as religious a writer as the author of the Pharisaic Book of Jubilees is;
Bloom writes that J gives God a dynamic personality that is so original as to
“usurp psychic space and become a fresh center.”181 But so aboriginal is
the J-Writer, and so influential has Genesis been on future tradition, that
Bloom asserts that we are contained by the elliptical J-Writer just as much
as we are contained by Shakespeare and Freud. By which Bloom means
later authors recycle the J-Writer’s uncanny metaphors. The Hebrew
Homer, though, has been bowdlerized by scribes; Bloom laments that we
have lost J’s version of the Akedah story, when Isaac is to be sacrificed by
Abraham. Likewise, the usurpation of the Priestly Author’s creation-scene
that begins the Bible is thought less primal than this translated first
moment:

When there was as yet no shrub of the field upon earth, and as yet no
grasses of field had sprouted, because Yahweh had not sent rain upon
the earth, and there was no man to till the soil, but a flow welled up
from the ground and watered the whole surface of the earth, then
Yahweh molded Adam from the earth’s dust (adamah), and blew into
the nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living being.182

Bloom comments that the Priestly-writer’s Deity “is already almost the God
of Paradise Lost,” while J’s Yahweh is the “first violator of the Second
Commandment,” since Adam is freely molded in Yahweh’s image or zelem,
which means that Adam is theomorphic and Yahweh anthropomorphic.183
Bloom will later argue that Yahweh shares the exuberant personality of
King David, and the implication is that Adam’s creation is a subtle form of
ancestor worship. He will also propose that the western canon starts with
the J-Writer, even though Bloom knows there was a serpent in the Epic of
Gilgamesh, but no Yahwistic Being, and he notes, “it is the largest irony of
J that his God Yahweh had created consciousness in the serpent but not in
the woman or in Adam,” which means the nakedness of primeval
consciousness was anterior to the first human characters from whom
Gentiles and Jews alike descend.184 In so arguing, Bloom reveals a Jewish
bias; he provides an alternative to Heidegger’s etymological grounding of
being in Pre-Socratic Greek sources, but he completely ignores that part of
the Epic of Gilgamesh pertaining to the taming of the natural man, Enkidu,
who comes to a broader form of consciousness after having sex with the
civilized harlot Shamhat.
The next part of Bloom’s published Norton lectures are on the subject of
the prophet Jeremiah, who Bloom heralds as the inaugurator of the
inside/outside dualism that Bloom associates with the figure of askesis. This
revisionary ratio is associated with Emerson and mind/nature dialectics in
Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge and pre-eminently Wordsworth. But
here Jeremiah’s raped and abused stance, his phrase “inward parts” is
interpreted as meaning the fire of inwardness: “what matters is Jeremiah’s
emphasis . . . on the injustice of outwardness and the potential
redemptiveness of our inwardness.”185 Bloom notes that for Jeremiah,
Yahweh has become a God of sufferers rather than a Davidic warrior-god;
the God of suffering is the topic of the Book of Job: “Job’s abominable
friends are what The Marriage of Heaven and Hell calls ‘Angels’, or pious
timeservers, fit to become minor officials of Kafka’s court.”186 Blake
wrote that in the Book of Job, Milton’s Messiah was the Ha-Satan in a
chiasmic reversal of the casting down of Satan into the pit by Christ in
Paradise Lost; the Jobean desire of Milton’s Satan is replicated in Bloom’s
observation that Calvin said of Job, “God would have to create new worlds,
if He wished to satisfy us,” which means humans cannot be satisfied
because they desire too much.187 Bloom adds a supposed Gnostic irony
from Kierkegaard: “Fix your eyes upon Job; even though he terrifies you, it
is not this he wishes, if you yourself do not wish it.”188 His point is that the
vision of God speaking from the whirlwind and of leviathan and behemoth
are of God and God’s creatures; but this intervention is only terrifying if
you accept the first cause as truly first, which Gnostics do not. Bloom’s
confrontational Jewishness and his Gnostic love of the abyss indicate what
came first: “When Milton invokes the Holy Spirit as Muse in Book I, he
asks us implicitly to recall that the Muses originally were the spirits of those
springs dedicated to the triumph of Zeus over the titanic gods of the
abyss.”189 This abyss becomes the universal blank of nature over which
Milton in his blindness broods and which is Milton’s greatest foe in the
combat of creativity versus nonentity. Bloom reminds his audience that the
sublime takes place between origin and ends since no one speaks of “Father
Nature,” and hence the abyss which Milton’s ephebe Wordsworth broods
upon “is at once the ego’s need and its attempt to be unfathered, to originate
itself and thereby refuse acknowledgement to a superior power.”190
The Judaic seam in Ruin the Sacred Truths reappears as a discussion of
the Jewishness of Freud’s thought, in which “psychoanalysis becomes
another parable of a people always homeless . . . who must seek a
perpetually deferred fulfillment in time.”191 The religion of Akiba is
oriental by inference and Bloom writes: “Western conceptualization is
Greek, and yet Western religion, however conceptualized, is not.”192
Bloom investigates how after Alexander’s conquest Greek thought seeped
into Jewish life, such that Torah-learning and the sanctification of
instruction now represented a saving intellectual grace. Book culture in a
Platonic mold saved the Jews and yet separates normative Judaism from the
religious vision of the Yahwist. That Bloomian phrase of historical
revelation, “I am that I am,” becomes re-parceled as “what matters are the
times when God intervenes and Israel responds.”193 Bloom speculates that
“a certain curious sense of interiority marks Jewish thought,” which Bloom
relates to the Second Commandment’s prohibition.194 Thus, the description
of the Temple being built reminds of the bildungsroman involved in
Freudian transference, where the transference of authority from a figure in
the patient’s past to the psychoanalyst is the first principle of therapy,
especially if the neurotic affect is repressed in the manner of a censorious
“thou shalt not.” Taboo repressions that hinder the free associations of
poetic afflatus, the hum of Whitmanian thoughts evaded in Stevensian
imagery, become for Bloom not a pushing under or pushing down but “an
estrangement from representations.”195 In fact, Bloom calls the Second
Commandment primal repression and implies that Freud’s determination
that everything potentially has meaning to be similar to rabbinical memory,
in which everything is already contained in the Bible. Repression or
Verdrängung becomes the flight from representations, the presumption of
god-like emulation, which Bloom connects to the sin of Prometheus. Bloom
notes that in Moses and Monotheism, Freud speculates that Moses was
Egyptian and that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare, thus doing away
with two paternal rivals. Freud’s figure of the devoured father could not be
more different from Yahweh’s paternal covenant of an elected love for
Israel; Bloom proposes that the Jewish prophets stand against the injustice
of the outside world and that this interiority creates the desire associated
with inwardness.196 Bloom identifies the prophetic conscience not just
with the superego, but also with an unending burden that quests for more
life, though fully in the knowledge that the prophetic work cannot be
finished: “Jewish dualism is neither the split between body and soul nor the
abyss between subject and object . . . it is the ceaseless agon within the self
not only against all outward injustice but also against . . . the injustice of
outwardness.”197 Interiority therefore negates idolatry with the latter’s
bondage to the bodily eye because sense in everything means over-
determination and character-as-fate battling against outward injustice. The
ego, on the other hand, is interpreted as the frontier of the mental and the
physical in contrast to the Romantic self with its dual split between
adverting mind and object in nature; therefore, inwardness “is the true name
of the bodily ego.”198 Bloom argues that Freud’s intrinsic Jewishness is
abundantly apparent in his consuming passion for interpretation, but this
observation applies equally to Bloom, who yokes the inwardness of
Freudian psychology to the fiery prophetic interiority of Jeremiah.
Bloom’s working hypothesis for interpreting Kafka is that this Jewish
writer perversely did everything he could to evade analysis. The
quintessential parable for his reading is this Kafkan statement that plays
upon the fact that Kafka in Czech means crow: “the crows maintain that a
single crow could destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves
nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the
impossibility of crows.”199 Here Bloom modestly admits that “there can be
no ultimate coherence to my Gnostic interpretation . . . because Kafka
refuses the Gnostic quest for the alien God.”200 He disagrees with Milena
Jesenká’s synopsis that Kafka was “a man of insight who was frightened of
life. . . . He saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail
and destroy defenseless man. . . . All his works describe the terror of
mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings.”201 Bloom
thinks she distorts Kafka’s evasiveness, his interest in Jewish religion which
hungrily draws Bloom toward this Jewish genius. How oddly Kafka seems
to pre-figure Bloom’s own presentiments with regard to the nihilistic
possibilities of the Yahweh-less universe of the Gnostic speculator:

Max Brod, responding to Kafka’s now-famous remark—“we are

nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head”—explained to his
friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both
sinful and evil. “No,” Kafka replied, “I believe we are not such a
radical relapse of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad
day.” Playing the straight man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant
there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and charmingly
said: “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for
us.”202

Bloom believes that poetic-meaning is impossible in a fallen world.

However, he remarks that “in Kafka’s world as in Freud’s, or in Scholem’s,
or in any world deeply informed by Jewish memory, there is necessarily
sense in everything, total sense, even though Kafka refuses to aid you in
getting at or close to it.”203 Jewish sense dominates Bloom’s reading of the
figure of Odradek too much; he misses that the uncanny paterfamilias,
which he interprets as a return of the repressed, would seem constructed
from a Jewish star and a Christian cross-bar. The narrator describes the
figure as a broken-down remnant of threads, but he finds the thought of
acculturation surviving him painful. Bloom reads Kafka’s characters as
being trapped in the Kenoma and menaced by a Gnostic dread of Archons,
or those petty bureaucratic officials who rule the primary world. The best
example of this is to be found in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” a dark
Jewish saying that almost explodes the narrative of The Trial. Bloom offers
the comparison that just as “Freudian man nurtures the desire to destroy the
father, so even Joseph K has his own unfulfilled wishes against the image of
the Law.”204 Kafka writes that the man who is excluded from the Law
perceives in the darkness of the guardian’s doorway a radiance that streams
immortally from the door of the Law, and this reminds of Bloom’s vignette
in which the ephebe poet experiences the baleful otherness of the Covering
Cherub as a burning brightness against a framing darkness, since these are
visions of the Creation gone malevolent and entrapping.205 My suspicion is
confirmed, when Bloom ends his chapter on Kafka by writing, “no other
modern Jewish author troubles us with so strong an impression that we are
in the presence of what Scholem called ‘the strong light of the canonical, of
the perfection that destroys’.”206 Thus, Joseph K is deemed another
jackdaw, “another Kafkan crow in a cosmos of crows . . . waiting for that
new Torah that will not be revealed.”207 Bloom argues that traditional
questers suffer ordeal by landscape, whereas Joseph K is menaced by
officious time-servers encouraged by the remnant of the radiance itself.208
He makes much of the biographical information that, while writing The
Hunter Gracchus, Kafka was studying Hebrew in a doomed effort to firmly
ground his identity by journeying to Palestine: “we may call the voyages of
the dead but never-buried Gracchus a trope for Kafka’s belated study of his
ancestral language.”209 Gracchus means crow in Latin, and so the
impossibility of crows means the impossibility of hope, of a loving
Pleroma, or of the carrion-hunter reaching Zion. A brilliant example of this
impossibility of analysis is contained in the aphorism: “what is laid upon us
is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given,” which negative
Bloom interprets as Judaism, or “the spiritual form of Kafka’s self-
conscious Jewishness,” while the positive signifies the pastness of the Law
in comparison to the lateness of Kafkan evasiveness.210 Fearfully, the
thought of helping Gracchus is one that makes ordinary people take to their
beds, and Kafka relates there is sense in that, even though the enormity of
the nationalistically self-conscious German negative snuffed out the lives of
his sisters.
The Book of J is divided into three main sections, the life of the
authoress, a new translation of the J strand of Genesis, and a commentary
upon the putative book by Bloom. It lies at the heart of my narrative
because here Bloom deconstructs the template of normative Judaism and
hence his own religious background. The problem instantly arises of how to
define Orthodox Judaism in the sense of showing what Bloom reacts
against. Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith provide a necessarily brief
introduction to these hallowed matters. The first principle is that God is the
creator and the guide; Bloom argues that Yahweh is a literary character and
that one should read by inner light. The second principle is that Yahweh is
alone God and is One, whereas Bloom thinks that the cult of Yahweh wins
an agon with other gods, and that monotheism was introduced after the
Persian captivity. The third principle states that Yahweh is immaterial and
without body; Bloom catalogues humanoid manifestations of Yahweh. The
fourth principle emphasizes that Yahweh is first and last; Bloom imagines
earlier textual versions of Yahweh and delights in tracing further
genealogies of Yahwistic gods stretching down to the perpetual present. The
fifth principle asserts that Jews must pray to Yahweh alone; Bloom instead
recites poems at times of trouble. The sixth principle grants the status of
truth to the words of the Prophets; Bloom recounts that the Bible is literary
fiction of an exuberant kind and therefore gives equal weight to the
aesthetic utterance of non-Judaic prophets. The seventh principle refers to
Moses as a Prophet and as a repository of God’s truth; Bloom rationally
denies the Mosaic covenant with Yahweh but feels guilt. The eighth
principle outlines that Torah is the work of Moses but dictated by God;
Bloom champions the Documentary Hypothesis and implies that Moses is a
literary creation. The ninth principle adumbrates that Torah cannot be
exchanged for another document; Bloom substitutes The Book of J. The
tenth principle indicates that Yahweh reads men’s thoughts and
comprehends all their actions; Bloom believes gods were written by men in
opposition to the idea that gods write in men’s hearts; we have free-will.
The eleventh principle articles that Yahweh rewards or punishes those who
keep or break his commandments; Bloom’s entire career is obsessed with
breaking the Second Commandment and asserting that priests manufacture
mind-forged manacles. The twelfth principle predicts the coming of a
Messiah; Bloom quotes Jesus as saying, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” when
Peter proclaims him Messiah, but nowhere identifies Yeshua, or anyone
else, as God’s anointed, the Davidic deliverer of the Jews. Akiba
proclaimed Ben Kochbar as Messiah, and Bloom reflects that this “terrible
mistake” caused a Holocaust even more severe than the German one.211
Maimonides associates the Messiah with the rebuilding of the Temple,
while Bloom warns that Al-Aqsar Mosque must never be destroyed.212
The thirteenth principle has faith in the revival of the dead; Bloom hates the
idea of the rapture in the context of Christian America, for him immortality
comes from literary ability and its canonical reception. There are other core
elements of Judaism that Bloom seems to doubt; his interest in canon-
formation means that he questions the presence of poems and wisdom
literature in the canonical books of the Bible, and this obstinacy undermines
Akiba’s judgment in assembling the canon. Bloom exercises great
skepticism with regard to Yahweh’s covenant being a blessing: “I will make
you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12.1-2); Yahweh’s interventions are more
often figured as personal disasters for those concerned. As a Nietzschean,
Bloom philosophically prefers the will-to-power to being a do-gooder; his
supreme fiction is a warrior-god. Above all, Bloom argues that Yahweh is a
literary creation because men invent gods from that portion of eternity that
exists in their imagination.
Bloom champions the Documentary Hypothesis, the theory that Genesis
was authored by a number of now nameless writers, whose efforts were
homogenized at the time of Ezra the Scribe and subsequently assigned to
Moses. Perhaps drawing on the disguised male voice of The Song of Songs,
Bloom claims that an anonymous great lady called Gevurah and/or
Bathsheba wrote the J strand of Genesis; since Ezra preached endogamy
and Jewish descent is matrilineal, J’s identification with a Hittite woman
seems ironic. Her work is compared to children’s fiction with the result that
J’s Yahweh is read as being at times rather temperamental. The
consequence of this biographical speculation is that the earliest strand of the
Bible becomes de-sacralized; a secular product of the Solomonic
Enlightenment that followed the heroic age of David. Bloom notes that the
court of David was essentially a military society “with the hero-king
presiding,” whereas the age of Solomon was cultured and urban, but still
locating its ideal in the charismatic David.213 Bloom’s Gnostic reading is
revealed by his first thought, one over-determined by Blake: “Blake . . .
taught us that a crucial aspect of religious history is the process of
‘choosing forms of worship from poetic tales’.”214 Bloom speculates that J
was influenced by prior writings on the cult of Yahweh that in all likelihood
would reveal to us a grotesquely primitive form of worship that the
enlightened Gevurah satirized. His argument is that the J-Writer was
someone of great originality in the representation of inter-personal struggle,
and that the Solomonic enlightenment was a kind of Pleroma from which
the later Kenoma of Scriptural redaction produced the building blocks of
normative Judaism.
I want to consider Bloom’s controversial invention of J as an authorial
identity before moving onto a consideration of his commentary upon The
Book of J. Tradition Bloom thinks arbitrary; therefore, he lists salient
differences between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, such as the Judaic
differentiation of Scripture into teachings, prophets, writings, or Torah,
Nevi’im, and Kethuvim, respectively. He tuts at the less than arbitrary
ending of the Christian Bible with Malachi proclaiming Elijah’s return (as
John the Baptist) rather than the rebuilding of the Temple in II
Chronicles.215 Nevertheless, the first five books of the Bibles of both faiths
are the same, but with different names; the Jews chose to call their Torah
chapters by the first words in each book; thus, Genesis is christened “In the
Beginning,” Exodus—“Names,” Deuteronomy—“Words,” Leviticus
—“And He called,” while Numbers is rendered “In the Wilderness.” Bloom
emphasizes that chapter and verse divisions in the Bible are purely arbitrary,
the divisions first occurring hundreds of years after their inception, and
hence they tell us nothing with regard to the intentions of the original
authors. What Bloom designates “The Book of J” was composed between
nineteen-hundred years and twenty-three-hundred years before chapter
divisions were imposed upon the source material. According to the
Documentary Hypothesis popularized by Graf, Vatke, and Wellhausen, the
earliest books of the Bible were not written by Moses but by a number of
different authors at different periods in time. Thus, J stands for the Jahwist,
while what Bloom calls later censorings of J are entitled E after the Elohist.
Bloom includes the information that J only utilizes Elohim to refer to divine
beings plural and that the word Yahweh was rendered secret because of its
magical potential. P equates to the Priestly Author who wrote Leviticus, D
for the Deuteronomist, and R for Redactor. R would seem the villain of
Bloom’s narrative, since he did the most editorial damage to J’s artistic
purpose. Bloom is fundamentally opposed to Robert Alter’s thesis that the
Pentateuch is a work of composite artistry.216 The strangeness of Bloom’s
hypothesis has been severely criticized by Alter, who maligns Rosenberg’s
translation. For example, Alter criticizes Rosenberg for multiplying non-
existent puns on the word “boundary,” which contends with Bloom’s thesis
that J was a playful ironist.217 The entire slant of Bloom’s Gnostic reading
is that J was a Great Original and that poetic earliness is aesthetically
superior to priestly belatedness.
Bloom identifies J as a highly sophisticated female member of the
Solomonic elite, who entertained a friendly rivalry with the Court historian
who wrote 2 Samuel. He readily admits that his reading is mostly
imaginative surmise and yet dismisses other attempts to place J as either
scholarly fictions or else religious fantasies. The kernel of Bloom’s reading
is that J’s Yahweh is a literary character; Bloom compares this
representation with other literary characters and, in particular, King Lear;
Hamlet he likens to Mark’s Jesus. Blasphemous as it sounds, Bloom
imagines an all-too-human Yahweh, a god who devours roast beef and
curds, whose hands seal Noah’s ark, who walks in the cool of the Eden
evening. For Bloom, J’s characteristic style is that of the sublime irony of
god’s incommensurability, when dealing with biblical characters, which is
akin to Kafka’s Gracchus. He rejects the post-exilic Deity as a safely
transcendentalized gaseous vapor in order to embrace J’s impish portrayal
of Yahweh. Comparisons with Blake yield to Emerson, who is quoted as
saying that the mind revolts against the Bible wearing black cloth and, more
importantly, that churches are not built on the truth of religion but on tropes
and figures of powerful writers. This agonistic idea reduces to an
Orc/Urizen binary, as Bloom attempts to unbrick what he sees as an
essentially aesthetic enterprise from normative moralists and the
didacticism of priests. The argument is advanced, that J escapes genre, and
this to nullify David Damrosch’s thesis that Genesis contains too many
different styles of writing for collocation under the umbrella of single-
authorship: “recent critics of the French variety have joined in, cheerfully
destroying what they regard as the capitalistic social myth of individual
creativity . . . they want to persuade us that a demiurgical ‘language’
dictates and authors merely serve as a medium.”218 Bloom repudiates the
demiurge language and its literary archons; he hails J’s elliptical creation as
a work so comprehensive and universal that three of the great world
religions were founded there, that is Judaism, Christianity, and Mormonism.
The result is the Romantic image of authorship, a feminine scribe producing
scrolls as texts that reflect a unified consciousness, “a single, magnificent
mind, holding reality together in the grand, single image of Yahweh, whom
we may call J’s awakened imagination.”219 Bloom writes that he hears in J
an ever early freshness and that E represents a revised or censored J,
whereas the Deuteronomists numbering three or more provide a history of
King Josiah’s puritan reforms. By this means, he champions J against the
Priestly P, who composed alternative and pious versions of J’s stories and
ultimately R, who, from Frye’s perspective, pulverized the various sources
so thoroughly that “we are totally unable to reconstitute any of them, J
included.”220
Bloom finds the passionless Platonic antithesis of J’s anthropomorphic
Yahweh in the theologizing of Philo of Alexandria, the founder of the idea
that everything in Torah is divine because the holy word of God was
dictated through His medium, Moses. The liveliness of J’s writing is
accounted for by its profane comic potential, which seems closer to
dramatic irony, insofar as the words and actions of a character reverberate
with readerly meanings lost on the characters themselves. Stylistically, this
tragic form of irony is elliptical and provocative in the sense of stirring the
normative out of their torpor with defamiliarizing juxtapositions, as in the
instance of Esau, who barters his birthright for a mess of pottage. Bloom
portrays himself as Falstaffian, but a truer analogy is provided by
Coleridge’s insight into the sublime style of Milton, since all things become
Bloom. The paratactic J is economical and wields dramatic irony, while
Bloom thrives on unsettling his readers by honoring her perceived ellipses,
and this to the extent of undermining normative definitions of divinity. J
produces no cloven-fictions since the creation of man is monistic, with no
division of body and soul, though it might be compared to the Egyptian
myth of man’s creation, in which the figure of a potter’s wheel also appears.
Bloom compares J’s creation-of-man narrative to a child making mud pies
with his hands and grotesquely blowing life into the figurine’s nostrils. In
what for me is the most moving part of the book, Bloom sows together a
cento of texts from The Psalms and The Book of Job, in order to resurrect
what may have been J’s creation scene, the one that the Priestly Author’s
account of creation replaced. Bloom’s suspicion is that this creation scene
was censored because it bore too close a resemblance to a Canaanite legend,
in which the anthropomorphic storm god Baal fought Yamm with the help
of his wife and sister, Anat, and hence brought order to the chaos of the sea:
“Certainly J knew this story, and probably she knew also the Babylonian
epic Enuma Elis, in which the storm god Marduk battles Tiamat, goddess of
the sea.”221 Bloom notes that Psalm 74 sings the praises of a God who
“didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou breakest the heads of the dragons
in the waters.” Here Yahweh is interpreted as falling like a rainstorm upon
his enemies:

In creating, Yahweh rode above the Deep, which rose against him.
Tehom, queen of the Deep, sought to drown out Yahweh’s Creation,
but he rode against her in his chariot of fire. . . . Yahweh destroyed
her vassal Leviathan with one great blow to the monster’s skull,
while he ended Rahab by thrusting a sword into her heart. The waters
fled backward, awed by the voice of Yahweh, and Tehom fearfully
surrendered. Yahweh shouted his triumph, and dried up the
floods.222

Bloom’s agonistic creation narrative does not display Yahwistic irony; more
generally, he foists a supreme fiction with the temperament of a child on the
trembling universe, a triumphant charioteer that reacts angrily when
confronted with disobedience. Bloom himself notes that “the Yahwist,
unlike every subsequent biblical writer, shows no awe or fear of
Yahweh.”223 His entire reading depends upon the idea that from the
perspective of later editors the J-Writer breaks the Second Commandment;
he reveals knowledge of earlier antique writers, but J is the chosen Jewish
text, the author of the story most transformed by Christianity.
Bloom borrows from Gerhard von Rad’s argument that the undersong of
the Yahwist is always the sublimities of David’s monarchy and the ironic
coda of less successful ancestors. Bloom thinks J a woman because Sarai,
Rachel, and Tamar are portrayed as heroines and because the creation of
Eve is given more textual space than that of Adam. He describes his
essentialistic intuition that J was feminine as a sublime fiction, while her
own imaginative triumph, the Davidic Yahweh, is revealed in subtle
innuendoes to the heroic age of the United Monarchy. Yet, Bloom mentions
that David was as fervent in love as in war and that he had abundant wives
and concubines, while Solomon enjoyed hundreds of both. J’s depiction of
polygamy is not at all optimistic; Sarai persecutes Hagar, while Rachel is
jealous of Leah, and Rebecca cannot brook a rival. For Bloom, David is the
hero of the Jewish Bible much more so than Moses, although he does not
allow that The Book of J once encompassed the life of David and surmises
that it ends with the burying of Moses’ body in an unmarked grave because
this is antithetical to the making of Adam from the red clay. Bloom gushes
that he is charmed by David and that his charisma is due to originality: “He
is an original, yet of that rarest sort whose advent establishes a new center,
whose freshness has nothing of the eccentric in it.”224 J’s putative nostalgia
for David places J as a throwback to the age of the Solomonic
Enlightenment, a woman intent on satirizing the ailing age of Rehoboam.
The golden calf that causes Moses to break the tablets of the Law alludes to
Jeroboam’s construction of two golden calves at the rival shrines of Bethel
and Dan.225 The hapless Rehoboam allows the United Monarch to split
into the rival states of Israel and Judea; Bloom surveys J’s punning word
play upon the root of Rehoboam’s name and the sarcasm readily associable
with her consequent references to wide and open spaces. J’s characters
quest to hold the blessing of Yahweh, and hence to become the ancestors to
David: “Adam receives Eden, and Moses his unwilling mission, because
David is to be.”226 David moves the imagination of his own people, Bloom
suggests, because David represents more life “and the promise of yet more
life into a time without boundaries.”227 It is of great dramatic irony that
Bloom calls J’s Yahweh “interventionist” and that he revels in David’s
adulterous exuberance in slaying Uriah the Hittite.
Bloom’s inventive critique relies upon comparison with like texts such
as those written by the Court Historian author of II Samuel; he also notes
that “the Tree of Life is prevalent in the literature of the ancient Middle
East.”228 The entire Documentary Hypothesis is dependent upon an
exacting labor of close reading, but a destructive rather than a constructive
one, Moses, the traditional author of the text is deconstructed into a number
of narrative strands, which are historicized into different eras according to
religious imagery. Bloom’s J is effectively the supplement to E, P, and D. It
is characteristic of Bloom’s later criticism that he engages more with
character, whether these are the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s plays,
or the inhabitants of J’s psycho-dramas, in which various personalities
compete for the Yahwistic blessing. The Davidic blessing of more life is
repeatedly propounded by Bloom, who underlines that the opposite of
successful agonistic struggle for the blessing is to be scattered and,
therefore, forgotten. Ironically, Bloom’s gnosis means that he subtly picks
up on moments when Yahweh is less than effective, an example being the
fall-narrative. In Bloom’s reading of J there is no fall, or guilt, just
disobedience with regard to Yahweh’s warning not to eat of the Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil: “J has given us no candidates for culpability,
except perhaps Yahweh, already portrayed as a bungler in his original
creation of candidates fit for Adam.”229 Bloom takes J to be a woman
because Bloom thinks that the text hints at process, Adam was made from
mud, but Eve from an altogether more human source. But Bloom’s
argument relies on just such an aggregative premise, since J enables not just
E and P, but also later writers, who are her pupils in opposition to Philo’s
belief in the Moses hypothesis. This hermeneutic base applies in almost
every example of which Bloom treats: “His (Yahweh’s) invective against
the serpent is so excessive that it encouraged two strong misreadings of J,
one normative Judaic and Christian, the other Gnostic, the first seeing the
poor snake as Satan, the second weirdly exalting him as a liberator.”230
Ironically, Bloom points out that as well as being a God of invective, the
God of Eden is also a mothering Deity whose human creations behave like
naughty children. A God, chary of boundaries, who baffles monoglot
speech because man is in danger of challenging the boundary between man
and God in Babel/Babylon, is hardly the monologic deity of the Redactor.
Bloom is drawn to the way that Abraham haggles with Yahweh, in order to
save the benighted inhabitants of Sodom for their contempt of Yahweh in
buggering strangers, and to the blessing that is conferred on Jacob whose
“progress and survival are marked by fraud or tricksterism, by heel-
clutching.”231 At least J likes Jacob and gives him preferential treatment in
comparison with Esau, J’s baffled natural man, the father of the Edomites,
whose leader, Saul, potentially brought the worship of Yahweh into Canaan,
and this to cement his reign. Bloom writes that born-red Esau does not
interest the sophisticated and courtly J, who celebrates the usurper David. In
spite of J’s elegant distaste for the rugged-outdoor type, Bloom describes
her version of charisma as having Wordsworthian overtones: “J’s vision of
the charismatic is that its quality lets us envision a time without boundaries,
a sense of something ever more about to be, a dream that is no dream but
rather a dynamic breaking through into a perpetually fresh vitalism, the true
abundance of Yahweh’s promise to those he favors.”232 Jacob and Joseph
carry the blessing and are smooth, insofar as Joseph is recognized as the
archetype for all those court Jews to come through the ages, down to Henry
Kissinger in the Nixon-Ford era.233 The haunting specter of anti-Semitism
is never very far away from Bloom’s mind, and after admitting that Joseph
was a sharp trader, “reducing all the farmers of Egypt to the status of serfs,”
he laments that this passage has been used by the Christian tormentors of
Jews throughout the ages.234
Bloom muses upon the customary uncanniness of the unsuitability of
Moses’ character to lead his people out of bondage: “anger, impatience, and
a deep anxiety about his own hold on authority.”235 The outstanding
moment for Bloom in the story of Exodus is the patently blasphemous
invitation to view Yahweh, who (like J) can hardly control his testy distaste
for the plebs of Israel and their seventy representatives. Bloom addresses
himself to this true vision of the western sublime as the elders of Zion
witness the feet of their God walking on a pavement of sapphire,
momentarily forgetting of course that the event takes place in the Middle
East.236 Such a sight—that of transparently seeing the God of Israel—
clashes dramatically with the Second Commandment, which solemn
directive not to represent Deity underpins Bloom’s sublime description of
how Blake’s Tyger is made from revisionary ratios. Bloom effectively
invents his own J-writer and a personalized Supreme Fiction superior to the
aesthetic failure of God in Paradise Lost. Yahweh bears a striking
resemblance to Blake’s Tyger, a dangerous and not particularly moral
creature that leaps off the page into the reader’s imagination. Bloom’s
depiction is Gnostic through and through because the Pleroma has an imp-
like vitalistic Deity, and the Kenoma a remote gaseous vapor that
apologizes for the calamity of the captivity. The vital spark or daemon of
his dynamic Deity promises the breath of life that was grotesquely pumped
into Adam’s earthy figurine and which defamiliarizing uncanniness
pervades canonical strangeness. Agon is a Hellenic ideal, and Bloom cannot
reconcile this with obedience for the father, or the troubling thought that in
the Pentateuch human life does not own itself but is the property of the
dynastic Yahweh and, consequently, a people struggling to be a nation.237
His irreconcilable explanation is that the true root of Judaism was
dominated by the ideal of a warrior-king and his womanly poet-laureate,
who wrote with dramatic irony about agonists that contested with each
other for the blessing of Yahweh. An excellent example of the mixing of
sublimity and irony occurs when Bloom picks out the incident of Balaam
and the Angel for special consideration because the sublimity of an angelic
presence opposes the high comedy of a pompous timeserver being
humiliated by a wise beast of burden. Yet, Bloom discerns that unlike the
moaning of the Israelites, who wander in a wilderness after obtaining the
Yahwistic blessing, and who are punished for their pains, Balaam’s talking
ass is perfectly justified in talking back to his master. Bloom ends his
commentary upon Moses with Kafkan irony: “Any man’s life . . . is not
long enough to enter Canaan.”238 Bloom explains away J’s preference for
words and reluctance to represent images as her wariness in representing
David, the passion of her desire. This statement is open to the objection that
J on David may have been lost, or edited, and hardly agrees with Bloom’s
argument that J’s imagination was uninhibited: “the religious version of
imagination is always stunted by anxieties of representation.”239 The
Israelites were a religion that became a people because the central point of
J’s text is the agon for the blessing of Yahweh, “the basis for J’s fivefold
repetition of Yahweh’s blessing.”240 That Yahweh is here when he is here
and not when he is not, reduces to perpetual potential for power, a restless
dynamism that refuses to be confined. Bloom’s deity is lively because he
creates life and all life derives from this act and its eternal repetition, even if
the suppression of J’s creation narrative has been replaced by P’s cosmic
harvest festival.241 Blakean Bloom ultimately emphasizes that the largest
insight into the psychology of Yahweh is that, despite endless energetic
exuberance, He sets limits, boundaries, contexts for his creations and does
not allow presumptuous or contemptuous violations.242 The redactors
framed Yahweh’s fearful symmetry; thus, Bloom deconstructs the covenant
of Orthodox Judaism and one is left with the feeling that he has remade
Scripture in his own image.
In Jesus and Yahweh, Bloom ruminates over the creation of the Christian
myth, compares Christ and Yeshua to Yahweh and God the Father, and
indulges his penchant for Kabbalistic speculation. Scholem’s scholarship
would seem the dominant influence on Kabbalah and Criticism and the
latter portions of Jesus and Yahweh. Idel I see as an important later, but
much lesser, influence upon Bloom’s thought, although he intelligently
underlines that Bloom’s “spiritual quest is quintessential.”243 Near the start
of Omens of Millennium, Bloom remarks that “there are angels throughout
the Hebrew Bible but they are rarely central concerns, and frequently they
are editorial revisions, surrogates for Yahweh whenever the priestly
redactors felt the early J-Writer was being too daring in the depiction of
God.”244 The first few pages of Jesus and Yahweh reverse this humanizing
tendency, insofar as Bloom proposes that “Yeshua was transformed into a
theological God” by New-Testament Christology and then by Hellenistic
philosophy.245 Likewise, the all-too-human Yahweh of the primal text is
transmogrified by the Redactor’s preference for the Priestly Author and the
Deuteronomist and vanishes beneath later rabbinical writings. Allied to this
insight is the replacement of Yeshua with Christos, since Bloom’s belief is
that John is the most anxious in tone of all the Gospel writers. The original
conclusion to John was that of the story of doubting Thomas, “a manifest
metaphor for a sect or coven undergoing a crisis of faith.”246 These
frustrated expectations are further focused with reference to what Bloom
describes as the impossibility of the New or belated Testament competing
with the Hebrew Bible and “the Yahwist in particular.”247 From this
perspective, the Johannine mode is seen as a lie against time, such that John
the Baptist states, “He who comes after me ranks before me” (Jn 1.15).
Moses is similarly belittled when placed in comparison with Jesus: “No one
has ascended into heaven but he who has descended from heaven, the Son
of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the
son of man be lifted up” (Jn 3.13-14). Bloom comments that John is a
revisionary genius and that “Moses was only a part, but Jesus is the
fulfilling whole.”248 Thus, the Jews eat manna but die, whereas Jesus
offers living bread so that Christians can live eternally, which indicates that
John invents a Christian counter-sublime. The phrase “before Abraham
was, I am” (Jn 8.58) is interpreted as a faux fulfillment of Yahweh’s “I am
that I am,” hinting that John’s Jesus has more agonistic intensity than J’s
Moses or Abraham. John is berated as a Jewish anti-Semite because of his
nastiness to the Pharisees and for his portrayal of the Judas myth that
Bloom thinks is the cause of murderous anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Paul is
subjected to Nietzschean scrutiny, as someone who wanted power and gains
it over Exodus 32:32, where Moses offers his life as atonement for the
sinfulness of worshiping the golden calf, to which Paul replies: “For I could
wish that I myself were accused and cut off from Christ for the sake of my
brethren” (Rom. 9.3). Paul, therefore, offers to suffer eternal damnation by
becoming cut off from Christ, which Bloom decides is a hyperbolic reply to
Moses, who by offering his life only wishes to atone for the orgiastic
worship of the golden calf.249 Paul is hailed as the writer who sanctified
the New Testament, or the later as earlier, and therefore as the man, who
relegated Jewish Scripture to the status of an old-timer Testament, while
Bloom wishes to relegate the Talmud to the status of a belated Testament
with reference to the primal Book of J.
Bloom’s argument is that John’s rhetoric places Christian life above
Jewish death and owes much textually to Paul, since Paul’s epistles are the
earliest surviving Christian writings, and hence Paul is the crucial founder
of the Christian faith. Though he is a Pharisaic thinker, Paul begins the
shrinkage of Yahweh to what Bloom figures as the Blakean Nobodaddy, a
distant cosmic law-giver, almost entirely supplanted by the kenosis of Jesus,
the god who became man in order to atone for Adam’s sin. Bloom is not
enamored of Paul, whom he describes as being like a character in Dickens,
and, indeed, a psychosexual crank. He is, however, found by Mark, the next
earliest of the first Christian writers. If repressed homosexual-longing and a
failure to break completely with Jerusalem are beyond Bloom’s
understanding, then Mark is an entirely different matter, since Mark’s Jesus
is secretive and so is Mark. Bloom would seem to have his interest pricked
because Mark proclaims with considerable anxiety in relation to a putative
precursor, the first Isaiah, and his unseeing listeners: “Mark swerves from
Isaiah by portraying the disciples as not very bright students of a
quicksilver master.”250 Bloom’s liking for Mark is partly engendered by
the mercurial nature of the Christ portrayed by Mark, since in this Gospel
Jesus simply provokes a species of astonishment in all whom he meets,
which is deemed too idiosyncratic not to be Mark’s invention.251 Mark
takes captive the Hebrew texts because he does not seek to write
exegetically; in contrast, Matthew quotes Isaiah and Jesus side by side.
When Jesus relates parables to those who see and yet understand not, hear
and yet hear not, Mark is unafraid to duplicate the ambiguous mode of
saying of Isaiah and, ultimately, the Yahwist. What Bloom calls the
shocking and uninhibited immediacy of Mark derives in his ability to renew
the J-Writer’s freedom in depicting an all-too-human man.252 Bloom
rejects the Greek Trinitarian Jesus as well as the Gospel of John’s Jesus-as-
the-Christ of Catholic theology in favor of that more Hebraic Yeshua
portrayed by Mark, and, of course, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas,
which Bloom thinks “profoundly compatible with J’s Yahweh.”253
Bloom frequently propounds the double parallel that Hamlet is death’s
ambassador in an ironic parody of Jesus the divine-envoy, and that Lear
parodies those sudden furies caused by Yahweh’s demand for too much
love.254 However, he is profoundly ambivalent about anything that falls
without this neat parallelogram and puzzles over the gradual transformation
of Yeshua, who is hailed as the greatest-ever Jew, into the incarnated
Christian God, a crucified Messiah, and finally the Bringer of atonement:
“The Gospels give us a Jesus as mythological as Attis, Adonis, Osiris, or
any other dying and reviving divinity.”255 Bloom writes that had Yeshua
lived, he would have been amazed at his subsequent deification and even
outraged at the emergence of three other gods in the form of God the Father,
the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Spirit. He sourly notes that many millions of
his fellow Americans would find these assertions unacceptable, that
American Fundamentalists “eagerly anticipate the Rapture, in which Jesus
Christ will gather them up into heavenly immortality.”256 Bloom gets his
teeth into the Nicene Creed, the dogma of the Trinity, considered as “the
structure of anxiety it most assuredly was, is and always shall be.”257 This
is because, in Bloom’s words, Jesus Christ represents “a new God on the
Greco-Roman model of Zeus usurping his Father Chronos-Saturn,” and
therefore the Trinity’s purpose is to replace “the Father by the Son, the
Original Covenant by the Belated Testament, and the Jewish people by the
Gentiles.”258 A formula that can be reduced to theology is necessarily a
system of metaphors and doctrine its literalization, which Emersonian
statement Bloom turns on its head by writing that the best poetry is a kind
of theology in waiting and theology generally is bad poetry.259 Bloom
dislikes the poem of the Trinity, which he compares to Abraham’s potential
sacrifice of Isaac, since God the Father, a mere shadow of Yahweh, sends
his only Son because He loves mankind. Bloom then ponders the
Athanasian Creed, that is that Jesus is made of the homoousia, translated as
the “same stuff,” or “essence,” as God the Father. He writes that Joyce
rendered this as a process, in which Jewgreek becomes Greekjew, intending
that one civilization surpasses another in a process of Hellenization,
underlining that Jesus envisages only Jews as beneficiaries, but that his
disciples address themselves only to Gentiles.260 At this point, we come to
the triumph of the American religion since Bloom reveals his cyclic
conception of history: “Our Law is not Hebraic or Greek, but ultimately
Roman, and our great chronicler, whom we await, would be an American
Edward Gibbon, who will depict our inevitable decline and fall.”261 Bloom
has decided that the J-Writer’s Yahweh was a person and a personality, as
was Mark’s Jesus, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are extreme metaphors
and that the American Jesus is beyond metaphor, because He “has
subsumed the national myth of the New People chosen for a future of a
dreamlike happiness, compounded of emancipated selfishness, and an inner
solitude that names itself as true freedom.”262 Bloom’s argument that Jesus
was a sublimely charismatic Jew provides a platform for the transition of
my argument from Bloom’s interest in deconstructing Judaism to doing the
same to Christianity, an argument that would be impossible to contemplate
unless religious-writing was interpreted aesthetically, and comparisons,
which are outlawed in certain creeds, the modus operandi.
Bloom dislikes anthropomorphic gods, preferring theomorphic men, and
yet he emphasizes the “wonderfully anthropomorphic” depiction of Yahweh
fashioning Adam out of clay.263 Bloom reveals a favorite anthropomorphic
depiction as being when Yahweh stands before the walls of Jericho “drawn
sword in hand” (Josh. 5.13). He is attracted to the warrior-god of Exodus
(15.3) who is figured as a “man of war” but countenances the idea that
Yahweh is a redaction of a number of gods and counts perhaps seven
different personalities subsumed beneath one all-encompassing name that
was later rendered as Elohim (divine being) and Adonai (lord). A striking
feature of Bloom’s theological criticism is that he agnostically oscillates
between describing Yahweh as a literary character, who was created (an
argument that scandalizes Fundamentalists), or as your Creator, and as such
definitive of “our continued need for authority to sanction the self’s
sometimes desperate yearning for a mode of transcendence.”264 He applies
his distinctive literary-critical methodology to biblical characters, and hence
Jesus finds a composite precursor, not just in John the Dipper, but in
Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and pre-eminently Yahweh. But John’s severe
revisions inflict an Orphic sacrifice, and thus the text of Torah is rended in a
sparagmos, “scattering Yahweh’s limbs as if the Master of Presence was
another Osiris,” or the sacrifice of “a contemporary Israeli blown apart in a
bus by a Palestinian.”265 Bloom remembers seeing graffiti on a New York
subway: “Nietzsche is dead! God lives!”266 He then observes that
Nietzsche’s prod, Darwin, would seem embattled by Creationism in
American schools, which dovetails with his observation that the all-too-
human Yahweh knows limits but that later monotheistic deities based upon
Yahweh possess total power. Bloom’s wry remark is that as “God’s might
augments, his presence wanes.”267 This leads Bloom to ponder the puzzle
of Jesus and his various biographers; does He incarnate Yahweh as John
says, or is He uncannily questing for “the origins of his sense of self, unlike
the doom-eager hero-god-victim of John.”268 The questing-sense-of-self is
crucial to my argument since by this method Bloom becomes the prophet of
an encyclopedic concatenation of works that measure the perpetually
growing mind of cultural tradition from a faux secular perspective.
Inevitably, Bloom treats of the Yahwist’s anxiety and asks whose
Yahweh’s father was? He states that while “Zeus usurps his own father,
Chronos . . . Yahweh is unfathered. Bereshith (Genesis) is not a
beginning/again.”269 He recalls Totem and Taboo where the slaying of the
totem father by a horde of sons (who cannibalize their forebear) represents
the origin of all religion and culture.270 Although Bloom refuses to
contemplate that Islam or Christianity did this to Judaism, he nevertheless
asserts: “the Roman holocaust of the Jews, with its first climax at the fall of
Jerusalem and destruction of Yahweh’s Temple . . . resulted in the rise . . .
of Rabbinical Judaism.”271 Neither will Bloom admit of that egregious
Christian truth, called by Bloom a creative misreading, that is the suffering
servant passage in II Isaiah (52.13). In Christian terms, the sheep being led
to slaughter, bearing the guilt of many, and for the intercession of sinners is
the Messiah, but to those of the Hebraic faith, he is all captive Israel, whom
King Cyrus of Persia can release from bondage. From Bloom’s perspective,
the purpose of the text is to persuade the Jews to abandon their exile in
Babylon.272 Jesus shouts out on the cross, “Lord why have you abandoned
me?,” and Bloom meditates that unless God is a personal figure, then
worshippers abandon Him. In effect, Bloom suggests that the modern
American psyche is founded not on enlightened rational principles, but
instead on Christian ideas that derive from Judaism. One is never quite sure
who creates whom in Bloom’s prose; for instance, he speculates that
creation is the ruination of earlier worlds and that God creates within
himself, via zimzum, “a Gnostic opening up of an abyss within
Yahweh.”273 Therefore, God has to fall into himself and hence molds man
from mud so that men can remake their literary creations into gods and
Bloom’s supreme fiction, Yahweh. Indeed, Bloom believes that “we must
dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal god but that god in heaven is
an immortal human.”274 Bloom repeats that the Kabbalistic name for
Yahweh, or Ein-Sof, means without limits, but that every all-too-human act
of Yahweh indicates accepting limitations, which leads Bloom to quote
what for him is a hauntingly humane and Quakerish passage from Auguries
of Innocence:

God appears & God is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day. (129–32)

Bloom discovers the language of power in Blake’s limpid rhyme, which

grants the possessor a heightened sense of linguistic power unrelated to the
resentful socio-political definition of empowerment treasured by
materialists. Empirically, this feeling of empowerment, or rather of
transcendence (dismissed by materialists), is described as an “elevation, a
mounting high on no intoxicants except incantatory language,” but
spiritually, Bloom figures it as an “awakening to a knowledge of something
in the self that cannot die, because it was never born.”275
Bloom provides a most unexpected insight when he compares
Whitman’s Myself, Soul, and real Me to the Kabbalistic trio of nephesh,
ruach, and neshamah. Here the nephesh corresponds with God’s persona,
while the neshamah symbolizes the soul that is even a mystery to Him, and
the ruach Yahweh’s vital inner breath.276 These distinctions indicate the
essential Jewishness of Bloom’s thought that seeks to yoke American
poetry to Scholem’s interest in mystical speculation. The perpetually
growing inner self in Wordsworth’s verse almost seems to mirror the
Bloomian macrocosm that is consonant with tradition, “a perpetual process
going on in God, taking place with each inhalation and exhalation of the
divine breath” that becomes mortal, or as Bloom advises: “try to imagine
that every time you hold your breath, and then release it, you create and
ruin another world.”277 Whether or not Wordsworth is a god that he might
stand alone, Bloom apprehends “a God without end, limitless in his self-
sufficiency.”278 At the last, Bloom abandons mysticism for a more
pragmatic on-going present: “Yahweh, who still feels homeless after his
Temple’s destruction” seems “to have exiled himself . . . until he returned in
1948.”279
 There are two faces to Bloom’s writings on Jewish authors, secular or
otherwise. In the first place, he argues that aesthetic writings have to impose
themselves on tradition and, in the second, he proposes that his
interpretations of tradition, including the Hebrew Bible, are always done in
an aesthetic fashion. My objection is that Bloom’s definition of tradition
corresponds to the religious to the ironic extent that he suggests the J-Writer
contains all later tradition; thus, to apprehend Bloom as an American Dr
Johnson is also to convert the latter’s infamous truculence into a scarcely
concealed form of Zionism. Despite asserting Torah is no different to a
novel by Tolstoy, he believes that Yahweh is himself Torah and yet is
unknowable: “Yahweh remains the hidden God, hedged about by Tanakh,
the two Talmuds, and Kabbalah. And since Yahweh himself is Torah, the
Talmuds, the Zohar, and the entire Oral Law from Moses to Isaac Luria, all
of them are finally unknowable as he is.”280 As an Apophatic theologian,
Bloom asserts that without a negative moment in the act of creation, God
and the cosmos would fuse as one, which should remind of his praise of
Derrida’s treatment of the negative linguistic moment that does not cohere
with its writerly creator.281 Bloom emphasizes that Yahweh “is a name and
so a word, and he is always the essence of act, and hardly to be described as
a supreme thing in a cosmos of things.”282 This apothegm indicates that
tradition is directly analogous to the breath of Yahweh, if the writing in
question is authentic enough to break into tradition. From an ethical
perspective, Bloom criticizes Yahweh for demanding love without returning
the love of the Jewish people and, consequently, Bloom rebels against
“endless barrages of praise, prayers, hymns of gratitude, and immense love,
unceasing love.”283 Since Yahweh, in Bloom’s words, should be shot for
desertion, the act of fighting for the Jewish people must be considered
sacred. Such is the religious moment in the writings of Bloom that his
interpretation of American aesthetics becomes overdetermined by Judaic
considerations; he has a Kabbalistic understanding of the mystical in the
writings of Whitman. To complete the chiasmus, there is a strong case to
propose that Bloom honors his father by imposing his own highly agonistic
definition of tradition on Jewish culture.
 6

Bloom and Protestantism

Bloom asks this provocative question of American culture: “How can any
societal over-determination account for the phenomenon of any solitary
genius?”1 In the remainder of this book, I explore this paradox by
examining Bloom’s relationship with Protestantism; the thread through the
maze is that Bloom’s autobiographical criticism sifts through the over-
determinations of post-Puritan American culture that affected him from
infancy onwards. My discussion begins with a short definition of
Protestantism; it then charts Bloom’s childhood recollections of reading
alone, his vocation to write criticism, and his apprehension of an American
religion of the Whitmanian self. After this, I investigate his truculent
relationship with the New Critics, which was characterized by a memorable
defense of displaced Protestant poetry. From here, I proceed to his marriage
of Yeatsian Gnosticism to Emersonian transcendence and his Gnostic
definition of the American Sublime in Whitman and Stevens. I argue that
displaced Unitarian and Quaker ideas underpin American poetry at its most
formative moments and analyze Bloom’s contention that the aforesaid poets
freed imagination and discarded Christianity. Further thoughts on
Gnosticism in Agon and elsewhere are considered before an analysis of The
American Religion in terms of Bloom’s synopsis that native-American
religious movements are a combination of Protestant tradition and Gnostic
theology. Bloom’s hyperbolic championing of Shakespeare as the inventor
of the modern self is compared to prior instances of inwardness in the
Protestant tradition. The book ends with a treatment of Bloom’s anti-
Platonic writings, which epicurean stance indicates his Falstaffian unease
with certain branches of ascetic thought. Overall, Bloom attempts to
redefine Protestantism in America as a type of Emersonian Gnosis, but
herein dwells a further paradox. Material pleasure is a sin from the
perspective of Pauline Scripture and in its most extreme form this doctrine
leads to Ahab-like iconoclasm; the puritan anxiety as to election produces
hard work from the inner machinery of faith and yet scorns the showy
fripperies of wealth. Gnostics hate the material world and this attempt to
explain the problem of evil ultimately recapitulates the Second
Commandment; thus, the graven image of England in the wicked
Manichaeism of Emerson becomes the psychological block that prevents
divination. Hatred of material culture gives birth to modern consumer
society and yet I argue that Bloom craves more than epicurean delight; he
wishes for metaphysical materialism.
Blake declared that he must invent his own system, or else be enslaved
by another man’s; ironically, there can be no better indication of Non-
conformism. The Latin root Protestantem means declaring in public; thus,
Protestants often portray themselves as vocal revivalists of the earliest form
of Christianity. This makes Protestantism fundamentally opposed to Popery
and Roman Catholic dogma that mortgaged souls to pay for the High-
Renaissance artworks decorating the Sistine Chapel. Although my
definition can only be a rough guide to the fundamentals, already, it
contains punning overtones of Protestant Romantic poets breaking with the
florid poetry of Alexander Pope in their desire to enact a renaissance of the
English Renaissance. Distant memories of my Methodist upbringing in
Wales remind me that Protestantism is best defined as the five “alones”:
Sola Scriptura or Scripture Alone, Sola Fide or Faith Alone, Solus Christus
or Christ Alone, Sola Gratia or Grace Alone, and Soli Deo Gloria or Glory
to God Alone.2 The one that most over-determines Bloom would seem to
be Scripture Alone since he relates that we should read by inner light, a
doctrine developed from Luther’s contention at the Diet of Worms that
because Catholic councils contradict one another, the only way to read the
Word of God is by conscience, that is a rejection of catechism in favor of
personal interpretation: “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain
reason . . . my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”3 The five overlap
since Scripture Alone intends that the believer has a close personal
relationship with the Gospels and therefore with Christ, or the tenet of Faith
Alone. The apostles knew Christ personally and the reformers wanted to
recapture this intimacy unsullied by mediatory priestly dogma; Luther was
particularly drawn to Paul’s statement in Romans that “a man is justified by
faith without the deeds of the law” (3.28). Bloom’s rejection of New
Criticism and New Historicism, his emphasis that there is no other way to
read than the self, temperamentally mimics Protestant skepticism for
Catholic instruction, or indeed any iconoclastic act directed against
institutional authority whatsoever: his Miltonic department of one. The
principle of Grace Alone does not entirely break with Catholic teachings
with regard to Divine Mercy as salvation, but subtracts the Catholic
emphasis upon good works as a method of obtaining salvation, and a
concomitant belief that the sacrament of the Eucharist grants grace through
the actual material presence of Christ during transubstantiation. The
combination of justification by faith in Christ and belief in Grace Alone
seems counter-intuitive because, in rejecting the doctrine that one might be
saved by good works, the resultant uncertainty as to salvation created
anxiety in Calvinists since Puritan preachers sermonized against hypocrites,
who outwardly seemed saved but nevertheless were inwardly damned. I
write counter-intuitive because Protestants were still exhorted to act
charitably and because Weber argues that the urge to excel in business and
wealth-creation became an unintended consequence of this anxiety. The
doctrine of Christ Only targeted intercession by papal indulgence to gain
money from poor grieving relatives in order to shorten the time spent in
purgatory by dead loved ones; it emphasizes that Christ died on the cross to
expiate the sins of the believer. To Lutherans, Calvinists, and Puritans,
Original Sin indicates total depravity in unregenerate man and prevenient
grace, such that man’s willful imagination potentially opposes predestined
salvation, which is important in the present context because the said
doctrine intends that, if man rejects salvation by Christ Alone, then man
turns his own preoccupations into a kind of idolatry of self. Wordsworth
writes that by our own spirits are we deified; Bloom—that the Spirit which
moved over the face of the waters “is identical with the shaping spirit
dwelling within the soul of the inspired Protestant poet.”4 Glory Alone
rejects the monastic Romish division of sacred and secular in favor of
leading one’s whole life in imitation of Christ for the glory of God. This
latter is another interesting tenet for the student of Bloom because the Holy
Spirit creates the gift of faith in the human heart and hence facilitates belief
in atonement or at-oneness with God. A Protestant believer might subdue
the ego to prepare for a visitation from the Holy Spirit, but grace itself
could not be induced. At the start of Paradise Lost, Milton arrogantly
summons the Muse, and Bloom explains this as “an epic device that he
transforms into the summoning of the Holy Spirit of God,” and further
reflects that Milton’s egoism finds direct descendants in Blake and
Wordsworth, in the respect that these were examples of “the autonomous
soul seeking its own salvation outside of and beyond the hierarchy of
grace.”5 Finally, the radical potentialities of Protestant congregations has to
be underlined since New-World Puritans would soon proclaim: “Without
Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing . . . as publick Liberty,” or
as Perry Miller comments, “there is inherent in Protestantism a mentality
bound, sooner or later, to turn techniques of protestation against its own
origins.”6
The seed of what would become Bloom’s mature Gnostic philosophy is
present in his earliest childhood memories; Bloom records: “something in
me was very lonely. Something in me felt what I think is the deep pleasure
that solitary reading only could bring.”7 The solitary existentialist pleasure
of reading converted him to the American Religion, which Bloom relates
“contaminated me long ago” and “envelops us all.”8 Putting a name to
Bloom’s solitary meaning, one thinks of Emerson’s Waldeinsamkeit, which
translates as frontier-loneliness. Bloom connects the American religion to
Whitman and the isolated self, one of his revisionary ratios is strongly
American in this puritanically ascetic respect: “askesis in strong American
poets emphasizes the goal of the process, self-sustaining solitude.”9 Though
Bloom’s revisionary ratios are useful for discussing intertextuality, full-
scale readings in the Bloomian mode feel unsatisfactory, and Bloom
explains why: “There is no method other than yourself. All those who seek
for a method that is not themselves will find not a method . . . they will ape
and involuntary mock.”10 The studious method of the self that stands alone
before God with only Scripture as guidance was congenial to the Quaker
faith and originates in the wisdom of John: “That was the true light, which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (1.9). This version of
Luther’s “here I stand” represents the ultimate source of the Protestant Sola
scriptura, which stipulates that the dissenter’s own reading of the Bible has
ultimate authority. Bloom’s outline of English religious dissent establishes
private judgment in morality as sovereign and “inner light within each soul,
by which alone Scripture was to be read” as the principle that would ensure
absolutely nothing came between man and his God.11 In a secular context,
Bloom sounds not unlike Fox, who advised students of the Bible that they
need not depend upon teachers and guides but instead should read by their
own inward light; Bloom writes that Blake “read the Bible by a light so
inward that he . . . found therein his own imaginings.”12 The word
“inward” is pivotal since, in The American Religion, Bloom propounds the
view that “a religion of the self burgeons . . . and seeks to know its own
inwardness, in isolation.”13 Bloom’s interest in Protestantism lies precisely
in its adherents courting of a solitary existence, since the Miltonic reading
of the Bible by one’s own inner light belies ex cathedra catechisms and
nurtures what Bloom apprehends as the inner self, “there are three crucial
components in Emerson’s American religion: the god within; solitude; the
best and oldest part of the self, which goes back before creation.”14 He then
adds a religious utopian caveat with specific reference to Whitman:
“Whitmanian democracy fuses them in the divinity of the self, which is our
native understanding of the Resurrection as an escape from history, that is
to say, from European time.”15 Bloom admits that Emersonian capitalistic
reactionaries and, indeed, shamanistic hippy revolutionaries, resist the calls
of societal feeling; therefore, his political support for liberal politicians is
humane but rather incongruous: “I’ve never voted for a Republican for
dogcatcher.”16 Poetic Protestantism in an American context should be
distinguished from Christianity because, as Bloom states, “Emerson and
Whitman . . . freed imagination and discarded Christianity.”17 Bloom’s
thesis is that Whitman as the American Christ became the god of the New
World: “to find Divine Walt, we need to center upon Song of Myself . . . in
which the God of the United States achieved decisive self-recognition.”18
Walt’s ecstatic poetic shamanism contains the directness of Hicksite
Quakerism, a form of Protestantism that hearkened back “to the Inner Light
vision of George Fox.”19 This innermost counsel when reading Scripture
becomes in Bloom’s analysis, “What the Gnostics called the spark or
pneuma, the breath of being, Whitman terms the Me myself or the real
Me.”20 Bloom is writing of the Protestant sense of individual autonomy,
“the awareness that not to be alone is itself a House of Bondage.”21 The
logic of Bloom’s interpretations of Whitmanian metaphors is that
“European Protestantism, like European poetry, undergoes a
transmemberment in our Evening Land.”22
Bloom knew by the time he was twelve that all he wanted to do was read
and discuss poetry; this indicates an almost Lutheran sense of calling. The
paradoxes multiply when interviewers reveal a canonical teacher of secular
literature surrounded by the constant buzz of callers and phone-calls, who
nevertheless apprehends a hermetic sense of loneliness in the self. He
recognizes the irony that “Isaiah and Ezekiel did not believe that the Jewish
nation would save itself through study, which is Plato’s idea of salvation”; it
is Bloom’s in the sense that he finds salvation by existentially feeding the
inner self with aesthetic pleasure.23 Bloom’s at-home-ness with American
society does not conquer the solitude of the American sublime: “in the end
one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.”24 This
lonely thought deserves its corollary, Bloom’s insight that “absolute inner
isolation . . . is . . . the essence of Protestantism.”25 I find it provocative to
link this wistful love of solitude to Bloom’s American cultural background,
since for Bloom “the United States is the evening land of Protestantism.”26
Allen goes so far as to say that Bloom’s analysis of American poetry
“provides a terminal point in that narrative of the gradual westering of the
muse, which, in many respects, is the theory of the anxiety of influence.”27
But the feeling of being in and belonging to the evening land of American
Protestantism is problematic, since Bloom thinks the Jewish identity of the
Diaspora is a permanent enigma; one good example of this is that Bloom
would seem somewhat alienated from, and yet at the same time
imaginatively open to, the writing of Protestant authors: “whether I
immerse myself in the Geneva or the King James Bible, Tyndale’s genius
(though not his Protestant zeal) enriches me. As a Jewish reader, I tend to
be aware that these are Christian Bibles, and therefore alien to me
spiritually though not as language and as imaginative experience.”28 One
might surmise that when writing on the topic of the King James Bible,
because Bloom mentions that Tyndale “sought to appropriate the Hebrew
text for a Protestant Christ,” Bloom reclaims these translations from a
Jewish perspective.29 A good example of this process of chiasmus that
seeks to reinvent the Old Testament as the earlier Covenant and the New
Testament as the belated Covenant is provided by Bloom’s words on Paul:
“Nobody else misreads the texts of the Hebrew Bible so outrageously as
Paul does, and always by design. More even than the rest of the New
Testament (except the Gospel of John) the writings of Paul suffer an anxiety
of influence in regard to the Hebrew Bible. Seeking power and freedom,
Paul tears to shreds the authority of Tanakh.”30 Usually, Bloom admires
aesthetic audacity, but his treatment of John is soured “by its anti-
Semitism,” such that he concludes “The Torah cannot be truth for John, and
yet he needs to steal his own authority from it.”31 Bloom’s paradoxical
commentary is that the Protestant Bible tallies with his imaginative
sensibility but not his epicurean Jewish skepticism, it could not be stranger
that the Gnostic spiritual side to his agonistic personality warms to the
aesthetic strength of the aforesaid work of literature. His readings of British
novelists like Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen dwell upon their
explorations of solitary inwardness, which Bloom believes to be the mark
of Protestantism. Bloom places Henry James’s Isabel Archer and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in the line of descent from Richardson’s
Clarissa Harlowe; in the former character he discovers “the force of the
Protestant will in its earlier intensity,” and this is especially so for Hester
because she “defies Puritan Boston.”32 To an even greater extent, in its
westering belatedness, the religion of Emersonian self-reliance that he
thinks defines Prynne and Archer defies a British tradition that is also
Protestant and Romantic. Nevertheless, the anxiousness of this Protestant
tradition caused his primal American religionist anxiety enough to begin a
New World tradition, since Bloom’s definition of the American Religion
“renders European Protestantism inauthentic in our professedly Protestant
culture” because this religion “has turned us towards Gnosis these last two
centuries.”33 Bloom believes the disjunctive Emerson to be “the mind of
America” and that “the central concern of that mind was the American
religion, which most memorably was named ‘self-reliance’.”34 A crucial
distinction opens up here since Bloom turns against Abrams’ doctrine that
Protestant Romantic poets did not so much delete and replace religious
ideas as assimilate and reinterpret them; and thus, “despite their
displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however,
the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human
nature and history survived, as the implicit distinctions and categories
through which even radically secular writers saw themselves.”35 It should
be added that Bloom distrusts two areas of Emersonian scholarship: firstly,
that of Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch, who trace Emerson’s ideas
back to Puritans like Cotton Mather etc., and secondly, the received
scholarship that views Emerson as a weak descendent of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Carlyle. Bloom’s intention is to redefine American
Protestantism as a form of Gnosticism and to claim very much in opposition
to Abrams and his early influence that poetry lies against time and hence
hardens into religion, such that Emerson symbolizes America’s
independence from European religious and poetic models, but as well
represents the point of origin for the American religion.
Bloom’s undergraduate tutor at Cornell, Abrams, argued that English
Romantic poetry is a form of displaced Protestantism, but, as Adam Begley
relates, this was not the kind of criticism Bloom encountered as a graduate
student at Yale: “The dominant orthodoxy was T. S. Eliot-inspired New
Criticism. Bloom’s field, Romantic literature, was held in low esteem; the
tone was gentlemanly, high-church Protestant.”36 The early Bloom argues
there is no more important point to be made about English Romantic poetry
than the fact that it is a form of displaced Protestantism, and therefore
uncongenial to the Catholic cast of mind, “particularly since it has been
deliberately obscured by most modern criticism.”37 Thus begins Bloom’s
most pugnacious assault upon the Urizenic New Critics in The Visionary
Company: “the poets deprecated by the New Criticism were Puritans, or
Protestant individualists, or men of that sort breaking away from
Christianity and attempting to formulate personal religions in their
poetry.”38 Bloom’s point in The Visionary Company is that, just as the
Romantics assert their individuality against the authority of William Pitt’s
regime, so in a parallel fashion Bloom struggles against the strictures of the
Anglican New Critics: “the poets brought into favor by the New Criticism
were Catholics or High Church Anglicans—Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Pope,
Dr Johnson, Hopkins in the Victorian period, Eliot and Auden in our own
time.”39 From Bloom’s Orc-like perspective, one line of English poetry,
“and it is the central one, is Protestant, radical, and Miltonic-Romantic; the
other is Catholic, conservative, and by its claims, classical.”40 Bloom
attacks C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost as an Anglo-Catholic
document, while defending the Romantics from the charge of megalomania
made “by a series of modern critics from Irving Babbitt and T. E. Hulme
through T. S. Eliot down to the American academic critics called ‘New’.
”41 The epilogue to The Visionary Company proposes an alternative canon
to the Metaphysical poems championed by the New Critics: “Milton’s
Penseroso becomes Wordsworth’s Solitary, and the Solitary in turn becomes
Byron’s pilgrim, Shelley’s wandering poet, Keats’s shepherd-prince,
Browning’s Paracelsus and Childe Roland, and later the wandering Ossian
and Forgael of Yeats and the sublimely defeated Crispin of Stevens.”42
Even in a late essay on Spenser, Bloom underlines that the father of the
questing poetic self “did not allow himself to be inhibited either by the fear
that a universal symbolism founded on sacramentalism might betray him
into Catholic poetry,” and that Derek Traversi decried Spenser’s poetry as
“furthering the dissolution of the declared moral intention into mere
rhythmical flow.”43 It should come as no surprise that Bloom opposes the
New Critics in Shelley’s Mythmaking on the grounds that “The New Critics
. . . have become for their followers the fathers of a new church.”44 We find
iconoclastic echoes of this schism in Bloom’s liking for “Christian Liberty,”
or the Miltonic “prerogative of every regenerated man under the New Law
of the Gospel to be free of every ecclesiastical constraint.”45 He writes that
Wordsworth battled to surpass Milton (as did the other canonical
Romantics): “Milton is the fountainhead of . . . a Satanic idolatry of self.”46
 In The Visionary Company, Bloom establishes Wordsworth as the
principal poet of the Romantic generation because he instigates a
Copernican revolution such that poets after him are shackled to the
subjective mode that he and Coleridge largely invented. It is Bloom’s
contention that “to make a myth is to tell a story of your own invention,”
although he adds that to do this the greatest of the Romantic poets fully
entered “into the abyss of their own selves.”47 Bloom’s reading of
Wordsworth begins with the poet passing Jehovah unalarmed, an example
of the autonomous soul seeking its own salvation outside and beyond the
hierarchy of grace and Blake’s response that Divine Mercy was never
absent except to Wordsworth’s perception. In The Prelude Imagination rises
from the mind’s abyss as Wordsworth discovers he has crossed the Alps,
and Bloom writes that the poet’s possible sublimity, or the soul in creation,
rises out of the striking metaphor of unfathered vapor. How the soul felt in
remembered moments of obscure sublimity becomes the central concern of
Bloom’s reading of The Prelude where Wordsworth suggests that nature
humanizes man. Bloom explains the Wordsworthian by contrasting the
latter’s relationship with the book of nature to Blakean idealism: “The
visible body of Nature is more than an outer testimony of the Spirit of God
to him; it is our only way to God. For Blake it is a barrier between us and
the God within ourselves.”48 Bloom ultimately states that Blake “could not
ruin the sacred truths . . . to a story that might emerge clearly from the abyss
of his own strong ego”, and that “Blake is one of the last of an old race of
poets; Wordsworth was the very first of the race of poets that we have with
us still.”49 Bloom knows that Wordsworth invents the poem of imagination
and its relationship to nature and calls this the myth of memory as salvation;
Tintern Abbey becomes the modern poem proper. His reading of Tintern
Abbey emphasizes the reciprocity of mind and nature until, seeing into the
life of things, we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul.
Worshipful love of sovereign nature (the outward world) leads Wordsworth
from selfish perceptions to renewed love of humanity because anchoring
nature becomes the soul of Wordsworth’s moral being. But the phrase a
“living soul” refers to I Corinthians 15:45, or the opposition between God’s
creation of the natural man from clay and spiritual resurrection, and
indicates that displaced Pauline doctrine lurks behind the Neo-Platonic
sublime of Tintern Abbey. Bloom describes the image of the seashell in The
Prelude as symbolic of reasoning and of primal unity, and hence it is an
ideal type of imagination; he underlines that the tyranny of the eye renders
the psyche half-passive, whereas the organic fusion of seeing-hearing in the
Intimations Ode causes the mind to know itself without exterior cause.
Bloom’s discussion of Beulah introduces The Visionary Company because it
rules his discussion of the mind/nature dialectic that he insists characterizes
the marriage of the mind to nature, or the central problem of Romantic
nature poetry:

“Tintern Abbey,” the Intimations ode, and “Peele Castle” trace the
stages by which the bard of Beulah, desperately trying to maintain a
vision of a married land against the lengthening shadow of organic
mortality, gradually gives way to orthodoxy and timidity and at last
falls into the Ulro of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and beyond that, the
final abyss of the sonnets favoring capital punishment.50

This cycle from the poet of “possible sublimity” and “something evermore
about to be” to the Urizen who could write “Fit retribution, by the moral
code,” is the natural cycle that Beulah alone as a vision must at last come
to.51 The originality of Bloom’s position lies in a sensitive reading of
Blake’s four mental states that are then used to illustrate the other five
canonical Romantic poets: “innocence, or Beulah; experience, or
Generation; organized, higher innocence, or Eden; and the Hell of rational
self-absorption or Ulro.”52 Bloom asserts that the imagery of Blake’s
Beulah, or the cycles of nature, contains the entire pattern of symbols to be
found in Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination,
Keats’s Endymion and Shelley’s pastoral romances.53 Bloom’s reading
functions well for Blake, for the Wordsworth of The Prelude and for Keats
in “Ode to Psyche”: “Like the other great Romantics, Keats distrusted the
Beulah of earthly repose”—“he went on from it to a myth that promised a
humanism that could transcend nature’s illusions.”54 But his imaginative
modus operandi does not work as well for his discussion of Don Juan,
where Bloom is forced to admit that Byron hardly ever leaves the primary
world; the secondary being that of the visionary imagination: “Byron lived
in the world. . . . Don Juan is, to my taste, not a poem of the eminence of
Milton and Jerusalem, of The Prelude or Prometheus Unbound.”55
However, Bloom later changed his mind and gallantly admitted that Don
Juan was the greatest production of the Romantic period. Bloom confesses
that he reads Wordsworth like he reads the Hebrew Bible, that is for
blessings granted by the spots of time and, further, that Freud has cost him
Blake but not Wordsworth because while “both sought to replace a dying
god” with “the god of the perpetually growing inner self” only Wordsworth
truly succeeded.56
The centerpiece of The Ringers in the Tower is “The Internalization of
Quest Romance,” which along with efforts by Wellek, McGann, Perry, et al.
is one of the most influential essays on the notoriously difficult topic of
how to define Romanticism. Bloom’s influential essay initially reduces
Romanticism to the figure of quest romance in Shelley’s Alastor then
broadens to consider Wordsworthian identifications with six other canonical
poets. Before considering his arguments in more detail, it is important to
note that “The Internalization of Quest Romance” continues his critical
defense of Shelley: “Eliot thought that the poet of ‘Adonais’ and ‘The
Triumph of Life’ had never ‘progressed’ beyond ideals of adolescence.”57
Instead, Bloom proposes that the subjective mode of modern poetry in
English is largely the invention of Wordsworth and that Wordsworth’s
turning to the past resembles Freud’s psychoanalytic therapies:
“Wordsworth is a crisis-poet, Freud a crisis-analyst; the saving movement
in each is backward into lost time.”58 Bloom will later suggest that there is
a shamanistic element to Freudian psychoanalysis, but, in The Ringers in
the Tower, he is more interested in contrasting Romantic eros with Freudian
eros and the formula that “the libido leaves the inner self when the inner
self has become too full . . . man must love in order not to get ill.”59 We
have seen that the quest-romance is defined as the search of the libidinous
self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from anxiety; Bloom’s counter-
intuitive stance is that Wordsworth is an anti-natural poet fleeing from
entrapping nature, and he stakes his authority upon a definition of
Romanticism that involves a rejection of nature as well as the sympathetic
imagination: “The Romantic movement is from nature to the imagination’s
freedom . . . and the imagination’s freedom is frequently purgatorial,
redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self.”60 Bloom argues
that the “hero of internalized quest is the poet himself, the antagonists of
quest are everything in the self that blocks imaginative work.”61 What
Bloom defines as Selfhood has to be subdued and in Blake’s Milton this
Selfhood is recognized as Satan; in later works, this parallel becomes
further defined as the internalized influence of the Covering Cherub taken
as the influence of Milton upon Blake.62 The heroic quest is Miltonic in the
sense of being satanic, or, as Bloom explains, “The internalization of quest-
romance made the poet-hero not a seeker after nature but after his own
mature powers, and so the Romantic poet turned away, not from society to
nature, but from nature to what was more integral than nature, within
himself.”63 All romance is founded upon enchantment; Bloom declares that
enchantment is resisted by an organic anxiety principle identical to the
ego’s self-love, a creative principle which resists in the name of a higher
mode than the sympathetic imagination, which in Bloom’s schemata is
identical with the Promethean phase of the quest.64 In Bloom’s opinion the
Romantics “tended to take Milton’s Satan as the archetype of the heroically
defeated Promethean quester.”65 Thus, we come to the famous delineation
between the two phases of the Romantic Quest, the Promethean Phase and
the Real man, the Imagination:

Prometheus is the poet-as-hero in the first stage of the quest, marked

by a deep involvement in political, social, and literary revolution, and
a direct satirical attack on the institutional orthodoxies of European
and English society. . . . The Real Man, the Imagination, emerges
after terrible crises in the major stage of the Romantic quest, which is
typified by a relative disengagement from revolutionary activism . . .
so as to re-center the arena of search within the self.66

Bloom prefers the Romantic poets when they have abandoned their
revolutionary aspirations and instead seek consolation in the realms of
visionary desire, or what he has christened, after Blake, the Real Man, the
Imagination. The highest examples of the Real Man are listed as, “The Four
Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem; The Prelude and the Recluse fragment; The
Ancient Mariner and Christabel; Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The
Triumph of Life; the two Hyperions; Don Juan; Death’s Jest-Book.”67
Bloom takes his inspiration from his authoritative precursor Frye: “in
Romanticism the main direction of the quest of identity tends increasingly
to be downward and inward, toward a hidden basis or ground of identity
between man and nature.”68 The rising currency of Wordsworth in Bloom’s
canon is well represented by the insight that an organic anxiety principle
identical with the ego’s self-love overcomes Wordsworth’s desire for
transgression of the natural order: “in his crisis, Wordsworth learns the
supernatural and superhuman strength of his imagination. . . . But his
anxiety for continuity is too strong for him, and he yields to its dark
enchantment.”69 The hero of internalized quest is the idealist poet himself
and the dark enchantments, “the antagonists of quest” or “everything in the
self that blocks imaginative work.”70 Bloom means partly the daemonic
spirit of solitude that pursues Shelley’s questing poet in Alastor but also the
dark and nameless thoughts that Wordsworth identifies in Coleridge in
Resolution and Independence and which refer to religious opacity in
Milton’s invocation.
In Blake’s Apocalypse, Bloom argues that Blake loved the free-play of
imagination more than anything: “ ‘I know of no other Christianity and of
no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine
Arts of Imagination’, this ‘liberty’ being the Jerusalem of the poem.”71 In
The Visionary Company, Bloom employs the psychological insights of
Blake to explicate other poems of the same era, but in Blake’s Apocalypse,
he is adamant that Blake should be read for his originality, the unlikeness of
his giant forms to the corresponding likenesses that he discovers in Freud:

I have analyzed this dramatic opposition as a parallel to a momentary

alliance of the ego and the id in protection of the libido against the
wily arts of the superego. As a rough bringing-together of Blake and
Freud this has some suggestive value, but it now seems to me another
unnecessary reduction of Blake’s poetic mythology into mental
figures less imaginative than Blake’s own very subtle ones. Tharmas,
 like the id, is the regent of bodily appetite, and Luvah-Orc is a life-
force rising from bodily appetite. But Freud located reason in the
ego, separating it from the moralizing function of the superego.
Blake assigns both reason and social morality to Urizen, and splits up
the ego into Los and the Spectre of Urthona, the “I” as potential
creator and the “I” as selfhood, fearful and time-obsessed.72

The constant battle that Bloom fights in order to reconcile the reader to the
ostensible strangeness of Blake’s visionary poems points to the fact that
Bloom began reading Blake at a young age; Blake seems more homely than
shocking in his conceptual originality.73 In Bloom’s mature philosophy, the
American religion is defined as a personalized relationship with Jesus
coupled with the knowledge that each American possesses an inner life that
existed before the Creation-Fall. Bloom’s Gnostic analogy reinscribes in
American terms Blake’s coalescence of “the individual creativity or Poetic
Genius in every man with the principle of individuation itself.”74
Elsewhere in Blake’s Apocalypse, Bloom writes on the topic of state
religions that “the heaven of orthodoxy, or idea of restraint, was formed by
the Messiah or Reason, but to get the stuff of creativity he had to ‘fall’ into
the energetic world of imaginings, or else Reason could have no ideas to
build on.”75 Bloom decadently builds a displaced spiritual world of art in
opposition to American society, which activity finds consonance with Blake
and Milton: “So John Milton, at the end, learned to wait, comforted by a
paradise within himself, happier far than the outer one he had failed to bring
about in his England.”76 Bloom notes that “only two books truly mattered
to Blake . . . the Bible and Milton” and that history to Blake was
intrinsically cyclic:

The English Bible, as Blake read it, began with a Creation that was
also a Fall, proceeded to the cycle of history, with alternate
movements of vision and collapse, and achieved the pastoral art of
the Song of Solomon, the tragedy of Job, and the triumphant
prophecy of greater poets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. The entrance of
this poetry into history in the Gospels was culminated in the
 Apocalypse, and set a pattern for the Christian poem, a pattern that
Milton, in Blake’s view, had almost succeeded in emulating.77

Bloom argues that in spite of formal divisions into stanzas, “a remarkable

number of central poems in Romantic tradition divide argumentatively and
imagistically into three parts.”78 The beginning, middle, and end of
Bloom’s version of creation, fall, and redemption is constantly reiterated:

. . . first an initial vision of loss or crisis, centering on a question of

renewal, or imaginative survival; second, a despairing answer to the
question, in which the mind’s power, however great, seems
inadequate to overcome the obstacles both of language and of the
universe of death, of outer sense; third, a more hopeful, or at least
ongoing answer, however qualified by recognitions of continuing
loss.79
Bloom confirms the intrinsically Christian pattern when he writes that this
“de-idealized vision of Romanticism reveals that the super-mimesis of
nature generally turns out to be the simpler act of imitating Milton.”80 He
borrows this patterning from Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism, as is
revealed by the phrase, “historically, this is certainly a displacement of a
Protestant pattern.”81 Bloom finds this discourse analogous to the Lurianic
pattern of Zimzum, Shevirath ha-kelim, and Tikkun, which can be rendered
into the displaced Christian scheme as contraction, catastrophe, and
restitution. Bloom calls this triadic patterning that mirrors the Psalms and
Prophets the internalization of quest romance: “Since the desire and
fulfillment alike come from the Poetic character . . . the next step must be to
identify the Poetic character with the true or real Man who is also the
source of the true God.”82
Bloom later repudiated his desire to Judaize Blake’s Jerusalem: “the re-
creation in English terms of the work of Hebraic prophecy . . . involves a
comparison of England and Palestine, and of Albion and Jacob (called
Israel).”83 Nevertheless, Bloom draws the British analogy: “Blake begins
Jerusalem’s third chapter with an address to the Deists, or what he takes to
be the religious orthodoxy of his own time. The address is in fact made to
State Christianity or the established religion of any nation at any time, and
is perfectly applicable to European and American society right now.”84 The
precedent for what I am arguing comes from Isaiah and is present in Blake
and, indeed, Bloom’s reading of Blake: “The books of Ezekiel and the other
prophets are essentially collections of public oratory, poems of admonition
delivered to a wavering people. The poems are interspersed in chronicles
that deliberately mix history and vision.”85 Fite argues that the polished
Bloomian aside undercuts an emphasis upon imaginative vision, a good
example being the synopsis that Yeats fails as a poet because “he does not
believe strongly enough in the creative power of the Romantic
imagination.”86 When Bloom writes, “Morning in the East means that the
fires of the West (the body’s energy and the American Revolution) have
now appeared in man’s emotional life and in the French Revolution,” the
inference is that just as events in America influenced the French
revolutionaries, so does the poetry written by Blake about the French and
American revolutions stir something in Bloom.87 America is figured as a
revolutionary Orc: “Washington, Franklin, Paine, and the other leaders of
revolution, mentioned earlier in the poem as rising up in the night of
oppression, now stand ‘with their foreheads rear’d toward the east,”
threatening the Urizenic world of England and Europe.”88 Bloom asserts
that revolutions always end in Urizenic reaction: “Whether or not Orc is to
win (and history and Blake’s poetry alike will prove that he cannot) his
effect upon human faculties is a permanent one. Desire shall fail, but the
gates are consumed, and man is opened to infinity if he will but see his own
freedom.”89 In 1964, Bloom wrote that America identified Urizen and King
George, but how close this now seems to Bloom’s voluble opposition to
President George Bush and his religious crusade against Saddam Hussein, a
case of what Blake described as “Religion hid in War”: “It is scary to reread
the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman
Empire seems an outline that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush
retraced.”90 The American Revolution has merely turned its allegiance
from Washington to Bush, or from Orc to Urizen, and is yet another
example of organic repetition: “The Orc cycle, the withering of desire into
restraint, is the theme of The Mental Traveller” and hence Bloom
apprehends: “a world unable or unwilling to rescue itself from a mere round
of organic repetitions, a Urizenic mill of meaningless wheels.”91 His
reading of Yeats’s Second Coming complements Bloom’s drawing of the
British analogy since the horrific image of the Yeatsian Sphinx becomes a
belated revision of the Blakean Urizenic image for mechanistic societies
and the military industrial complex. Were one to substitute petrol-guzzling
car wheels and production lines for steam-driven cotton mills, then Bloom’s
Blakean analogy would have great prophetic power; the cyclic
historiography of Bloom’s Blakean perspective needs to be emphasized:
“Political revolution is just that, revolution, the revolving of another cycle
of revolt aging into repression, Orc dying into Urizen’s religion, the French
Revolution passing into the despotism of Napoleon.”92 Bloom figures the
historical woes that beset Blake’s England in generalized terms that almost
seem prophetic: “an age of tyranny and war in which . . . his culture quite
properly seemed to him altogether Satanic, and in which he alone seemed to
be keeping faith in with imagination.”93
In Yeats, Bloom’s interest in selfhood and solitude augments when he
overturns the New Critical judgment that Yeats was at his best as a
Modernist who repudiated Romanticism in order to suggest that the Irish
poet’s aesthetic excellence dwells in vestigial signs of solitary quest
romance. The Protestant genealogy of questing protagonists that Bloom
traces consists of Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, and Yeats,
starting with Milton’s magus in Il Penseroso and then passing through
Wordsworth’s Solitary in The Excursion, Shelley’s questing poet in Alastor,
Browning’s Childe Roland in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came and
then Yeats’s Oisin in The Wanderings of Oisin. The next sentence brings the
questing figure home to Bloom’s own library-borrowing doorstep in
Brooklyn: “among poets of our own century, Stevens, Lawrence, Hart
Crane.”94 Bloom’s argument is that because Yeats chose Shelley’s Alastor
for his chief of men the “antithetical solitude of the young Shelley . . . is
very clearly the ultimate origin of Yeats’s later theories of the mask and the
antithetical self.”95 Bloom is anxious to place Yeats’s The Wanderings of
Oisin in the same tradition as the figure of the Solitary in The Excursion,
which influences Shelley in Alastor, or the poem of the “phantasm world in
which every object becomes an emblem of loss, of the world’s separation
from the self.”96 In a throwback to the main argument in The Visionary
Company, Bloom argues that the predominant state in Yeats’s poetry is the
passive state of Beulah, in which the Yeatsian quest moves between “a
solipsistic self-absorption and the merging of that self in the universal
mood”.97 Bloom traces the origin of Yeats’s lunar cycles to a commentary
upon “The System” of Blake in Yeats’s edition of The Works of William
Blake:

The mind or imagination or consciousness of man may be said to

have two poles, the personal and the impersonal, or, as Blake
preferred to call them, the limit of contraction and unlimited
expansion. When we act from the personal we tend to bind our
consciousness down as a fiery center. When . . . we allow our
imagination to expand away from this egoistic mood, we . . . merge
in the universal mood.98

This immortal and imperishable fiery center becomes Phase 15 of the

moon, while the looking glass of universal thought becomes Phase 1: “the
opposition in Yeats between Phase 15 and 1 is the Coleridgean or
Wordsworthian contrast between the Secondary, creative Imagination, and
the death-in-life of the world without imagination.”99 The influence of
Blake and Shelley is nowhere more apparent in Yeats than in the Byzantium
poems, in which the poet sails out of nature and apprehends the fires of the
eternal. Bloom suggests that the Yeatsian Condition of Fire, with its
purifying simplification through intensity, is precisely the Romantic
Imagination, and that the fires of Byzantium correlate with Blake’s
Golgonooza, that is a city of art and the burning fountain of Shelley’s
Adonais: “Remembering that Shelley calls our minds ‘mirrors of the fire for
which all thirst’ Yeats asks the inevitable question, for Gnostic or naturalist
alike, ‘What or who has cracked the mirror?’ ”100 In Bloom’s opinion,
meditation upon the broken glass that constitutes a fallen many-colored, or
perhaps starlit dome, militates against the one of the imagination; and
hence, he compliments Yeats as being “the last of the High Romantics . . .
who asserted imaginative values without the armour of continuous
irony.”101 Bornstein follows Bloom in suggesting that Yeats was
influenced by Hallam’s writings on Shelley and Browning’s essay on
Shelley; thus, both Hallam and Yeats see Shelley as the type of the
subjective poet: “the image-making power of the imagination” enables him
“to by-pass reason and apprehend beauty directly,” and therefore Yeats
stresses with Browning “the connection between solitude and vision.”102
Bloom writes this about Browning’s poetic appropriation of the subjective
quest: “The landscape of ‘Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came’, like
that of Alastor, is charged by the quester’s own furious, self-frustrated
energy, and cannot at last contain that energy.”103 According to Bloom,
Yeats’s The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry reveals “the poet’s infinite desire
to break through natural barriers and so uncover an altogether human
universe.”104 Bloom’s championing of Oisin as a solitary quester overturns
the received wisdom that Yeats was a second-rate Romanticist, until later in
his career, when he discovered Modernist lyrical force: “Yeats . . . remained
always a poet of autobiographical self-recognition, in the solitary tradition
that Shelley had founded upon Wordsworth.”105
Bloom’s grand critical purpose in Yeats is therefore revisionist; he seeks
to resurrect the place of myth-making Romantic poetry in a tradition that
had previously characterized Yeats as a Metaphysical poet.106 This
polemical process was first advocated in “Yeats and the Romantics,” an
essay published in Hollander’s Modern Poetry: “The best of our modern
poets . . . Yeats and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain, Wallace Stevens and
Hart Crane in this country, are the legitimate inheritors of this Spenserian or
Romantic line of poets.”107 Bloom interprets the mode of this line of poets
as anti-natural, the poem as an alternative world to that of nature and
identifies the Yeats of poems like A Dialogue of Self and Soul, Vacillation,
and The Man and the Echo, as a very human, very Romantic and very
Shelleyan Yeats, “existing in the perilous dialectic that witnesses every
object of desire disappearing into another experiential loss.”108 Bloom
would seem fascinated by the Yeatsian division between the antithetical and
the primary, which Bloom correlates with two characters from The
Excursion: “The Wanderer is the primary, ‘objective’ man of A Vision,
while the Solitary is the quester who is doomed to carry subjectivity to its
limit, in the search for possible ecstasy, away from a possible wisdom.”109
Thus, Yeats followed Blake “in the dialectical audacity of transvaluing the
ancient quarrel between the objective and the subjective man, the Angel and
the Devil in Blake’s terms.”110 Bloom seizes upon Yeats’s comment that a
poet always “writes out of the tragedy of his personal life, but never directly
to the reader, for ‘there is always phantasmagoria’. ”111 He then qualifies
Yeats’s statement by attacking the impersonality of the New Critics: “in this
age of Eliot, Auden, and the New Criticism . . . there is no escape from or
evasion of personality in this phantasmagoria, which is indeed precisely
what Blake and Pater called ‘vision’ and the other major Romantics the
Secondary or creative Imagination.”112 Yeats is written from within the
same revisionary polemic that opposes the New Critics: “Pater, like so
many other critics and poets of the nineteenth century, is still out of fashion,
having been dismissed by T. S. Eliot to the large Limbo inhabited by those
who did not keep literature in its proper relation to Christian belief.”113
The decadent aesthetics of Bloom find a precursor in the appreciations
of Pater that sought an alternative to Protestant spirituality in fine art. Thus,
Bloom has an eye for beautiful sentences that communicate the eccentricity
of Pater’s solitary epicurean subjectivity, “Pater . . . is reputed to have
walked the Oxford meadows in the cool of the evening, murmuring that the
odour of the meadow-sweet gave him pain: ‘It is the fault of nature in
England that she runs too much to excess’. ”114 In Bloom’s view,
aestheticism courts new opinions and a fullness of life that gets as many
pulsations of the artery into the given time; while the desire for art for art’s
sake finds an ecstatic epiphany in the privileged moment.115 We would
misinterpret Bloom if we fail to emphasize his preference for aesthetics
over Christian symbolism; he draws attention to the fact that, by insinuating
the children of this world are wiser than “children of light” (Lk. 16.8), Pater
scandalously creates an aesthetic alternative to rival the religion of
Christianity.116 Although Yeats began as a disciple of Pater’s passionate
aesthetic humanism and hence a student of the lonely ecstasy of creative
joy, Bloom argues that Yeats misread Pater, perceiving him to have caused
the disaster that ended in the tragic generation of Johnson, Dowson, and
Wilde.117 In such a context, Pater bequeaths an almost impossible legacy
“an intense consciousness or passion that cannot accommodate itself to
experience again.”118 Bloom places this intensity of conceits within Pater’s
historical dialectic:

There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency, flying from
the center . . . throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected
imagination; delighting in brightness and color, in beautiful material,
in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy . . . its
restless versatility drives it towards . . . the development of the
individual in that which is most peculiar and individual in him. . . . It
is this centrifugal tendency which Plato is desirous to cure, by
maintaining, over against it, the Dorian influence of a severe
simplification everywhere, in society, in culture . . .119

Bloom writes that the “centrifugal is the vision of Heraclitus, the centripetal
of Parmenides . . . the centrifugal is the Romantic, and the centripetal the
Classic.”120 He prefers the Romantic individualism of the Protestant Yeats
to impersonal modernist classicism; Bloom suggests that Yeats’s Pre-
Raphaelite intensification in The Wanderings of Oisin represents a
resurgence of Victorian Romanticism.121 Pater’s The Renaissance was one
of Yeats’s sacred texts, but Bloom argues that Yeats’s reading indicates the
triumph of mechanical chaos over art, of nature over the visionary moment
and neither a Paterian assertion of personality against the flux of sensations,
nor the privileged moment when inward and outward momentarily correlate
in an epiphany. The tragic quest that is doomed to failure, death, and rebirth
is hence symbolized by the Yeatsian lyricism that acted as a prolegomenon
for The Ringers in the Tower: “I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void
fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have
appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.”122 This beautiful
quotation recasts the precious metal of Pater’s style as a mystical, fated
gnosis that the poet’s antithetical sensibility apprehends in an undeceived
and experiential fashion, while tragically being caught up in the cycle of
death and rebirth. It removes the weight of Paterian meaning, that is that the
world of experience fades after temporarily setting the spirit free in a
moment of epiphany. Bloom argues that Yeats follows Wilde in converting
“Pater’s vision of the flux of experience into a theory of masks,” wherein
poetic truth remains detached by a powerful relativism: “the movement of
sensations is matched by the flux of contending beliefs and actions.”123
Yeatsian terminology is notoriously stylized and Bloom distinguishes the
fated Image from life and the Mask that is chosen by the poet to redress his
essential poverty; hence, the Mask represents the various poses of poetic
imagery created by the poet and the fated Image the obsessive perception of
certain ideas obtained from primary processes. Pater is important for
Bloom’s argument precisely because his emphasis upon idealism stands
mid-way between Wordsworth and the Modernists and because his
epicurean criticism explains “why all post-Romantic poetry resolves itself
into another aspect of Romanticism, despite its frequently overt anti-
Romanticism.”124 Bloom’s chapter on “Late Victorian Poetry and Pater”
ends in an extraordinary fashion with a reading of “Tea at the Palaz of
Hoon” in which Stevens incarnates as the Poetical Character, or the rebirth
of the Paterian poet as Apollo, “a declaration of the mind knowing its own
autonomy, declaring that outward sense is wholly the servant of its
will.”125 Bloom’s final point is a judgmental one; the active virtue of Yeats
would seem more tough-minded than the tragic generation, but not as
strong as Stevens.126
The sweetest part of Bloom’s corpus is dedicated to the decadent poetics
of Keats, Pater, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson. In “Keats and the
Embarrassments of Tradition,” he asserts the dark Stevensian wisdom that
death is the mother of beauty. Life to Milton is death to Keats, and hence
Bloom writes that the Shakespearean “way of Negative Capability” was “an
answer to Milton.”127 Bloom intuits that we prefer Keats to almost all his
contemporaries because he shares our materialist sensibility; nevertheless,
he argues that Keats’s poetic descent is traced from the solitary line of
Protestant poets. Therefore, the most striking image in Bloom’s writings on
Keats is this comparison with Orc: “The contrary to prospective vision, in
Blakean rather than Nietzschean terms, is the cycle of the being Blake
called Orc, who would like to tear loose from Nature’s wheel, but
cannot.”128 Instead of eternal return, Bloom suggests that “by the point at
which the fragmentary The Fall of Hyperion breaks off, Keats . . . has
become the quest-hero of a tragic adventure.”129 The quest begins when
Wordsworth’s Solitary manifests itself in Keats’s Endymion where this
questing-for-love example of nympholepsy “becomes a figure nearly
identical with poetry itself.”130 Bloom brings Stevens to the Keatsian
banquet with great decadent gusto: “Poetry is not a means of good; it is . . .
like the honey of earth that comes and goes at once, while we wait vainly
for the honey of heaven.”131 Bloom supposes that the “wealth of tradition
is great . . . in its own subtleties of internalization” and that Keats followed
Wordsworth on the path of Romantic internalization, in order to guard
against the large “often paralyzing embarrassment” of the “rich
accumulation of past poetry.”132 Pater could appreciate a life of sensations
but a stable boy like Keats would be left to do the living; thus, Bloom
decadently quotes Yeats’s fine fiction that Keats was an urchin ruined by his
thirst for luxury and compares Keatsian psychology to Pater’s bundling
wisdom that the self is a movement of dissolute impressions, images,
sensations, of which “analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away,
that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.”133 In
Bloom’s opinion, Tennyson never achieved autonomy for his own
imagination, his best poem being Mariana where Tennyson produced a
sensuous imaginative phantasmagoria “running down into isolated and self-
destructive expectation.”134 By far my favorite essay in The Ringers in the
Tower is “The Place of Pater: Marius The Epicurean,” in which Bloom
quotes Tennyson’s male muse Hallam on Wordsworth’s crowd:

Susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, their fine

organs trembled into emotion at colors, and sounds, and movements,
unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments. . . . So vivid was
the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it
 became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought,
and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.135

Bloom appreciatively remarks that at the center of Pater’s Marius the

Epicurean is the flux of sensations; that the good life is awfully brief and,
because of this decadent desperation to see and touch, “what we have to do
is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new
impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy.”136 He thinks the
Beats were akin to Pater: “currently fashionable sensibility, two-thirds of
the way through the century, is perhaps another ironic disordering of
Paterian sensibility.”137 Bloom states that Pater is the aesthetic hinge
between the Romantics and the Modernists, which judgment reminds of
Orsino’s dying fall, not least because Pater wrote that all art aspires to the
condition of music:

While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite
passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted
horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the
senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odours, or work of
the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate
every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the
brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways,
is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.138
Bloom comments that the burden of Marius The Epicurean is the “near
solipsism of the isolated sensibility, of the naked aesthetic consciousness
deprived of everything save its wavering self and the flickering of an
evanescent beauty in the world of natural objects, which is part of the
universe of death.”139 Reductively, Bloomian aesthetics is a something-
ever-more-about-to-be decadent appreciation of poetic beauty by
estrangement that feeds the inner self, that elusive inner world of the
unconscious.140 But Pater’s unorthodox opinions warn that epicurean
fullness of life should not be mistaken for a “kind of idolatry of mere life,
or natural gift”; the important thing is that insights are guided by choice.141
 Paterian Epicureanism is outed by Bloom as the aesthetic sensibility
proper, and by this Bloom means not sensually indulgent pleasure but the
high-tide of life and above all insight into the full variety of aesthetic
experience, the pulsations of the arteries of artistic impressions—
impressions that must one day end. Bloom talks of the self-defeated fate of
Pater’s Roman quester and takes Marius as decadent archetype for modern
lyric poets in the mold of Stevens and Yeats.142 In “Blake’s Jerusalem: The
Bard of Sensibility and the Form of Prophecy,” Bloom criticizes “the poet
of Sensibility, the man of imagination who cannot or will not travel the
whole road of excess to the palace of wisdom.”143 This lucid statement
introduces a related insight into Bloom’s favorite Victorian poem, Childe
Roland To The Dark Tower Came: “By marching into that land of his
terrible force of failed will . . . he compels himself to know . . . the anxiety
of influence.”144 To summarize Browning’s poem, a questing knight rides
across a ruined landscape toward a mysterious tower and right at the end of
the poem sees a terrible fire, which Bloom interprets as the Yeatsian
Condition of Fire. In Bloom’s view, the poem “becomes a ballad of the
imagination’s revenge against the poet’s unpoetic nature, against his failure
to rise out of the morass of family romance into the higher romance of the
autonomous spirit questing for evidences of its own creative election.”145
Bloom records Browning’s association of Shakespeare with the objective
poet, and Shelley with the subjective poet, and Yeats’s transformation of
these opposites into the primary and the antithetical. Roland rides across a
landscape without imagination and Bloom, who was born in 1930 and
whose essay on Pater was published in 1967, notes that Browning was
thirty-nine when he wrote the poem; an age at which the imagination learns
that “no spring can flower past its meridian,” while adding that Shelley was
“impatient of our staler realities.”146 In “Ruskin as Literary Critic,” Bloom
outlines that the qualities of “Reverence, sensitivities, and accuracy, taken
together, are the theological virtues for criticism, but the combination can
thwart creation.”147 Bloom sees this morish quotation as the very center of
Ruskin’s criticism: “There is no wealth but Life—Life, including all its
powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which
nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.”148 But
this noble vision darkens, “Ruskin’s formulation of the Pathetic Fallacy is a
profound protest against nineteenth-century homogeneities,” since a
primrose should be a fact more than a feeling of something more deeply
interfused. Ruskin would have adored the tough sensibility of Stevens but
not his dictum that reality should be made more difficult to see: “But it is
still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough
to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions;
and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still
strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his
weight.”149 Ruskin wants for Wordsworth’s unsubstantial structure to melt
into reality without its imaginative force evaporating like morning mist,
whereas Pater wishes for dream-like sensation to melt into fantasy like the
passionate Porphyro into Madeline’s dream. Bloom believes that we are on
Pater’s side because (with sour wit) he remarks: “Wordsworth could see
only landscapes that he had seen before, and that no landscape became
visible to him that he had not first estranged from himself.”150 The
workings of the imagination are adjudged compensatory for primary
perception, especially that of childhood perception, and hence Bloom
includes Ruskin’s post-Wordsworthian insight into the child-like quality of
genius: “the whole difference between a man of genius and other men . . . is
that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of
children, in perpetual wonder . . . infinite ignorance, and yet infinite
power.”151 To see as a child sees is to purge the familiar, to see as if for the
first time but perpetually renewed as the poet in the act of creation attempts
to become his own begetter. Bloom explicitly states that, unlike
Wordsworth, Pater welcomes excessive self-consciousness and hence
inaugurates the decadent phase of Romanticism, “in which, when honest,
we still find ourselves.”152
The very last section of The Ringers in the Tower is entitled “Epilogue:
A New Romanticism? Another Decadence?” Here Bloom writes that in
1968 observers of the contemporary cultural scene liken it to “Romanticism
. . . from 1770 to 1830” and “the Decadence, or Aestheticism . . . 1870 to
1900.”153 He quotes Pater, who suggests that the romantic character in art
is found in the addition of strangeness to beauty: “mass culture increasingly
is in a Romantic or Decadent phase, and its images begin to acquire the
strangeness or curiosity in which Pater pioneered.”154 Pater is of interest to
Bloom because “his historical novel Marius the Epicurean compared the
condition of late Victorian England to that of Rome in the age of the
Antonines, the last high moment of a great civilization directly poised on
the verge of Decline and Fall.”155 Hugh Brogan has argued that the period
of Nixon and Carter gave rise to “loose talk” of decline in American
political circles, a phenomenon that Paul Kennedy enlarges upon in The
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: “An economically expanding Power—
Britain in the 1860s . . . may well prefer to become rich rather than to spend
heavily on armaments. A half-century later, priorities may well have
altered. The earlier economic expansion has brought with it overseas
obligations (dependence upon foreign markets and raw materials, military
alliances, perhaps bases and colonies).”156 Bloom rails against
interventionist presidents; the prophet in him would presumably welcome
Robert Nisbet’s gloss on the public reception of Kennedy’s thesis:

. . . when Yale history professor Paul Kennedy published his The Rise
and fall of the Great Powers with its concluding argument that the
“American Empire” was already manifesting signs of decadence and
decline, a storm of outrage issued forth from neoconservatives. . . .
They could not abide the thought that American progress might be
tapering off, already succeeded by the stigmata of decline and
possibly, fall. Never! The Americanization of the world would go
on!157

E. H. Carr observes that “After the First World War, Toynbee made a
desperate attempt to replace a linear view of history by a cyclical theory—
the characteristic ideology of a society in decline.”158 Bloom begins
Anatomy of Influence by diagnosing symptoms of decline that I want to
connect to the British analogy: “We have approached bankruptcy, fought
wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor.”159 The
Orc cycle would seem rather cyclic, as would Bloom’s pervasive interest in
the life-cycle of poets who age from Orc to Urizen, which just leaves a
direct apprehension of political decline unproven: “twenty-first-century
America is in a state of decline.”160 Bloom’s interpretation of the Orc cycle
is something of an aesthetic obsession and the fact that America has passed
from its Orcish revolutionary origins to an Urizenic colonial power is part
of Bloom’s nightmarish prophecy: “It is that singular kind of nightmare
some of us dream obsessively, in which you encounter a series of terrifying
faces, and only gradually do you realize that these faces are terrified, and
that you are the cause of the terror.”161 These words were written about
David Lindsay’s Orcish quester Maskull that Bloom relates to Prometheus
and the Yeatsian Mask: “Lindsay’s narrative thus has the shape of a
destructive fire seeking for a kindlier flame, but finding nothing because it
burns all in its path.”162 Bloom reveals something quintessential about his
own aims, when he draws this striking historical analogy between the
British and the American centuries:

. . . in the England of 1819, lay a country and a situation

frighteningly like the here and now, a situation of domestic and
foreign revolution and middle- and upper-class reaction against both
revolutions. Substitute the black people of the United States for the
working people of England, and the Southeast Asian revolution for
the French, and the situations tend to lose themselves in an identity
that may account for the still-emerging cultural parallels.163

He contrasts Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs with Coleridge and De

Quincey in order to justify his thesis that, thwarted by the Urizenic
American Moloch, the Orcish but quixotically escapist Beat Generation
turned to drug culture, just as the world-weary questers among the
Romantics became decadent: “frustrated by the societal balking of the new
birth of mixed creative and organic energy that had seemed the spirit of the
age, many Romantics . . . found solace through various modes of
internalization.”164 But insert a ditto for Bloom, who finds solace from the
nightmare of history (that he frequently complains of in his many anti-
Republican asides) by occupying his thoughts with aesthetics. However, his
thought is never unqualified aestheticism; Bloom prefers indeliberate
parody to the psychedelic abyss of psychoanalysis; his review of Ginsberg’s
Kaddish is largely dismissive, though one Blakean apothegm is worth
quoting: “His dominant notion as to form derives from Blake’s ‘Exuberance
is Beauty’, the belief that the energy embodied in poetry finds only its
outward boundary in reason and order, and can make that boundary where it
will, at the limit of the poet’s informing desire.”165 The problem is the
liquefaction of content: “Ginsberg is ruined poetically by his willful
addiction to a voluntaristic chaos, by a childish social dialectic as
pernicious as any he seeks to escape.”166 Bloomian aesthetics rely upon
the struggle with a malforming precursor, the greater the binding down, the
fiercer the internalization, and this dialectic is lacking beneath the decadent
mask of Ginsberg’s too-free content.
We are now in a much better position to understand Bloom’s Manichean
definition of the American sublime which owes a great deal to Emerson’s
gnosis: “How came the Individual thus armed and impassioned to parricide
thus murderously inclined” to “kill the divine life? Ah wicked
Manichee!”167 Protestants can brook no instruction as a catechism and
Bloom defines the belated American sublime as a fiercer internalization
than any previous national aesthetic. Fite calls “Emerson and Whitman: The
American Sublime” Bloom’s most difficult essay. However, the essential
axiom of the text reduces to a kind of blotting out of the past defined, either
in terms of memories, or as cultural tradition, with the figuration of what is
absented as an abyss. But that is an abyss populated by the spontaneity of
instinctual American genius untaught by Europeans and thus Emerson gives
Bloom his celebrated formula, “I against the Abyss.” To textually ground
his point, Bloom concentrates upon Whitman’s intertextual relationship
with Emerson and lists three references that form a sliding-scale of denial.
In 1863 Emerson is described as “the actual beginner of the whole
procession,” but by 1887 we hear the cock crow: “It is of no importance
whether I had read Emerson before starting L. of G. or not. The fact
happens to be positively that I had not.”168 Bloom shows Whitman writing
that “the best part of Emersonianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys
itself” with the poet’s sublimely independent corollary, “Who wants to be
any man’s mere follower?”169 Then, Bloom traces the reoccurrence of this
gigantic figure of self-reliance in Song of Myself, in which the Emersonian
giant goes wherever Walt goes and in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
where Stevens answers the giant part of the uncertain question that is
himself. Bloom’s redoubtable memory banks pressgang Kierkegaard into
work: “When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest
simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered.”170
Kierkegaard’s forgotten-to-be-remembered figure becomes Emerson’s
apothegm: “When we have no new perception, we shall gladly disburden
the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.”171 Bloom argues that
the “true Emersonian dialectic of imaginative autonomy as against
Necessity” is also that of “transparency as against enforced
opaqueness.”172 Emerson wipes away anxious moonlight like mud in a
Protestant askesis: “Every man has his own voice. . . . Let him scorn to
imitate any being, let him scorn to be a secondary man.”173 Bloom then
turns to what he describes as the essay misentitled “Nature,” which is
transcendental to the point of refusing to acknowledge nature as any more
than a natural blank created by our own perceptions: “The ruin or the blank
that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is
not coincident with the axis of things and so they appear not transparent but
opaque.”174 Bloom’s comment does not yet identify the white whale with
this Protestant refusal to come second: “if our own eye contains the ruin or
blank we see in nature, then it contains also the joy and color we see there .
. . in that ecstasy when the axis of vision and the axis of things coincide . . .
we see into the life of things, we behold a transparency that is also
ourselves.”175 The perceived Puritanism of Bloom’s Gnostic father was
duly denigrated by Yvor Winters, who attacks Emerson for “addressing an
audience which, like himself, had been so conditioned by two hundred
years of Calvinistic discipline.”176 Winters was doubtless discombobulated
by Emerson’s late Romantic pronouncement that the virtues of society are
the vices of the saint, and therefore “we must cast away our virtues, or what
we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our
grosser vices.”177 Bloom concatenates another of Emerson’s morally
ambivalent flourishes: “our crimes may be lively stones out of which we
shall construct the temple of the true God,” which he notes is similar to
Blake’s proverb about the bricks of religion building brothels but also to
Nietzsche when beyond good and evil, Pater’s fluctuating sensations and
Yeatsian contraries.178 As if over-hearing the growing mind of the nascent
American tradition, Bloom dwells upon Emerson’s wisdom that “the one
thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be
surprised out of our propriety . . . in short to draw a new circle.”179
Psychologists call a click-whirr response what Bloom defines as Swift’s
mechanical operations of the spirit; Bloom indicates that Emerson’s
meaning is close to the maturing ego progressively displacing the id, the
child-animal changing into the teenage human. We are close to the heart of
this book since when Bloom repeats that “the daemon is our destiny,” I take
him to mean that he confronts the daemon of the American Protestant
self.180 Bloom says that Romanticism is not “a Napoleonic obsession with
titanic forms,” and reformulates his definition as “a humanism, which seeks
our renewal as makers, which hopes” that “we—even we—coming so late
in time’s injustices can still sing a song of ourselves.”181 Emerson’s circles
and circumferences are compared to the Blakean devourer and prolific, such
that daemonic influx is regarded as the devouring Emersonian sin of
limitation, whereas the prolific half of the contraries was seen by Emerson
as the circumference widening delight in pulsating energy. Emerson’s
philosophy abandons the fixed point where the stillness is and, according to
Bloom, is more akin to the Wordsworthian mode of a possible sublimity
that is ever more about to be. He cares about the journey, not the goal, the
chase is better for Emerson than the kill; thus, Nietzsche said of him: “he
touches on the cheerful transcendency of the worthy gentleman who
returned from an amorous rendezvous, as if he had accomplished the
mission. ‘Though the power is lacking,’ he said gratefully, ‘the lust is
nevertheless praiseworthy’.”182 Whether Emerson is a charming self-
deceiver or a prophet who snatches visionary success from the jaws of
defeat is the question; Bloom cheerfully ends his essay on Emerson with
this quotation: “As long as I am weak, I shall talk of Fate; whenever the
God fills me with his fullness, I shall see the disappearance of Fate. I am
Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.”183
 Bloom defines the discontinuous abyss as the primal American
difference and traces this figure to the Rhodopi mountains in Bulgaria: “The
Emersonian elevation authentically is shamanistic—it bears all the splendid
and barbarous stigmata . . . located in the Siberian shamans who had
descended into Scythia and Thrace, and whose egregious raptures lurk in
the dark abysses from which Western poetic tradition emerged.”184 He
compares Emerson to Empedocles, saying that Empedocles is “an authentic
High Romantic ruined quester” like Manfred and Childe Roland, but that
Emerson was an “Empedocles-in-dialectical-reversal, a happy pilgrim
whose daimonic drive irradiates every Dark Tower.”185 He finds the figure
of Orpheus in Emerson’s essay “The Poet” and defines Orpheus as “a kind
of Shaman . . . a master of divination whose quest leads to godhood, if
finally also to failure and to a terrible death.”186 His essay “The Native
Strain” contains this Gnostic statement with regard to American reality:
“Where Greek thought emphasized always the great reality of human
mortality, Orphism was not only a doctrine of immortality, but of the actual
if latent divinity of the soul.”187 More explanation is required here since
the Bloomian self is thrice divided: “deeper than the psyche is the pneuma,
the spark, the uncreated self, distinct from the soul that God (or Demiurge)
created.”188 The Shaman’s occult self was stimulated by the fly-agaric
mushroom and induced a kind of trance that resulted in an ecstatic
intoxication that is a powerful ingredient in authentic Gnostic experiences.
Bloom confesses to having had an out-of-body experience while being
treated for a bleeding stomach ulcer, which vision reminded him of Jean
Cocteau’s Orpheus. He writes that this mystical doctrine was Thracian and
Bacchic and, further, that the only gods that matter to the Orphics with their
rituals of purification and purgation were Eros and Bacchus, who is to an
extent identified with the figure of Dionysius. Due to Emerson’s influence,
the only gods that matter to the native poetic strain announced by
Tocqueville as having “exaggerated descriptions and strange creations” are
the Orphic pantheon of “Eros, Bacchus and Ananke.”189 Orpheus as
imagined by Emerson is irrational and Bloom reckons that in his Orphic
writings Emerson achieves “an ekstasis, a stepping-out that is truly a
wandering beyond limits”; thus, Orphic poetry for Emerson is wild or “freer
speech” and is exactly “instinct.”190 There is no place for western
philosophical rationalism in Bloom’s Emersonian discourse since “Orphic
instinct . . . manifests itself as Dionysiac possession, and also as rival
possession that begins as Eros and ends as Ananke, love yielding to
necessity.”191 The shamanistic qualities that interest Bloom are those of
divination in an oracular sense that would make of American poets
liberating gods since Orphism “holds that man is wicked, because
descended from the Titans who devoured the child Dionysos-Zagreus, and
yet also divine, because descended also necessarily from the grotesquely
cannibalized Bacchic babe.”192 American poets are liberating gods because
they prophesize the kingdom of man over the sensory world of nature and
have a titanic stature that transcends nature thanks to the presence of
something older than nature in their being. It is easy to see how the guilty
myth of Dionysos-Zagreus and Freud’s primal horde cohere, and then
formulate an infinite regress of devouring poetic sons plus prolific poetic
fathers, since Bloom believes that the native American strain “must be
related to the differences between British and American Puritanism”
because both poetries are “displaced Protestantisms.”193 Emerson’s casting
out of European influences left Dickinson and the rest with a discontinuous
new start: “Dickinson owes more to Emerson than Emerson did to
Coleridge, Wordsworth.”194 Bloom usefully quotes Jane Harrison, who
writes: “The religion of Orpheus is religious in the sense that it is the
worship of the real mysteries of life, of potencies (daemons) rather than
personal gods (theoi).”195 The centrally influential Emerson becomes
figured by Bloom in the grisly metaphor of an oracular Yankee skull
symbolic of American Orphism. Bloom argues that the whole movement of
modern poetry is toward the “progressive internalization of every sort of
quest,” which uncovers the “solitude at our center.”196 He celebrates those
poets like Whitman, Stevens, and Ashbery that record moments of
solipsistic bliss as they triumph over the flux of experience, or indeed, as it
is in Bloom’s reading of The Owl in the Sarcophagus, of “the mind’s power
over our consciousness of death.”197 I end this potted survey of Protestant
references in Figures of Capable Imagination with Stevens’ apothegm that
in the new world all men are priests.198
In Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Bloom argues that
Stevens incarnates as an American poet in the mold of Whitman, and is
influenced by the transcendental philosophy of Emerson, but in fact never
rids himself of the collective influence, either directly or indirectly, of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Sometimes Bloom persuasively
demonstrates the direct influence of the English Romantics, powerfully so,
in the case of the trope of the leaves that derives in Shelley’s “Ode to the
West Wind,” yet in other, more esoteric instances, he argues that the formal
hexagonal shape of Romantic odes indirectly imposes itself underneath the
veneer of an ostensibly American Modernist poetics. Bloom’s threefold
scene of instruction is reduced to the play between ethos, pathos, and logos,
although Stevens never moves the reader in the pathetic way that the plight
of Cordelia moved Dr Johnson. Pathos in Stevens largely depends upon
Bloom’s intuition that Stevens feels belated and that the American Sublime
is more belated than any other national literature. Thus, he writes that as
tradition advances poetic meaning becomes more abstract, as texts become
more over-determined poetic meaning becomes underdetermined; the very
abstraction of Stevens is explained away as a consequence of his
hauntedness by the influence of strong precursors. As a transcendental poet,
the outside, or the not-me, or the dead object world, must come second to
the first idea of poetic inspiration. A historicist would object that history
comes first, but in the iconoclasm of Stevens’ poetry there is frequently
strong evidence to suggest that Stevens lives in his own private and highly
imaginative world, a Sunday-morning world of art that Bloom’s Scene of
Instruction seems almost specifically invented to deconstruct. The
beginning of Wallace Stevens dismantles American tradition to its proposed
building blocks in Emerson. It starts with lists of analogues for the
categories of pathos, logos, and ethos to illustrate the Gnostic aphorism that
in American poetry everything since Emerson follows a triple pattern: “It
must be broken; It must not bear having been broken; It must seem to have
been mended.”199 Like in “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” Bloom
explicates Stevens’ entire career in terms of his categories of creativity:
“what I will call the crisis or Crossing of Election took place in 1915, when
his first strong poems were written. The Crossing of Solipsism lasted a long
time in him, but its crux was in 1921–22, and it was not resolved until
1934–36. The final crossing, that of Identification, took place in 1942, and
gave Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.”200 Bloom translates his triad of
ethos, logos, and pathos into Emerson’s essayistic categories of Fate,
Freedom, and Power and, in his chapter on Harmonium, into “The Man
Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” “The Snowman,” and “Tea at the Palaz of
Hoon.” Ethos Bloom equates with nature, or fate, “a universe of death
whose cyclic repetitions can be broken through only by transgressive acts of
origination, an origination that can be performed only as and by the Will,
the pathos or potentia of Power.”201 Thus, in “The Man Whose Pharynx
Was Bad,” the malady of the quotidian is “a badly repressed case of the
anxiety of influence,” an inability to be an early poet, and hence the poet’s
voice might fail.202 There is a hint that Bloom’s triadic nomenclature
derives in Ruskin’s discussion of the pathetic fallacy and that pathos is
shorthand for pathetic fallacy, or the imagining of life in the It-Thou of
inanimate nature: “Whereas the classical and medieval poets and painters . .
. expressed the actual qualities of the thing itself, the Renaissance and
modern artists first made the thing itself into an imagined thing and then
reimagined that already altered object.”203 Strong poets transform nature
or the precursor (often a composite of Emerson and Whitman) by the power
of their imaginings, which elide the primacy of nature and the precursor in
order to substitute the falsely solipsistic state of originating poetry that is
entirely free from the taint of influence. “The Snowman” becomes Bloom’s
shorthand for Stevens trying to imagine the thing itself, while “Tea at the
Palaz of Hoon” represents the poet as the origin of his own imaginings and
not an imaginative reduction to the true-seeing of an object as in “The
Snowman.” Sadly for Stevens’ putative dream of being an original of the
Native American strain, Bloom identifies a submerged echo of Emerson’s
transparent eyeball in the snow and Whitman’s fiery beard in the ointment-
sprinkled beard.204 Bloom suggests that Stevens’ inability to write between
1924 and 1930 is due to his slow realization that he was not a luxurious
poet of earth but more suited for austerities and dilapidations.205 This
realization replaces the lush wartiness of repressed autumnal sexuality in
“Sunday Morning” with the belated irony of “The Comedian as the Letter
C”: “it is bitter almost everywhere, frequently to the point of rancidity, and
yet it shares fully the obsessive quest that it ostensibly mocks.”206 The
quest Bloom speaks of is the tradition of quest romance as initiated by
Wordsworth’s Solitary in The Excursion and continued by Shelley’s poet in
Alastor and Yeats’s Oisin. Bloom states that the central irony of the poem is
that an imaginative Romantic quest cannot cross the Atlantic: “The Atlantic
severs the American Romantic Selfhood from its British precursor, and
internalized romance becomes only internalization and insatiable
egotism.”207 The deep structures of British Romanticism reach a point of
parody and hence desolation from which, after a breathing space of some
years, Stevens was to begin his poetic project anew, without the rich
Keatsian imagery of “Sunday Morning,” but with the formula that change
results in death, which is the mother of beauty.
Bloom argues the majority of Stevens’ ideas of order are limitations
corresponding to fate or tropes of ethos; he emphasizes change and the
subtle evasions of the inevitability of change often expressed as wistfulness
for a departing sexuality that becomes figured as the anxiety of belatedness,
especially in relation to Keats, Shelley, and Whitman. Bloom states that
Stevens associates solitude with peace and ideas of order with Emersonian
self-reliance; that Stevens attains poetic power when he ceases to fear the
solipsism of a self-creation so radical that the poet lived and breathed in a
world of his own metaphors. He quotes Schopenhauer to illumine his
proposition: “the subjective disposition, the affectation of the will, imparts
its own hue to the perceived surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings
communicate the reflex of their color to the will.”208 Bloom identifies
“Ideas of Order at Key West” as an American shore-ode and crisis-lyric in
the tradition of Emerson’s “Seashore.” Cataloguing a number of instances
of Stevens’ usage of the word “beyond,” Bloom concludes that beyond
means beyond the First Idea, and that there “can be no idea of order in
Stevens without reducing to a First Idea and then imagining beyond that
idea to a new and heightened solitude of power and will.”209 To do so is to
go beyond the limitation of Whitman for whom the muse of the sea
represents his mother, while the shore his father. The woman in “Ideas of
Order at Key West” becomes the poem’s central metaphor or a single
artificer of the world. Whitman’s “Word Out of the Sea” and Stevens’
“Words of the sea” are read as being antithetical; Stevens demonstrating his
power over the sea and hence the universe of death.210 Bloom views The
Man with the Blue Guitar as the gateway to Stevens’ major phase and Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction as the ne plus ultra of this period. The model for
both is a misprisioned Song of Myself and the expected map of misreading
re-introduced as “the characteristic ordering of the post-Enlightenment
crisis-poem.”211 He speaks of a crisis lurking beneath the poem’s surface-
improvisational buoyancy and means that Stevens’ crises are crises of
confidence with reference to the family romance of elder poets. But the
object world should not be ignored, since “the imagination takes us out of . .
. reality into a pure irreality.”212 In the best known passage of The Man
with the Blue Guitar, we come across a suspiciously familiar formulation as
to the circular logic that poems influence poems:

Poetry is the subject of the poem,

From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,

Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say. (CP, 176)213

Alas, Stevens was to write of the world washed in his imagination that “We
have imagined things that we have failed to realize,” which prompts Bloom
to reflect that “his lyric is an authentic American elegy, a study of the
nostalgias.”214 My favorite of Bloom’s readings in the chapter entitled
Parts of a World is his meditation upon “The Man on the Dump,” where the
poet expresses belated disgust as he refigures the dew in yet another poetic
mimesis. The dew is not new and is therefore old enough to be heaped on a
dump, or the expressiveness of an American High Romantic perpetually at
work reconstructing his poetic stance. Bloom reads the peculiar and
arresting phrase “The the” as any object whatsoever, outside the self, which
is in the process of being taken up again into language . . . another incipient
realization that there are no proper meanings in the language of poetry.215
The short chapter ends appropriately enough with this Nietzschean
contribution to the American sublime: “As soon as we . . . seek for once to
know ourselves fully by means of introspective reflection, we are lost in a
bottomless void.”216
Bloom underlines that we often underestimate how labyrinthine Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction is, in its subtle evasions and preternatural
rhetoricity, it’s excessive self-awareness as text.217 Bloom means that
Stevensian poems are images of abstraction that resist sentimentality:

. . . an image is an obsession or a haunting, part percept and part

concept, or we might say ethos as “haunt,” and so he tries to
demystify it by reduction to its First Idea, a fate or reality supposedly
beyond further reduction. But, in the next stage of his dialectic, he
undergoes a recognition of the First Idea (itself an “imagined thing”
or image) and then finds he is in danger of being dehumanized by
this Freedom of substitution . . .218

But this substitution is re-imagined, and Stevens moves onto a fresh

recognition or retroactive meaningfulness of the First Idea as potentia, or
Power and passion. Bloom meditates upon Stevens’ belief that the world
has been painted and that most modern activity is stripping the paint to get
at the world itself. He adumbrates that Stevens’ supreme fiction must be
abstract in order to undo previous poetic jobs of paint and must change or
else it will become a single domineering paint job. However, it should give
pleasure, and this pleasure is that of priority, although Stevens himself says:
“I have no idea of the form that a supreme fiction would take. The Notes
start out with the idea that it would not take any form: that it would be
abstract. Of course, in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction;
the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives
pleasure.”219 Bloom’s supreme fiction, the genesis of the warrior god,
Yahweh, is read as a rhetorical swerve away from prior figurations of
Canaanite deities. Stevens writes of the laborious human, “who lives in
illusion and who, after all the great illusions have left him, still clings to the
one that pierces him.”220 Bloom’s exegesis adds originality to pleasure,
where pleasure is the will-to-power expressed as aesthetic priority and yet
in old age could cry for the return of Yahweh. The metaphysical desire to be
stripped of illusion forms the clinamen that constitutes the first five cantos
of the poem and, in particular, the section “It Must Be Abstract.” The term
Nachträglichkeit, defined variously as aftering, after-imaging, after-
consciousness, and deferred meaning, would seem clarified by this
statement: “the First Idea, though imagined, is a thing; that is, the First Idea
is man, the earth, or the sun washed clean by being taken up into the
imagination,” but to attain the transparent clearness of originality Stevens’
imagery becomes very abstract and changeable: “As the qualifications keep
piling up . . . the reader . . . may grow weary of a prophecy that cannot stop
deconstructing itself.”221 Bloom adjudges the center of Stevens’ constantly
decentered canon to be the Canon Aspirin of Notes, who is charmingly
described as eating lobster Bombay with mango chutney. The Canon is the
antidote to the headache of unreality to rival St John’s backache which
signifies fallen human history.222 Bloom complains that lobster appears
nowhere else in Stevens, although mango does and is tagged as visionary
food akin to Coleridgean honey-dew. Bloom intelligibly writes that if “the
Canon Aspirin is the Romantic poet in Stevens . . . then his sister is the
muse . . . an idea of the moon of the imagination.”223 Unable to accept a
First Idea as fate or ethos the Canon dreams heroically enough to redeem
himself by inventing a metaleptic fiction of reversal, one that swaps
Whitmanian earliness for his own evasions, the supreme fictions of post-
Romantic poetry which demonstrates the poet’s power over reality and the
inevitability of death.
Bloom describes The Auroras of Autumn as Stevens’ most directly
personal crisis-lyric and one that grants the reader the illusion of closure
better than any other poem written in English in the twentieth century.
While observing the northern lights Stevens confronts the object world or
universe of death, and Bloom mentions from personal experience that the
lights do indeed resemble the gigantic coilings of a many-folded serpent.
The serpent becomes associated with the First Idea because these flashings
were thought to be caused by charged particles of solar origin, and for
Stevens the First Idea assimilates to the sun. The figure of Ananke or
necessity in Stevens is identified with the serpent, and hence the necessity
of change, death and the ageing sexual bitterness of Stevens’ poetry gains
representation in the figure of the necessitous snake. The precursor poems
suggested are Whitman’s beach-poems, where the American poetic psyche
tends to incarnate, and Shelley’s Mount Blanc. The First Idea as serpent
reduces to the frightening figure of universal whiteness, or the Snowman’s
Pyrrhic victory that Bloom often connects to the Coleridgean blank and
Melville’s whale. Bloom also draws a comparison with Wordsworth’s
figuration of the northern lights as an emblem of his own childhood
strength of imagination.224 The here, nowhere, and at once of Wordsworth
becomes a better translation of the “I am that I am” than “I will be present
when I will be present.” Bloom indicates that we have been slow to see
memory as a kind of emblematic thinking in post-Romantic poetry and that
Auroras contains a poignant reflection on Stevens’ gentle, ever-more-
distant, memories of his mother: “tactile memory of the mother has been
emptied out, and the house of the mind therefore crumbles.”225 Pessimism
fades to optimism as the image of the mother is replaced by his hearty, yea-
saying father, who is figured with reference to Jehovah, but, like his father,
God is dead. Stevens attains a belated vision of the sublime; when,
according to Bloom, he demonstrates that “any First Idea is finally an idea
of an idea, or a new troping of the sun, Stevens seeks to show that the
auroras are ‘nothing’ unless and until they are ‘contained’ by being
imagined in his mind.”226 Bloom reads the closing lines emphasis upon
innocence as a casting out of death, and strangely the image of burning
straw at the end of the poem does not ignite (as in Wordsworth) in order to
reveal the invisible world as the light of sense goes out with a flash, but to
establish that humans experience change and that humans are the origin of
the meaning of change.227 Thus, Stevens’ ultimate philosophic father is
Epicurus, who said that the “what” was unknowable, and therefore Bloom’s
discussion of Auroras ends with the comment that “no other twentieth-
century poem in English takes us further or more powerfully into the mode
of the Sublime.”228
 Bloom outlines that The Owl in the Sarcophagus “defines a vision of
three immortal forms—sleep, peace, and the mother—that move among the
dead.”229 The owl is not wisdom but “the transformation of our vision of
death from merely being swallowed up by the stone of the earth to a realm
where a central and humanizing discursiveness can operate.”230 The three
immortal forms of sleep, peace, and death that quiet the dead with their
humanizing discursiveness are based upon the figure of Whitman in The
Sleepers quieting the restless. Stevens’ visionary imagination figures death
as it will be rather than the plain fact of death and in so doing refigures
Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln in which the knowledge of death and the
thought of death are companions for the poet. However, these deathly
companions cannot communicate for who can return from that well-traveled
bourn? Bloom writes of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven: “New Haven
is simply any city that is not home, a city that unsettles the self just enough
so that it is startled into meditation, but close enough to home so that the
meditation keeps contact with the commonplace.”231 Reality in the poem
commonly means the not-me of Emerson, that is nature: “That leaves only
one’s mind or imagination to set against a reality that comprehends all
otherness, in a dialectical struggle without victory.”232 The poem reveals
that the poetry of earth is only one part of Stevens; the transcendentalist
quester is therefore the dominant part. Bloom argues that a poem is an event
and a portentous crying out to one’s fellow citizens and etymologically a
dying fall. Yet, a few pages later, the pompous language of this Shelleyan
search for reality is defined as parodic and harking back to Crispin:
“Creation is not renewed by images/ Of lone wanderers.”233 The poem has
so many evasive perambulations upon the nature of reality and perception,
that the poem’s narrative ends with the welcome statement that a clearness
has returned and Bloom too is somewhat relieved: “After so many dominant
blanks, so many staring eyes hatching like an egg, so many parodied
transparent eyeballs, as well as eyes’ plain versions, inexquisite eyes, and
assorted reflections, we experience a profound sense of liberation.”234
Bloom asserts that the poem terminates with the central Paterian trope of
Harmonium, that of “the apprehension of reality as the solipsistic
recognition of privileged moments.”235 Bloom admires Stevens’ last phase
greatly, but due to lack of space only one comment can be usefully culled
from his appreciations and that is the often-quoted phrase “cure of the
ground” that he interprets thus: “A cure of the rock is a cure of one’s own
reductiveness and, with it, freedom to have a larger idea of what it is to be
wholly human.”236 This said, it is irresistible not to mention when an
element of American chauvinism enters his argument that The Rock owes
Whitman a debt of influence: “Stevens hardly could hymn the night without
invoking Whitman, whose visions had established the difference of the
American night, a night wider, more fragrant, more vivid and promising,
and finally more mothering in its erotic deathliness than even the nights of
southern European tradition.”237 Despite his American heritage, Stevens
falls squarely within the ethos of another era that he cannot quite escape:
“The Romantic image . . . turns out to be neither hyperbolical nor
transumptive but purely visionary, an aspiration beyond the limits of
art.”238 Wallace Stevens is the top-selling book published by the Cornell
University Press: it is Bloom’s masterpiece.
Agon represents that stage of Bloom’s career when his major work on
Stevens was completed and whose concentrated single-author creativity
would again peak only with the writing of his big book on Shakespeare.
Nevertheless, I find Agon vital for an understanding of Bloom because it
explains much intractable rhetoric that existed as metaphor before and
because it comes just before Ruin the Sacred Truths and his turn toward the
matter of the canon. It is essential reading for anyone interested in teasing
out the subtle interrelationship of Bloom’s darkly hidden Jewish identity
judged in terms of his larger-than-life American intellectual persona.
Transumption was seen originally as a figure of comedy, but in Bloom’s
world it becomes an abyss of the unconscious that actively represses what
came before, so that the Gnostic late-comer can find fresh creative fields
and pastures new. The sublimely American Bloom sets himself against the
abyss of European history “urging his American bards to be at once Gnostic
and democratic.”239 His iconoclasm is here defined as “an antithetical
flight or repression away from art and nature alike, towards the solipsistic
grandeur that is a new Gnosis.”240 As early as Poetry and Repression,
Bloom offered this definition of Gnosticism that sets out an alternative to
Judaism and Christianity:

Gnosis, as the word itself indicates, means a kind of “knowledge”. . .

. This “knowledge” is itself the form that salvation takes, because the
“knower” is made Divine in such a “knowing,” the “known” being
“the alien God.” This kind of “knowledge” is anything but what the
West has meant by rational “knowledge,” from the Greeks until our
time. . . . It is also not what normative Judaism and orthodox
Christianity have meant by any human “knowledge” of God, for
Gnostic “knowledge” transforms man into God.241

He makes a distinction between Platonic soul and Gnostic spark or pneuma

that is more vital than the psyche of Plato; this dialectic informs the most
important of his opening remarks in Agon. Often, Bloom’s criticism
delights in relaying his discovery of an opposition between a workaday
persona and a poetic persona in a poet; the most voluble example being that
of Blake’s Spectre of Urthona and Los, though the example used in Bloom’s
“A Prelude to Gnosis” is firstly Yeats’s poem “A Dialogue of Self and
Soul” and then crucially Emerson’s concept of the social/political self and
the remainder, or “that which hovers in gleams.”242 In Poetry and
Repression, Bloom draws this distinction: “What Nietzsche called the
‘ascetic ideal’, Yeats called the primary, which he called also the ‘objective’
and the ‘sentimental’, the realm of the soul, and not the Gnostic pneuma or
antithetical self.”243 Bloom’s definition of pneuma relies upon Jonas:

In its theological aspect this doctrine states that the Divine is alien to
the world and has neither part nor concern in the physical universe;
that the true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or even
indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally
Other, unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies.
Correspondingly, in its cosmological aspect it states that the world is
the creation not of god but of some inferior principle whose law it
executes; and, in its anthropological aspect, that man’s inner self, the
pneuma (“spirit” in contrast to “soul” = psyche) is not part of the
world, of nature’s creation and domain, but is, within that world, as
 totally transcendent and as unknown by all worldly categories as is
its transmundane counterpart, the unknown God without.244

This quotation contains the key to Yeats’s “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”
since Bloom writes that Yeats’s “characteristic poem” is often a dialogue
between “the antithetical self and the primary soul” or the Gnostic pneuma
and psyche, respectively.245 In order to trace a genealogy that runs from
Orpheus through Pythagoras and Empedocles to Plato, and thence to St
Paul and ultimately Valentinus, Bloom relies on Dodds and to a lesser
extent Jonas. The genealogy itself starts with the concept of the occult self
in Shamanistic belief and the idiomatic Homeric concept of the thumos,
which Bloom glosses as being similar to Freudian drives. The thumos
becomes associated with the psyche or anxious self, whereas the occult self
became the detachable daemonic self that undergoes transmigration and
which causes an ascetic revulsion of the body:

An ontological self, the daemon, is said by Empedocles to persist

from life to life as “the carrier of man’s potential divinity and actual
guilt” (Dodds). Both divinity and guilt belonged to what Plato in the
Laws was to call “the old Titan nature,” referring to the sin of the
Titans in rending and devouring Dionysus (akin to the Dionysiac
Maenads’ sparagmos of Orpheus).246

Plato advances the genealogy by identifying the guilty occult self with the
rational Socratic psyche and thus Bloom surmises:

As in Pythagoras and Empedocles, the shamanistic metempsychosis

is intact in Plato. But shamanistic trance became Platonic rational
concentration; shamanistic Gnosis, or knowledge acquired in the
trance state, became Platonic metaphysics; recollection of past bodily
lives became recollection of the Ideal Forms as a foundation for
epistemology; shamanistic journeyings through sleep and Hades
became the Platonic myth of Er in The Republic.247

It does not entirely surprise me to see Plato reduced to a transformation of

the irrational, but it is nevertheless shocking to discover that Paul adopted a
Gnostic dualism: “Paul also needed (or wanted) a more radical dualism than
Platonism afforded . . . he relied upon a Gnostic . . . distinction, between
‘pneumatic man’ and ‘psychic man’ (or ‘natural man’, as the King James
Bible translates psychikos).”248 Christ as Platonic savior emergent from the
cave-tomb statically transcends natural-man Adam’s mundane opinions that
are ever-repeating, whereas the idea of an occult self pre-existent beyond
time indicates movement, or in Bloom’s words, a happening. Bloom
believes that readers should study texts that find them; hence, in the deep
reading of a poem you recognize “your own spark or pneuma” by which
momentary happening your workaday self knows the daemon or occult self,
and this provides knowledge “of a history, in which it (the pneuma) is itself
a critical event.”249
The next two essays in Bloom’s collection, “Lying Against Time:
Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism” and “Catastrophe Creation: Gnosis, Kabbalah,
and Blake” dwell on Gnosticism and, in particular, Nag-Hammadi
references to Valentinus. The unconscious reaction formations of poetry,
similar in effect, if not in intellectual outlook, to Yeats’s oppositional
daemon, are compared by Bloom to Valentinian error, or the process by
which a poet elaborates their own matter in the void.250 In Bloom’s
theology the abyss predates the creation and on a microcosmic individual
basis repression clears psychic space for the daemon’s poetic antagonist. In
Adversus Valentinianos, Tertullian says that Valentinus chose the path of the
serpent:

Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able

man both in genius and eloquence. Being indignant, however . . . he
broke with the church of the true faith. Just like those (restless) spirits
which, when roused by ambition, are usually inflamed with the desire
of revenge, he applied himself with all his might to exterminate the
truth . . . marked out a path for himself with the subtlety of a
serpent.251

Bloom has sympathy for Urizenic poets because “loving poetry is a Gnostic
passion not because the Abyss is loved, but because the lover longs to be
yet another Demiurge.”252 But the poet’s election-love is chained to that
initial love of the precursor’s words that reminds of Madame Bovary’s
idealistic belief that love must come suddenly and hurl you heart and soul
into the abyss. Milton’s rebellious Satan maintains that he knows no time
when he was not as now and before this namelessness, which is the gist of
the almost absurdist gnosis of Basilides:

Since therefore there was nothing, no matter, no substance, nothing

insubstantial, nothing simple, nothing composite, nothing
imperceptible (non-subjective), no man, no angel, no god, nothing at
all that can be named or can be apprehended by sense-perception,
nothing of the mental things . . . the non-existent God . . . without
intelligence, without perception, without will, without resolve,
without impulse, without desire, wished to make a world.253

It is easy to understand how this form of Gnosis can be allied to Freudian

repression and then applied to the ostensibly non-existent influence of a
precursor on a poet, since Freud attempted to map the mind and did so by
identifying what Bloom sees as his Urizenic definition of the ego with the
trait of injured Narcissism such that, as Bloom interprets, eros equals
figurative meaning, the immortal wound. Moreover, Bloom writes that
Freud proposed a catastrophe theory of creation, in which all life is seen as
preparation for ultimate ends, or the absence of irritability: “This
catastrophe theory is developed in The Ego and the Id, where two major
catastrophes, the drying up of ocean that cast life onto land and the Ice Age
are said to be repeated psychosomatically.”254 Freud’s definition of a drive
is then said to be that urge to return to an earlier state of things which, if
interpreted as literal language, means the dry repetition of a precursor’s
language that reduces to a kind of artistic death. The composure to write
one’s own words therefore becomes a sublime reaction to the threat or
terror of death that is contained in the unconscious, where the memory of
the precursor’s words in a repressed fashion is stored. In “Freud and the
Sublime,” Bloom compares Schopenhauer to the uncanny force of the
sublime mode in Freud’s figure of repression: “these very objects, whose
significant forms invite us to a pure contemplation of them, may have a
hostile relation to the human will in general . . . the beholder may not direct
his attention to this relation to his will which is so pressing and hostile, but,
although he perceives and acknowledges it, he may consciously turn away
from it . . . he is then filled with the feeling of the sublime.”255 Bloom
identifies Schopenhauer’s account of repression as an example of
unconsciously purposeful forgetting and yet has the audacity to throw in
Van den Berg’s criticism that “the theory of repression . . . is closely related
to the thesis that there is sense in everything, which in turn implies that
everything is past and there is nothing new.”256 Trilling throws light on the
function of Bloom’s revisionary ratios thought of as deep readings of the
psychological repressions that characterize poetic influence: “Vico spoke of
the metaphorical, imagistic language of the early stages of culture; it was
left to Freud to discover how, in a scientific age, we still feel and think in
figurative formations, and to create, what psychoanalysis is, a science of
tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synecdoche and metonymy.”257
Bloom develops Trilling’s synopsis by suggesting that Freudian psychic
defenses are fantasies which are always tropes in that deep structures, such
as desires become transformed into surface structures that are
symptoms.258 For instance, the Freudian figure of Negation (when the
subject denies what is repressed but is nevertheless able to talk about his
malady in negative terms) comes to mean in Bloomian discourse the flat
denial of influence by a disingenuous aphasiac author, a good example
being classicist Byron calling Shakespeare the barbarian himself. With
powerful rhetoric, Bloom recalls a quotation from Fletcher to clinch his
argument: “ ‘negation’ names the process by which, unconsciously, the
mind selects terms to express its ambivalence. Extreme dualism must cause
symbolic antiphrases . . . the most powerful satirists are dualists, users of
‘negation’, to the point that they become naïve Gnostics. They like
Gnostics, hover on the edge of extreme asceticism which can drop off
absolutely into an extreme libertinism.”259 This thinking relies on an act of
primal fixation or wounding that leaves a narcissistic scar similar to first
love in adolescents which Bloom calls an originating catastrophe. Bloom
quotes this intriguing passage from Freud’s Analysis Terminable and
Interminable: “repression is to the other methods of defense what the
omission of words or passages is to the corruption of a text.”260 I find it
especially absorbing that Freud chose as a rejected epigraph for The
Interpretation of Dreams, a passage from Paradise Lost, in which the rebel
angels plot to offend their enemy, his allegory being that the devils
symbolize repressed drives. Bloom speculates that psychology, cosmology,
and mythology are closely related and that a very good symptom of the
Gnostic universe is this mythopoeic extract that has survived from ancient
times and which is ascribed to Valentinus. From the serpentine bishop’s
myth, Bloom extracts textual anxiety in relation to Platonist writings and as
well a psychological parable in which iconoclasts smash statuary out of
fear:

Even as fear fell upon the angels in the presence of Adam when he
uttered greater sounds than his status in the creation justified, sounds
caused by the one who invisibly had deposited in Adam seed of
celestial substance so that Adam expressed himself freely, so also
among generations of men of our world, the works of men become
objects of fear to their own makers, as in the instances of statues,
images and everything which hands fashion in the name of a “god.”
For Adam, being fashioned in the name of “man,” inspired angelic
fear of the pre-existent man because pre-existent man was in Adam.
They, the angels, were terrified and quickly concealed or ruined their
work.261

The angels spoken of in this Gnostic parable become agents of psychic

repression, to the extent that they ruin the cosmos that Adam is thrown into;
Adam represents the pneumatic spark that exists before creation, in
allegoric terms a Primal Man that the Gnostics named Adam Kadmon, the
Divine Anthropos. God becomes a bungling craftsman: “Unlike Jehovah . .
. this workman does not make the world out of nothing . . . even as an
Athenian carpenter building the public planetarium must use the materials
to hand, and like the Athenian demiourgos or public workman he can hope
to do only as good a job as is possible within the limitations of his
material.”262 The fashioning of belated creation becomes an example of
lying against time,

When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate also the boundless,

eternal, infinite and timeless nature of (the original eight Aeons in the
 Pleroma), but could not express their immutable eternity, being as he
was the fruit of a defect, he embodied their eternity in time, epochs,
and great numbers of years, under the delusion that by the quantity of
times he could represent their infinity. Thus truth escaped him and he
followed the lie.263

Hence time is an illusion created by the malign creator-god Ialdaboath:

“This progressive movement constitutes the time axis of the gnostic world,
as the vertical order of aeons and spheres constitutes its space axis. Time, in
other words, is actuated by the inward thrust of a mental life. . . . It is a
metaphysic of pure movement and event.”264 Jonas’s existentialist
commentary enables Bloom to advance the Gnostic premise that texts lie
against time in a Nietzschean fashion, which asserts that only as an
aesthetic phenomenon is existence “still endurable to us,” which asceticism
translates “the condition of the ruins of time, and of the defense against
time, the deep lie at every reimagined origin.”265 Before the catastrophe
that results in captivity, the Gnostic spark knew a place of rest and
“Fullness,” the Pleroma, “a paradoxical world of tensely vital peace, and of
a calm yet active ecstasy.”266 The figure of quest romance returns when
Bloom tells his readers that the Gnostic quest equates to a return to a perfect
knowledge that transcends the repetitive world of time, but which is trapped
“by hostile angels called archons.”267 One of the joys of reading Bloom
would seem his heaping up of quotations on the same subject, sometimes by
the usual suspects, that is Shelley’s “washed in the blood of the mediator
and redeemer, time,” or else the unexpectedly Emersonian Heraclitus, “time
is a child playing draughts; the lordship is to the child.”268 Gnosticism, to
Bloom’s expert eye, is informed by a desperate belatedness; thus, Bloom
broods that the originary God saw the abyss transparently, which alludes to
Emerson’s figure of the transparent eyeball and which in turn underlines
just how much Gnosticism Bloom reads into the person he nominates as the
primal American thinker. Bloom claims that Gnosis gives you an audience
with a God unknown to and far away from this world, “a God in exile from
a false creation” and that “your deepest self was no part of the Creation-
Fall,” but part of an antient time when the spark of selfhood was one with
God’s fullness.269 But Emersonian anti-Europeanism fades into
Nietzsche’s Zoroastrian dualism figured as past versus belated American
present: “This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s resentment
against time and time’s ‘it was’ .”270
In “Emerson: The American Religion,” Bloom compares and contrasts
Emerson with Carlyle in order to identify the discourse of the American
Religion. It is hard not to see some of Bloom’s pronouncements upon
Emerson as overly enthusiastic: “he is our rhetoric as he is our Gnosis.”271
Bloom’s prognosis is that Emerson would seem essentially a Gnostic writer
and the circular formula that for every seeing soul there are just two
absorbing facts I and the unconscious/abyss. This dualism leads to the
corollary judgment that in Nature: “The freedom to imagine ‘the pure idea
in your mind’ is the heretical absolute freedom of the Gnostic who
identified his mind’s purest idea with the original Abyss.”272 But Carlyle
in Corn-Law Rhymes is interpreted as triumphing over the abyss in a less
radical way: “the Abyss is bondage, the production is freedom, somehow
still ‘in God’s name!’ ”273 His essay contains the most awful quotation
from Carlyle, one couched in sympathy for a potentially impotent man
suffering from a bout of racially aggravated sexual hysteria:

. . . far over the sea, we have a few black persons rendered extremely
“free” indeed . . . Sitting yonder with their beautiful muzzles up to
the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder
and incisor teeth ready for ever new work . . . Sunk to the ears in
pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at ease in the
Creation . . . rum-bottle in his hand, no breeches on his body,
pumpkin at discretion. . . . A bit of the great Protector’s own life lies
there; beneath those pumpkins lies a bit of the life that was Oliver
Cromwell’s. . . .274

To Bloom those black pumpkin-eaters represent all-devouring time and

Carlyle’s never accepted gnosis: “It is a familiar formula to say that failed
prophecy becomes apocalyptic, and that failed apocalyptic becomes
Gnosticism.”275 We must remember that apocalypse is meant to rescue
disappointed revolutionaries from time’s tricksterism, or the return of King
Charles. What Bloom calls a pungent phantasmagoria is for him evidence
of a demi-gnosis on Carlyle’s part, but one that led him to have an almighty
row with Emerson, “I differed from him . . . in his estimate of Cromwell’s
character, and he rose like a great Norse giant from his chair—and, drawing
a line with his finger across the table, said, with terrible fierceness: ‘Then,
sir, there is a line of separation between you and me as wide as that, and as
deep as the pit.’”276 Nietzsche thought Carlyle a canting English atheist,
and with great American honesty the disputatious nature of Emersonian
agon results in Bloom’s diagnosis of Emerson’s gnosis. Emerson could
complain that American laws were based on English models but a more
powerful symptom is Bloom’s insight that the transparency of Emersonian
transcendence opposes itself to the burden of time and objective continuity,
though this line of thought ever advances gigantic egoism. Whitman wrote
of Emerson that the best part of his writing was the idea that no man would
want to be any man’s mere follower lurks behind every page, and Emerson
himself professed: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected
thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”277 The
power of Emerson over Whitman is good health to the American
unconscious and ever a ring of Gyges that renders the Wordsworthian eye
(of the agitated storm) of nature transparent. Even the blank of nature is
seen to be lacking in ultimacy to an American sublime that decries man is a
dwarf of himself, and, from this Orphic song, Bloom apprehends that
Emerson believes man to be an incarnation of an Albion-like god set above
the grandeur of titanic American nature: “America was a larger form than
nature, filling nature with an emanative excess.”278 This brings us to
Enoch the lesser Yahweh whom, in Omens of Millennium, Bloom
introduces as the authentic angel of America and the imaginative center-
piece of the millennium. In the Book of Enoch, Enoch is transformed into
the archangel Metatron, the Prince of the Divine Presence: “Enoch’s skin is
replaced by a fiery garment of Light” and he expands “to the length and
breadth of the created world.”279 This astounding apotheosis represents, as
Bloom puts it, a point-for-point reversal of the fall of Adam Kadmon, and
hence encapsulates imagination because Metatron becomes “the esoteric
link” between “the divine and the human, fusing these realms.”280 The
latter Kabbalistic insights were Idel’s originally; Bloom finds the American
Orpheus, the prophesied Central/Universal man, who resurrects Eurydice as
leaves of grass embodied in the Adamic figure of Whitman.
“Whitman’s Image of Voice: To the Tally of My Soul” is the essay in
which Bloom argues that Whitman’s figure of the tally should be thought of
as a sublime measuring rod. Bloom’s exploration of the word’s meaning
reveals that it comes from “the Latin talea for twig or cutting,” notches on a
stick, or belt to indicate a sexual score and finally “tallywhack” or
“tallywags” for the male sexual organs.281 He continues that the carnal
image of the tally “notches a restored Narcissism and the return to the mode
of erotic self-sufficiency.”282 Even the sprig of broken lilac with which
Whitman laments the death of Lincoln becomes a phallic image of auto-
eroticism that intuits what is transcendent: “To tally . . . is at once to
measure the soul’s actual and potential sublimity, to overcome object-loss
and grief, to gratify one’s self sexually by one’s self.”283 Bloom states that
by keeping tally with all things Whitman’s self-pollution is “the most
productive masturbation since the ancient Egyptian myth of a god who
masturbates the world into being.”284 Emerson might respond that
“Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he said, ‘I am
God’; but the moment it was out of his mouth, it became a lie to the ear and
the world revenged itself for the seeming arrogance.”285 I write this
because in Easter-Day Browning divides between Cain and God’s usual
tally where Cain’s nature would seem to correspond to man’s selfish,
isolating cupiditas, while God’s usual ways represent caritas, or the philia
of communal friendship. Browning’s tally is an evaluation of the world in
terms of God’s blessedness, or caritas, whereas praising Cain would seem
cognate with arrogantly praising oneself, as in Browning’s poem of 1850
that responds to the death of his mother:

‘Cain’s nature thou wast wont to praise,

‘Not tally with God’s usual ways!’
These lines were published in the same time period during which Song of
Myself (1855) was being prepared; we do not know if Whitman read them,
but they nevertheless help us to unpick the psychic embroidery that
Whitman introspects as the flag of his disposition. The purport of my
explanation is partly to address Santayana’s gibe that, like Browning,
Whitman possessed a barbarous mind full of chaotic sensations because
alien to the natural light of reason; indeed, Browning wrote of Easter-Day’s
sister-poem Christmas-Eve that he wished for the faith engendered in a
white-washed-meeting-house vision to extinguish reason’s pale wavering
light.286 But as well, I extenuate Bloom’s argument that Whitman’s poetic
genius declines after the Lincoln elegy by suggesting that Whitman throws
his laurel-crown, symbolized by the lilac-sprig, onto the coffin of a
Christian martyr, while caught up in an out-pouring of national grief. He
stops so urgently proposing himself as a Christ-like figure to unify the
cosmos of the once more United States. At this juncture, Whitman finds a
god outside the self and loses the Emerson/Hicks dialectic that enlivens
Song of Myself.
Bloom writes that Whitman produces three different personas that he
lists as “my self,” “my soul,” and the “real Me” or “Me myself”; Bloom’s
thesis as to what these equate to is “my masculine persona, Walt Whitman,
one of the roughs, an American; the American soul (largely as expounded
by Emerson); my more ambiguous persona, somewhat feminine, somewhat
boyish.”287 He muses that the anachronistic Freudian analogies of the id,
ego, and superego do not tally since “the rough Walt is not wholly an id; the
quasi-Emersonian soul does not operate like a superego; the real Me is
hardly an ego.”288 Bloom proposes that the real Me mocks the subjective
self with mock-congratulatory bows because poetic language has failed
Whitman, the ephebe-poet, and his subjectivity. This unitary failure is
linked to the subtly different stance of Whitman’s ebullient precursor,
Emerson, who instead believed that mortal language itself fails his soul, the
Over-Soul, “which transcends the dance or interplay of tropes,” but which
defeat characterizes “intrepid agonists who never yield up their own
recalcitrance.”289 I pause here to remind the reader of my introductory
reading of “As I Ebb’d,” which also finds displaced Quaker-belief in
iconoclasm as an explanation for the aforesaid mockery of poetry in
Whitman’s shore ode. Recalcitrance in Paul’s theology occurs in those
believers who accept the resurrection-seed, but who still behave carnally;
the borrowed Gnostic concept here, as Bloom underlines, is the seed of
light. But I suspect Bloom allows personal dislike of Pauline theology to
blind him to the possibility that Whitman’s categories partly derive in
Corinthians where Paul rhetorically asks if Christ is divided; in which case,
the “my-self” is Walt the natural man, material breath, or psychikos;
Whitman’s soul, the sarkinos/sarkikos, or carnal body, that is the believer,
who lets Jesus into his heart, but whose flesh sins; and the “real Me,” the
internal spirit of the divine, or pneumatikos. It is extremely important to
note that Paul often uses the word pneumatikos in the sense of rational soul
because Whitman sometimes conflates soul and Me myself, as he does in
“Eidolons,” which poem presents a series of images as false shadows of the
eternal; it is interesting to learn that Hicks preached: “Most of the worship
in Christendom is idolatry, dark and blind idolatry; for all outward worship
is so—it is a mere worship of images. For if we make an image merely in
imagination, it is an idol.”290 The key to Whitman’s soul lies in Emerson’s
Over-Soul essay, where we find a definition of the universal soul as reason
and the Over-Soul as Unity, or the rational potentiality within man for a
wise holistic silence, in which receptive mood particles become united as
the eternal One of the Father. For Puritans, God would be Sovereign,
whereas Soul in Calvinism is an analogue for Sola fide or passive reception
of Jesus as Savior; yet, in Emerson’s displaced Unitarian belief-system, soul
corresponds to character, and is associated with influx of the surges of
everlasting nature. As Bercovitch notes, the intermediary between the
Transcendentalist and the Over-Soul was the text of America.291 The
material-spiritual sublime in Whitman is well-predicted by Emerson’s
revelatory sensations invading the enthusiastic soul; Hicksite Quakers did
not believe in Original sin and hence Whitman’s displaced spirituality
celebrates the body-electric, not least because Hicks abhorred the idea that a
merciful God should so punish mankind.292 Emerson associates the
passive soul with the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers; the ebb
of the individual rivulet before the flow of life and yet underlines that for
Quakers Jesus speaks always from within.293
Bloom portentously figures the metaphorical enigma of Whitman’s
tripartite division of self as the central problem in American poetry. Paul’s
categories of rational soul and Spirit of God are repeated in the Over-Soul
essay and elsewhere in Emerson’s prose but become ambiguous and even
antithetical in Whitman’s poetry; Bloom categorizes Whitmanian selfhood
as enigmatic: “the self is personality, the soul is character, and again the real
me is a mystery.”294 Bloom’s proof for selfhood’s tripartite division
depends upon a discussion of the following quotations that represent the
three intrinsic parts of Whitman’s self; here is the mundane-self part:

Walt Whitman, a cosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from
them,
. . . (“Song of Myself,” 497–9)

Here Whitman is the son of Manhattan rather than the Son of Man; he is by
no means the sensitive poetic measure of all things. That part of the shy
Whitmanian self Bloom loves most is figured in this passage, which
corresponds to the transmundane but phallic real Me:

But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect. . . . (“Song of Myself,” 73–9)

The sensual self does not stand apart, whereas the real Me stands up like a
Quaker speaking at a meeting house, is amused like a louche Oscar Wilde,
stands apart from the autoerotic pulling-and-hauling, a phrase that has
connotations of fishing with nets in Whitman’s prose and hence further
Christian associations. But the real Me is not exactly a Foxian orgasm
because a wild-card in and out of the constative/performative poker-faced
language game; indeed, the in-and-out allusion here to John 10.9 suggests
that Christ is the door by which man can find pasture. Christian
sanctification means standing apart, being in the world but separate unto
God, and hence the Me myself finds a source text with parataxis that echoes
the “they-are-not” dualisms of John: “They are not of the world, even as I
am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth: thy Word is truth. As
thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the
world. And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be
sanctified through the truth” (17.16-19). Christopher Marlowe was accused
of saying that John was Christ’s bedfellow; we should not ignore the
homoerotic influence of the Beloved Disciple on this American son of a
carpenter, or the tradition that John comforted Mary, Christ’s mother, while
her Son was being crucified. My tentative hypothesis is that Whitman
resurrects first, then dies, because the Pauline resurrection-seed, and the
Jesus of John, who says I am the resurrection, meld in Whitman’s
Quakerish refusal to abase himself to the influence of Emerson. The third
division occurs when Whitman’s “I” addresses the soul:

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other. (“Song of Myself,” 82–3)

The ‘I’ here is the ‘Myself’ of ‘Song of Myself’, poetic personality,

robust and rough. ‘The other I am’ is the Me myself . . . and clearly
not suited for embraces with the soul.295
Matthew’s Christ exclaims, “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be
abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted” (23.12), then He
rounds on the hypocrite Pharisees saying, “ye compass sea and land to
make one proselyte” (23.15), which makes me wonder if Kabbalah can
encompass the incorruptible.
It needs emphasizing that the Quaker emptying of outward impressions
in order for inner silence to speak is perfectly antithetical in process, but not
affect, to that wise passivity, which humbles the ego so that outward
impressions of nature can enter. In P. J. Keane’s recent reading of wise
passivity, the poetic self enjoys a mystical reverie, such that it becomes one
with the light of setting suns and therefore the central peace existing at the
heart of eternal agitations.296 Keane persuasively suggests that Emerson
recycles the Wordsworthian passive in the Over-Soul essay as passive
silence. The Over-Soul is described as a Unit by Emerson and the real Me is
figured as unitary by Whitman; but the real Me will not abase itself to the
carnal soul, so Quakerism clashes with Unitarianism. In Paul’s theology, the
carnal man is a Christian, who believes in Jesus as Savior, but whose sins
are of the flesh; the translucence of the divine is accepted into the believer’s
soul, but the sinner is still subject to bodily lusts: sensations, shall we say.
Jesus, in the rational Unitarian faith, is merely a messenger, but in
Quakerism Jesus represents inner light: “I in them and thou in Me” as
John’s Jesus says at 17:23 before being brought before the soldiers and
mocked. Bloom underlines that Whitman was his own Christ: “That I could
forget the mockers. . . . That I could look with a separate look on my own
crucifixion” (“Song of Myself,” 963–5). Whitman’s flesh will pass back to
the soil but the mustard-seed of Christ grows plentiful as grass in the
kingdom; the soul of America conjoins every atom as a unity that belongs
to you, the people, and to him, where the good news is at once Whitman
and Christ. Bloom notes the printer’s devil associations of the leaves-of-
grass metaphor and augments this with the Homeric allusion to the dead
leaves of generations. I always associate Whitman’s national epic with “We
are Seven” because of the transcendental grass-growing-on-graves
metaphor in both poems and the dialectic of adult wisdom and childish
wonder. But it seems more providential to emphasize that Wordsworth’s
wise passiveness and Emerson’s wise silence figure the extinction of
cupiditas in order to let in outward salvation or caritas, albeit as a kind of
displaced Wordsworthian nature-worship that leads to apprehension of the
transcendent Father in Emerson’s “The Over-Soul.” Whitman’s American
difference is a difference in kind rather than degree because Whitman’s
emptying of outward impressions would seem a gentle form of iconoclasm;
from a Bloomian perspective, he misreads Emerson’s rational Unitarianism
as being more material than spiritual. To Whitman the real virtue of
Emerson’s God within as presented in “Self-Reliance” is that it has Quaker
associations with the spiritual real I, or real Me. Material deity is an icon to
Quakers; true Deity, or the true self, the hotter part of the faggot, speaks
from within not from without, and again the influence of Hicks clinches the
argument: “that which may be known of God is manifest within man, and
that not by his reasoning power.”297 The real Me is pure idealism, but,
because inner light and therefore part of Jesus, or rather that part of the self
that knows love from before the foundations of the world, it enjoys
homoousia with the Father, the same Father that Emersonian rational belief
apprehends as the Over-Soul.
Bloom’s reading runs perfectly parallel to mine but lacks the recognition
of Christian theology therein: “Emerson’s ‘The Over-Soul’ is that great
nature in which we rest, while the self of his ‘Self-Reliance’ is ‘the
aboriginal Self’ preceding nature and as old as God.”298 He argues that
Whitman was more epicurean materialist than transcendental idealist and
that Christ is a thought evaded in what he nevertheless describes as the
valved trumpeting of the Newest Testament. Bloom wishes to find
Stevensian self-creation, whereas I discover an American prayer, not quite
ready for the evasive hum of atheism. Because the real Me equates pure
idealism, it cannot bow to the soul as the soul represents carnal poetry that
recalcitrantly partakes of the material world, a world that cannot be known,
except through the untrustworthy senses. Emotional need for belief in life
after death and, indeed, from before birth, opposes rational belief in what
lies beyond the reach of the senses; thus, Bloom mostly catalogues the
visionary images of night, death, the mother, and the sea from “The
Sleepers” with the spiritual real Me rather than the material not me. He
proposes that the major American tropes of night and death derive
ultimately from Hamlet’s sleep of death and that Shelley adds the imagery
of the sea and the mother in “Alastor.”299 Whitman would seem estranged
as Hamlet from the masculine ethos of the father: forever sanctifying the
unregenerate selves of the working Americans that Bloom interprets as
role-playing the shattered vessels of logos; writing with pathos about his
own irrational imagination that converts the aforesaid. My revision of
Bloom is to suggest that Whitman enjoys solitary pleasures (with the tally
of a male god of love) from which logos, or Word made flesh, he
manufactures an American gospel, or as John writes: “he that loveth me
shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to
him” (14.21). Yet, in the Lilacs elegy, the one that Whitman loved has
become Lincoln; the figure of Christian resurrection is replaced with Orphic
images of birdsong, a bright star and flowers laid at the feet. It is almost as
if Whitman abases himself before the murdered father of the nation, who
provokes the familiar four-fold imagery of death, etc. To venture one last
New-Testament comparison, Whitman’s earlier, far more self-assertive
poem begins:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,
. . . . (“Song of Myself,” 1–2)

In Ephesians, Paul says: “If you have heard of the dispensation of the grace
of God which is given me to you-ward” (3.2). This translation is Tyndale’s
from the King James Bible but a common alternative is provided by the
Complete Jewish Bible: “I assume that you have heard of the work of God
in his grace has given me to do for your benefit.” We can assume that
Whitman wishes you the Emersonian blessing of good health; he wants to
convert Americans to a transformed kind of Pauline grace and that
sanctification-errand the conversionary experience of reading Whitman’s
poetry. But paradoxically, Whitman’s iconoclasm is such that he archly
advises his eleves to destroy the teacher, although “He that by me spreads a
wider breast than mine own proves the width of my own” (“Song of
Myself,” 1234).
Bloom classifies Whitman, Twain, and Melville as a composite trinity:
“The United States does not have a single national epic, but an amalgam of
three very diverse works: Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn.”300 The Norman-Rockwellesque adventures of
Huckleberry Finn do not find Bloom, except as a figure for solitary lying,
and when Emerson writes that, which I can gain from another, is never
tuition but only provocation, we know that our street-fighter’s true subject
is the American Sublime: “Walt Whitman says that the sunrise would kill
him if he could not now and always send forth the sunrise from himself, but
Ahab is even more American and vows that he would strike the sun if it
insulted him.”301 The sunrise would kill the angel of death and,
presumably, Whitman takes the name of the American Christ symbolized
by sunrise on the Emersonian evening land, whereas Ahab wishes to strike
through even this cosmos. Milton’s Satan apprehends the sun as being like
the god of the new world and yet in a notebook entry Whitman writes that
he would not abase himself to the God of this world; his Ahab-like
obduracy could not be more different to Emerson’s meek portrayal of
Quakerism in “The Over-Soul.” Bloom sees Melville as one of the founders
of the American Religion, which this exegete defines as the trinity of
Gnosticism, Enthusiasm, and Orphism and which from his idiosyncratic
perspective would seem more Gnostic than Protestant. Moby-Dick is set in
what Bloom calls the Gnostic Kenoma, “ ‘Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?’ Ishmael asks us, once he too has been swept up into Ahab’s thrust
into the watery wastes that the ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, a
sensible emptiness.”302 This emptiness is the white blank of nature that the
whale symbolizes and which Ahab wants to apocalyptically break through,
“a true apocalypse, not the path of revolution that always becomes reaction
again.”303 Melville writes that white “is not so much a color as the visible
absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for
these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a
wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we
shrink?”304 Bloom’s comment is Emerson orientated: “I take it as a
critique of Emerson’s epiphanies of the Transparent Eyeball and the ‘ruin or
blank’ in his Nature.”305 But Bloom relates that his favorite passage in
Moby-Dick is from the chapter named “Candles,” in which the mariners
behold St Elmo’s fire, or ball lightning flaming like Ariel from the
boresprit. Bloom confesses that he memorized the passage when he was
twelve years of age and analyzes the passage thus: “Once he had been a
convert to Zoroastrianism, but I now know thee, and the gnosis makes him
free. He confronts one version of genius, the fire’s fathering force, with his
own personality or daemonic genius, and mocks the fire for not knowing
the fore-mother, the Abyss of the Gnostics, the origin before the Creation-
Fall.”306 At the end of Song of Myself, Whitman indicates that he is to be
found under the dreaming sod of the prairies; a Heraclitean Christ absorbed
into the mysterious processes of nature that he cannot translate but which he
associates with acts of glossolalia. Neither can Americans understand this
mysterious speaking in tongues, except that it seems to be a coming home
to the naked self of America, where blood and soil unite as the perceptual
filter and moral fiber of Whitman’s influence and the Orphic and therefore
Aeolian message of his buried body and its scattered leaves. The sublimated
autoeroticism of Whitman’s displaced Quaker aesthetic is nowhere better
exemplified than in that disjointed shamanistic dream episode, when, as
Bloom indicates, the real Me is raped. Here the traitorous villain touch is
grotesquely figured as a rape fantasy and Whitman, who has just related
that he cannot bear to be touched by another person, becomes the passive
victim of what at the beginning of the poem is merely the whimsical dream
of a lover’s plunging tongue that strips to the bare breast and the heart
beneath. Whitman repudiates organized religion and yet exalts being
sadomasochistically abased much like a Blakean clod of clay under the boot
soles. The richer recompense of this orgiastic sensation roughly conforms to
the recompense offered by Christ to the just at the resurrection (Lu. 14.14);
Whitman’s material seed is metaphorically spent for vast spiritual returns.
The striptease of Whitman’s final merit is tantalizingly refused to the
reader, who nevertheless holds the author’s leaves in his own hand. Bloom
describes this quasi-devotional fantasy as the crisis of the poem and his
insight is praiseworthy in the respect that Whitman would seem deeply
ambivalent as to the ostensible holiness of tactility. Christ exclaims do not
touch (Jo. 20.17), but when Whitman touches his lips he silences skeptics,
and my explanation is that this touch represents the displaced hush of the
meeting house. It is this iconoclastic quiet that allows Whitman to loaf and
hence voyeuristically befriend the justified workers of America that he
celebrates in his poetry. It is almost as if the text Whitman weaves says that
because the Lord clothes the grass; there is no need to toil, and by this
means the visionary poet transparently addresses the puritan anxiety as to
salvation, which might be taken as the central puzzle of American Being.
The American Religion is divided into five sections; the first identifies
and outlines Bloom’s definition of the American Religion in terms of
American-protestant spiritual history just as the last continues the process
of political commentary, to which this diagnosis gives rise. Bloom’s books
frequently contain irruptions of political prophecy together with the not
uncommon phenomenon of the flippant Bloomian aside. But in The
American Religion these interruptions effloresce into pages and pages of
commentary in their own right. Nevertheless, the middle sections of the
book work through Bloom’s initial proposition with particular reference to
the Mormons. We also find commentary on Christian Science, Seventh-day
Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostalism, and Southern Baptists.
For reasons of space, I shall treat of Bloom’s synopsis that the American
religion is a form of gnosis and then concentrate upon his thoughts on
Mormonism and the increasing political commentary that characterizes the
closing section on Southern Baptism. With delicious ex cathedra pomposity
Bloom informs us that religious criticism confronted by the indigenous
American visions of a religion-soaked society “is compelled to become
national criticism.”307
Bloom defines the American Religion as a form of Gnosticism despite
the fact that many of the adherents of the aforesaid religious groups would
not accept his conclusions, religious or political. Given that Bloom is a
deconstructive critic and many of the groups he examines are
fundamentalist, his ideas certainly would not please those who believe in
the literal truth of the Bible: “Literature and religion are not allied
enterprises, except insofar as both are conceptual orphans, stumbling about
in our cosmological emptiness that stretches between the unattainable poles
of meaning and truth.”308 Self and, disconcertingly, selfishness are located
at the center of Bloom’s insight into the American Religion, the essence of
which is that God loves the individual and that this God is Jesus and not
God the Father. Due to the fact that this God is known to the believer, and
has an intimate personal relationship with him or her, Bloom deduces that
this constitutes a gnosis. The furious American search for the spirit is
consequently equalized with a quest for “the original self, a spark or breath
in us that we are convinced goes back to before the Creation.”309 The
beginnings of the American Religion are traced to two sources. The first,
the African-American belief in “the little man within,” which signifies a
self that was not created but true to each American, who had come to, or
else come into being, in the new world.310 Bloom speculates that the first
African-American Baptists married the figure of the resurrected Jesus to the
concept of the little man or woman within each of them, from this
conceptual marriage derives the African-American Baptist rhetoric of Jesus
as a friend that ironically made the Southern Baptist faith possible. Bloom
claims that like Whitman’s divisions of the self this inner consciousness is
an expression of imagination, since the American Religion “is judged to be
an imaginative triumph.”311 He says this because “religion is imagined,
and must be reimagined” and because Emerson wrote that the idioms and
figures of Christ’s teachings have usurped the place of his truth, or to
employ one of Bloom’s favored Blakean proverbs: “Fundamentalists . . .
refuse to know that they have chosen forms of worship from poetic
tales.”312 The self-reliant hub of the American Religion is reached with
reference to William James, who writes in The Varieties of Religious
Experience that religion means “the feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to
stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”313 Emerson
was evidently hailed by Sydney Ahlstrom as the theologian of the American
religion in the same way that Bloom seems the critic of the American
century. The American Christ is therefore more American than he is Christ,
or as Joyce had it, Greek-Jew, and because Christ is a personal experience
for the American Christian.314 Bloom draws a parallel with Whitman, who
sings of two selves at once, the first a rough merging into social grouping
and the second the “real Me” or “Me myself,” an identity always standing
apart.315 During his discussion of enthusiasm as Gnosticism opposed to
Puritan Fundamentalism, we stumble across the potential reason for
Bloom’s misapprehension of Whitman’s categories: “in St. Paul, this
transcendent principle in the human soul is called the ‘spirit’ (pneuma), ‘the
spirit in us’, ‘the inner man’, eschatology also called the ‘new man’. ”316
Bloom points out the significance of Paul never using the term “psyche” to
denote the divine principle in man: “he opposes . . . ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, and
‘psychic man’ and ‘pneumatic man’. ”317 He goes on to write that spark,
seed of light, and daemon and pneuma have the same meaning, which is
nearer to “the indwelling spirit which the shaman inherits from other
shamans” than it is to the rational “soul” or psyche in which Socrates
believed.318 In Agon, Bloom mentions that the King James Bible psychikos
is translated as natural man but does not pause to consider that the elided
concept of the carnal man sarkinos should merge with the concept of the
believer’s rational soul. Whitman employs the concept of the soul to unify
Americans behind his status as would-be national bard; Bloom, however,
writes in praise of Romantic individualism or a form of Protestantism that
brooks no parley with either group authority in the first place, or even with
the everyday ego in the second, and for Bloom the Me myself is the best
and oldest part of Whitman, going back before the Creation. Bloom
connects American Protestantism to ancient Gnosticism defined as a proto-
Christian sect, whose doctrines were based on two convictions: “The
Creation, of the world and of mankind in its present form, was the same
event as the Fall of the world and of man, but humankind has in it a spark
or breath of the uncreated, of God, and that spark can find its way back to
the uncreated, unfallen world, in a solitary act of knowledge.”319 He is
helped in this identification by Philip Lee’s Against the Protestant Gnostics,
in which Lee protests against “the exaltation of the elite self against
community.”320 Bloom concludes that urging a need for community upon
American religionists would be in vain for the simple reason that “the
experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories
of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy
with the self enhanced and otherness devalued.”321
Bloom asserts that religion rises from our apprehension of death and
reminds us of his existential dread by remarking: “to give meaning to
meaninglessness is the endless quest of religion.”322 Bloom believes, after
Shakespeare, that there is nothing at the center of the self and that the abyss
within American selfhood finds peace when it is alone with the primal
abyss. Not unexpectedly, selfishness craves freedom, though not Christian
Liberty, but a solitude that represents an inner loneliness at home with an
outer loneliness or cosmological emptiness.323 This personal Jesus is
identified by Bloom as the resurrected Jesus and not the figure who died on
the cross, and yet this sublime knowledge is miserably selfish: “the
American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the
freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.”324 Bloom
suggests that religion culminates in the growing inner self; his pithy
formula is that religion is the poetry, not the opiate of the masses; he adds
that just as poetry triumphs over time, so religious experience scrimmages
against death. But Bloom is on his guard against the self-righteous and
fundamentalist moral virtues, which he describes in Blakean terms as “the
selfish virtues of the natural heart.”325 The American religion wishes no
limitation and a consequence of this desire is the crude literalization of the
Bible committed by Fundamentalists in their attempt to “overcome the
terror of death.”326 Bloom’s argument is that, like American imaginative
literature, the desire to find some intimation of immortality leads to a
severely internalized quest romance; this quest escapes from being time-
bound by becoming personally acquainted with Jesus, the resurrected Jesus,
who conquered death. Bloom picks up on Santayana’s wisdom that a living
religion has to be idiosyncratic, that its power comes from a swerve-bias,
which has to remind of Bloom’s ratio of clinamen. We come now to the
precursor-in-chief of American enthusiasm whom Bloom introduces as
John Wesley, “who received a supreme experience of conversion.”327
Conversion Bloom introduces as the fundamental experience of the
American religion because it figures renunciation and a new start; to be a
Christian you must feel that your sins have been forgiven. The closest
Bloom comes to the figure of Johannine justification by faith is hence being
born again, or the thought that Christianity is itself the malady for which
conversion offers a cure. Wesley’s more restrained English mode of
iconoclasm, with its enthusiastic motif of renunciation as conversion, is
then superseded by the violence, both internal and external, of the American
Religion: “the American Religion . . . is a knowing, by and of an uncreated
self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a
dangerous and doom-eager freedom: from nature, time, history, community,
other selves.”328
Bloom touts a triad of Wesleyan Enthusiasm, Gnostic Selfhood, and
Orphic ecstasy as the bedrock of the American Religion. Having traced
Bloom’s assertion that enthusiasm is at the center of the American Religion,
and outlined his belief that American self-reliance is a Gnostic stance, I
come now to the intoxication of religious ecstasy. Bloom draws a parallel
between Woodstock drug-taking and love-making and turn of the nineteenth
century revivalism at Cane Ridge, where approximately twenty thousand
rough frontiersmen and women from Kentucky assembled, and
experienced, in Orphic unison, a deeply spiritual and Pentecostal
phenomenon. In Bloom’s judgment the goings on at Cane Ridge were of a
bizarre sadomasochistic kind:

A person affected with the jerks, especially in his head, would often
make a grunt, or bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk.
This name of barking seems to have had its origin from an old
Presbyterian preacher of East Tennessee. He had gone into the woods
for private devotion, and was seized by the jerks. Standing near a
sapling, he caught hold of it, to prevent his falling, and as his head
jerked back, he uttered a grunt or kind of noise similar to a bark, his
face being turned upwards. Some wag discovered him in this
position, and reported that he found him barking up a tree.329

Bloom calls this example of orgiastic individualism frontier loneliness

turned into holy rolling; he writes that it was exalted into that state of being-
alone-with-Jesus. According to Bloom, the American Jesus was born at
Cane Ridge, a resurrected version of Christ known one-and-one, a
wilderness spirituality disconnected from any church. He further notes that
enthusiasm is not part of the gloomy religion of John Calvin; rugged
individualism that leaves a trail where there is no path combines with
spasmodic exercises in this form of American Orphism as Jesus walks with
the repentant sinner, and the sinner becomes saved through knowing Jesus
because He knows how to rise from the dead. This knowledge is figured as
the internalization of an internalization by Bloom, who charts how an
evangelist named Charles Finney pragmatically exploited his own charisma
in order to systematize as a technique wherever these spontaneous
Pentecostal intoxications might lead. Finney became a popular guru after
the Great Disappointment, when William Miller calculated that the end of
the world was nigh and encouraged his flock to expect Armageddon on 22
October 1844. Paradoxically, Finney is important to Bloom’s polemical
survey because he is the founder of American revivalism as popular
spectacle and, as well, the preacher who instigates social crusades, in his
case against slavery.
I wish to mull over Bloom’s examination of the main examples of the
American Religion, and because Bloom describes Mormons and Southern
Baptists as his principle paradigms, I mainly concentrate upon these.330
Bloom says he sees religion as a kind of spilled poetry, which inverted anti-
romantic rhetoric connects with Akiba’s inclusion of The Song of Songs in
the Bible because he was so enchanted by its music. Bloom muses upon the
fact that Mohammed belatedly describes himself as the seal of the prophets,
and yet Bloom lauds the even more belated Joseph Smith as the most
authentic religious prophet and, indeed, genius of the American tradition.
He quotes from the Wentworth letter, in which Smith records two angels
telling him that “all religious denominations” believed “in incorrect
doctrines.”331 Mormonism is apprehended as an amazingly strong
misreading of the early history of the Jews; Mormons believe they are
privileged descendants of the Israelites. Bloom lauds this belief system as
the product of the charismatic personality of Smith and the superlative
religion-making facility of his imagination. As far as iconography is
concerned, there is no crucified Jesus on Mormon crosses; their Jesus is not
the Jesus of the crucifixion, as in the Catholic faith. Bloom relates that
polygamy was at the heart of this apprehension of a truly American Christ
since sexual energy was inseparable from the sacred embodiment of Christ.
He fixes upon Smith’s interest in Abraham’s concubines and then stipulates
that “Joseph’s implication is quite plain: the function of receiving
concubines is to transcend the angelic state and become a god.”332 Bloom
argues that Smith’s radical theomorphic portrayal of patriarchs and gods,
who are anthropomorphic, represents a return to the J-Writer: “those Latter-
day Saints who have the authority to sustain polygamy will become gods,
and the sons of gods will be reconciled with their fathers, and then become
gods themselves.”333 Bloom associates J with Davidic nostalgia, the
memory of a warrior-king; therefore, it is with no small astonishment that
this Englishman reads Bloom’s speculation about Joseph Smith that he had
himself crowned as king of the kingdom of God before he was martyred.
Bloom anticipates my consternation, when he writes: “Our political satirists
. . . delight in describing the apparent weirdness of Mormon cosmology and
allied speculations, but they forget the equal strangeness of Christian
mythology, now worn familiar by repetition.”334 Bloom finds in the
writings of this authentic genius “the spiritual embodiment of the American
sublime” to the extent that right royal American religious writing spills
from Smith’s imagination, which quested for Celestial Marriage in the form
of marital plurality.335 Bloom quotes Blake’s one law for the ox and for the
lion is oppression in order to defend the honor of the bigamous fathers of
the Mormon Church. Yet, Bloom admits that while a Mormon man may
never be alone with his version of Jesus, he aspires to govern without rivals
in his world made with many wives. To prove his point, Bloom adapts
Mormon discourse to his own rhetoric: “Each stands in the Abyss before the
Fall of Creation, and each experiences the Freedom that is Wildness, the
perfect Solitude (itself creative) of the American visionary.”336 Bloom
summons to the witness stand Sterling McMurrin, who notes that Smith’s
denial of the Priestly Author’s ex nihilo account of creation is very similar
to the Platonic Demiurge: “This means that God is a being among beings
rather than being as such or the ground of being.”337 Bloom is entranced
by Smith, a man more self-creating than Emerson and Whitman and
therefore transcendent in Bloom’s imaginative response: “Joseph knew that
he was no part of the creation, knew that what was best and oldest in him
already was God . . . that despite his prophetic vocation and communal
vision, he was essentially alone, and could experience his own spiritual
freedom only in prophetic solitude.”338 Setting aside the unsettling account
of Mormons baptizing their dead, much of Bloom’s treatment of
Mormonism is perplexed by the near certainty that Mormons will take over
America due to industriousness and a superior birth-rate. So organized is
the Mormon Church that Bloom flirts with the idea of rebranding
Mormonism as corporate Gnosticism; thus, the lasting monument to their
energy is not their vaunting political power, but the Mountain of Names, a
vast record of human beings who have been baptized as Mormons, even
though they lived their natural lives as what Mormons like to call Gentiles.
Moreover, the Mormons teach that dead spirits beget spirits about to be
born despite the fact that Smith never believed in such a doctrine; however,
he did hold the paradoxical, passionate and surprisingly Gnostic belief that
our spirit, or intelligence, is as old as God. These meditations teach that all
religions are initially strange and unexpected, while their hardened theology
is contrived and arbitrary.339
 The belated religion of the American climate is, in Bloom’s prognosis,
an internalized quest become externalized, a desire for priority that yields to
a sense of superiority: “if your knowing ultimately tells you that you are
beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your natural acts cannot sully
you.”340 The key to unlocking Bloom’s thinking in The American Religion
is the book’s prolegomenon, a quotation by Kierkegaard, “Even now, in
1848, it certainly looks as though politics were everything; but it will be
seen that the catastrophe (the Revolution) corresponds to us and is the
obverse of the Reformation: then everything pointed to a religious
movement and proved to be political; now everything points to a political
movement, but will become religious.”341 Were one to substitute the
American Revolution for the French Revolution, then Bloom’s intention
becomes more perspicuous; what began as a war with the British Empire
over taxes and liberty, undoubtedly a political movement, has become
religious backwash. The very last sentences of The American Religion
contain this oppositional observation made about American foreign policy:
“We export our culture abroad, low and high, and increasingly we export
the American Religion.”342 Bloom’s intent is that religion dominates the
political sphere in American politics: “a belated version of our national faith
is moving to abrogate our secular origin.”343 He argues that foreign
interventionism will have a calamitous effect: “the twenty-first century will
mark a full-scale return to the wars of religion.”344 When Bloom explicates
the history and latent schism within the Southern Baptist Church, he defines
religion as poetry for the masses. In this instance, the figurative progression
of Orc to Urizen is representative of the polarity that exists between soul
competency and literalist interpretation. Bloom sees the Baptist faith as
baldly anti-intellectual and representative of a deep resentment at the failure
of the Confederate cause. Rather surprisingly, the “Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit”
ideology of one strain of Southern Baptism is identified as an extraordinary
throwback to Sethian Gnosticism. Under this sheep-and-goats division,
each one of us is predestined according to whether God or Satan had
planted the seed of Seth (who replaces Abel) or the benighted seed of Cain
into our soma via the womb of Eve. Bloom elects Edgar Mullins as the
Joseph Smith of the Southern Baptist faith, but only in a belated American
sense because he was not the originator, he was merely the re-founder of
what is a creedless faith.345 Bloom does not find it accidental that Mullins
was an avid memorizer of Paradise Lost since the faith that he helped to
develop was close to Milton’s maxim of being a sect of one, in the respect
of emphasizing a personal relationship with God: “each Southern Baptist is
at last alone in the garden with Jesus, to cite one of the principal Baptist
hymns.”346 The true heart of Southern Baptism is the inner light or the
internal Holy Spirit, and this is described by Bloom as most vital, wholly
personal, subjective and experiential, while conversion is the act of being
born again at the frantic and frighteningly inward center of spiritual life.347
In Mullin’s The Christian Religion, Bloom finds this inwardly tending
article of faith: “that which we know most indubitably are the facts of inner
experience.”348 In his appraisal, Baptists believe that Jesus is the
resurrection and the life, and this he connects to second-century Gnostics,
who held that “the general Resurrection had taken place spiritually when
Jesus raised himself, a belief inevitable for those who identified their
‘spark’, pneuma, or true self with the risen Jesus.”349 Thus, Gnosticism
becomes associable with Mullin’s notion of soul competency, or the
singular relationship with Jesus that Baptists possess as their right and
which Christian Liberty grants the holder an individualistic vision without
limitations. Bloom accuses Baptists of being the carriers of essentially dead
beliefs, even though culture is often taken to be the lived part of religious
sensibility, and nationalistic enthusiasm the primeval sign of an almost
entirely unacknowledged displaced religious sensibility. More persuasively,
Bloom elucidates that while Baptists are not dualists, they are in danger of
Nietzschean antinomianism, because, in their non-sacramentality, there is
no pragmatic boundary between Jesus, as known to the self, and the self.
This rhetorical play leads to the inevitable criticism that such an unhealthy
monism may have, “rather unfortunate societal and psychical
consequences.”350 A Baptist might reply that this special kinship with
Jesus represents the basis for intercourse and fellowship, intellectual or
otherwise. Bloom notes that “competency” can mean economic self-
sufficiency but also to seek together as in its Latin derivation, competere.
However, Bloom distils Baptism to a spiritual life of ever growing
inwardness, in which Baptists become the subject and object of their own
quest because, as Mullins writes on the topic of soul competency, “religion
is a personal matter between the soul and God.”351 Then Bloom reveals my
kernel of interest in these matters, “I would extend Mullins, but still (I
think) stay within his spirit, if I myself personalized soul competency as
freedom from every form of over-determination: societal, historical,
economic, even psychological.”352
Bloom concludes his chapters on Southern Baptism as he does The
American Religion, with a moody meditation upon Fundamentalism and its
relationship to modern American politics. His judgment is that Protestant
Fundamentalism is similar to Islamic Fundamentalism, and that inerrancy
for both movements indicates the repression of all individuality.353
Literalist interpretation of a text turns the Bible, or any other holy book,
into an icon and degrades the Protestantism of its traditional strength, which
is to read the Scripture by inner light: “Neo-Fundamentalists want a densely
substantial inerrancy, a truth beyond language, beyond ambiguity, beyond
any possibility of refutation.”354 Bloom describes the modern Southern
Baptist Convention as Orwellian and a de facto Catholic Church of the
South. He figures the hostile corporate-like take-over of the Southern
Baptist Convention by triumphant Fundamentalists as a microcosm for the
fall of America during the Reagan-Bush era. Religious criticism turns into
the vinegar of polemic; Bloom ends his meditation upon religion without
mediation (but become Fundamentalism) by considering the conversion of
General Noriega, while incarcerated in a Florida penitentiary. Bloom
records how missionaries persuaded the Panamanian president to give up
his red underwear and scarlet women: “This triumph for the Southern
Baptist Convention was fit prelude to the June 1991 meeting, where Oliver
North waved the flag and the fetus, followed by George Bush weeping and
praying as he stood before his constituents.”355 In The Visionary Company,
Bloom’s monumental conception of history as yoked to the Blakean figure
of the Orc cycle adumbrates that the nascent libertarian state engendered by
the French Revolution gradually became the exporter of imperial tyranny
under Napoleon. Bloom, as I read him, is proposing that America has
passed from the Blakean state of the revolutionary Orc, until even the
Christian discourse of self-exalting rock-and-roll musicians stamps an
American imprint on world culture. He suggests that Urizen—
representative of political and religious tyranny in Blake—figuratively
signifies modern America: “George Bush’s New World Order is a fresh
shadowing of the image of American-led Resurrection.”356 I close with the
wise words of Frye: “In religion, too, we must keep a critical attitude that
never unconditionally accepts any socially established form of revelation.
Otherwise we are back to idolatry again, this time a self-idolatry.”357
The English preoccupation with Shakespeare marks him out as the
central man of English letters, whereas Bloom indicates that in America this
honor is awarded to the reception of the teachings of Jesus; thus, Bloom’s
preference for the Bard should be seen as English in this respect. Due to the
extravagant length of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, I
concentrate upon Bloom’s introductory and closing remarks and upon the
two characters that stimulate him most, Hamlet and Falstaff. The
prolegomenon attracted controversy and here Bloom translates a passage by
Nietzsche as “That for which we find words is something already dead in
our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking,” so
that it coheres with a quotation from the Player King’s speech in Hamlet:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run

That our devices still are overthrown,
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none our own. (III.ii.199-201)

Bloom’s Burkean agenda would seem to be that misprisions inevitably

occur when we interpret or listen to each other, the rationalization of those
emotions for which we sometimes show contempt. The principle argument
here is that Shakespeare invents the discourse of the human by
demonstrating that humans overhear themselves and consequently reflect
upon their own thoughts (and those of others) in a perfectly selfish fashion
that is not defined by religious doctrine. Bloom deprecatingly describes
himself as Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator because he maintains that
Shakespeare was a genius, who influenced the world more than he was
himself dominated by vague historical forces. Bloom argues that the
seriation of examples of growing Shakespearean inwardness begins with
Falconbridge, Richard II, Mercutio, Juliet, Bottom, Portia, and Shylock,
reached a first peak with Falstaff; Henry V, Brutus, and Rosalind then
prepared for the second elevation with Hamlet, which hence made possible
Feste, Malvolio, Iago, Lear, Edgar, Edmund, Macbeth, Cleopatra, Imogen,
and Prospero.358
Bloom believes that Shakespeare invents modern representation of
human psychology because literary characters before Shakespeare were
relatively unchanging, with the exception, that is, of Chaucer’s Wife of
Bath, whom Bloom takes to be Falstaff’s true model. But in Shakespeare’s
plays characters change when they over-hear their own thoughts and hence
individuate themselves rather than being indoctrinated in a theological
relationship with a god of some description. Ironically, Bloom calls
Shakespeare a mortal god because his plays represent the outward limit of
human achievement and are beyond the mind’s reach because Shakespeare
invented us.359 Bloom’s relationship with Shakespeare is that of awe; his
criticism of the bard is sublime, to the extent that it concentrates upon
Shakespeare’s ability to break boundaries: “there is an overflowing element
in the plays, an excess beyond representation, that is closer to the metaphor
we call ‘creation’. ”360 He writes that the enigmatic Shakespeare produced
an art so infinite that it contains us, and, if Shakespeare does indeed contain
us, then individual humanity must grow and flourish within the
Shakespearean mold. Bloom asserts that no-one else managed to animate so
many diverse persons or so many separate selves. Bloom’s admiration for
Shakespeare’s superiority of intellect leads him to the curious revelation
that Shakespeare was more intelligent even than Bloom, the best mind since
Einstein. Shakespeare justly imitates essential human nature and does so by
representing human change, the staged realities of which are imitations of
our own painful existential realities, and yet Bloom slyly adds that this
imitation may have been more of an inventive lamp than a religious mirror.
Bloom says that Hamlet and Falstaff are superior to any other character that
they meet in their respective plays. They are so because of their vitality,
which Bloom classifies as an intellectual version of charisma, where said
characters are defined in terms of the Yahwistic blessing of more life into a
time without boundaries. The best and most heroically vital characters in
Shakespeare are listed as Rosalind, Shylock, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, and
Cleopatra, but the true charismatics are Hamlet and Falstaff. In Bloom’s
judgment, Falstaff and Hamlet inaugurate personality as we recognize it.
Bloom briefly lists Shakespeare’s competitors and then dismisses his
Renaissance rivals one by one; Marlowe’s characters are cartoons, Jonson’s
are ideograms, Webster’s vanish next to Shakespeare’s, Chapman and
Middleton’s do not possess human inwardness. He trounces the ideological
contexts of historicist thought that reduces aesthetics to politics and
underlines that aesthetics are a matter of perceptions and sensations; this is
Bloom’s greatest lesson: humans make history, not vice versa. Shakespeare
therefore teaches us to value originality, not the robotic following of trendy
critical fashions. Whoever brings his or her self to the bard will be
marvelously amplified. Shakespeare became himself by representing other
selves and by reminding ourselves of painful memories, since reading
Shakespeare would seem a piquant pleasure. Shylock is for Bloom a cause
for much ruefulness because a monstrously human caricature of a Jew.
Bloom counters Wittgenstein’s annoyed comment that life is not like
Shakespeare with Barfield’s intelligent observation, that our feelings are
Shakespeare’s meaning, and consequently introduces the oxymoron
naturalistic unreality. Shakespeare converts real life into theater and the
reason is that we cannot conceive of ourselves without Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was as much a creator of selves as of language: “he can be said
to have melted down and then remolded the representation of the self in and
by language.”361 Ralph Richardson’s performance was the Falstaffian
starting place for his lively and life-affirming book; Bloom ruminates that
“the greatest of all fictive wits dies the death of a rejected father substitute,
and also of a dishonored mentor.”362 Bloom’s identification with Falstaff is
such that he has acted the part on at least two occasions, but we imagine
that the Falstaff of Yale means that certain students have rejected him:

I remember a graduate student in one of my Shakespeare seminars . .

. who informed me rather vehemently that Falstaff was not worthy of
admiration, whereas the transformation of Prince Hal into King
Henry V was exemplary. Her point was that Hal represented rule and
that Falstaff was a lord of misrule, and I could not persuade her that
 Falstaff transcended her categories, as he transcends virtually all our
catalogings of human sin and error.363

Bloom himself despairs of ever again seeing a Falstaff to match

Richardson’s, since “the Falstaff he played was neither coward nor jester,
but infinite wit delighting in its own inventiveness, and transcending its
own darkening pathos.”364 He identifies Falstaff’s wit as Shakespeare’s wit
at its very limits, “even as Hamlet is the farthest reach of Shakespeare’s
cognitive acuity.”365 If there is a relationship between the nobleman of the
sonnets and Prince Hal’s rejection of Falstaff, then Bloom surmises that
Hamlet and Falstaff illuminate the sonnets more than love poems adumbrate
those giant forms. Falstaff is the cause of wit in others, wit is Falstaff’s god,
and like Blake, Bloom admits that Falstaff has a beautiful laughing
discourse, which is described as a form of devotion. Falstaff offends only
the virtuous and hence combines Aristophanes and Plato to become, in
Bloom’s opinion, the Socrates of East Cheap. Thus, Falstaff teaches his
pupils freedom or how to be free from society, although he is never alone
on stage. Hence, Falstaff is a satirist turned against power and historicisms
understood as explanations of history, which Bloom figures as cyclic:
“Falstaff knows that history is an ironic flux of reversals.”366 During the
rejection scene Falstaff is not permitted to reply; Bloom thinks that to reject
Falstaff is to reject Shakespeare. Yet, Falstaff signals that Shakespeare has
escaped the influence of Marlowe, “Falstaff, not Marlovian, is quite
Chaucerian: he is the son of the vitalistic Wife of Bath.”367 Unlike Hamlet,
Falstaff is not elegiac, and very unlike the negative exuberance of Shylock,
Falstaff possesses a positive exuberance. Falstaff is Hamlet’s greatest rival,
an immense fund of immanence as compared to the morbid transcendence
of the Dane. If Hamlet is death’s ambassador, then Falstaff has the Davidic
blessing of more life: “I like not such a grinning honor as the dead!. . . .
Give me life” (V.III: 58-9). In identifying so readily with this
Shakespearean type, Bloom celebrates Bradley’s comment that “the bliss of
freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff.”368 But when Bloom
draws this Gnostic analogy, “Falstaff . . . is still alive because Shakespeare
knew something like the Gnostic secret of resurrection, which is that Jesus
first arose and then he died,” Shakespeare’s walking witticism is
misprisioned. By building upon Auden’s diagnosis that Falstaff is
resurrected at the battle of Shrewsbury, Falstaff becomes a child of the
American religion, a portion of human eternity. Thus, Bloom finds spiritual
rebirth while reading Henry IV parts I and II.369
The strangest thing about Bloom’s reading of Hamlet is his conviction
that the ur-Hamlet was written not by Kyd, but by the fledgling
Shakespeare, who ever afterwards smarted to resurrect his first and most
absolute failure. To properly appreciate Bloom’s account of Hamlet, it is
necessary to put to one side this questionable assertion and instead begin
with his observation that a revenge tragedy was too immense a
consciousness for Hamlet, the leading Western representation of an
intellectual.370 The infinite reverberations of Hamlet are accounted for by
the prince possessing the charisma of King David and the Jesus of Mark.
Not one of Shakespeare’s other characters could stand a quibbling match
with Hamlet’s winning and yet losing combination of skepticism and
charisma. For Bloom Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ideal son; hence, he adopts
Joyce’s insight that Hamlet was named after Shakespeare’s son Hamnet,
who died many years before the play was written and the less-convincing
notion that Shakespeare’s father acted the part of the ghost of Hamlet’s
father.371 Contained by the earlier Hamlet, which too assiduously followed
the folk tale of Prince Amleth, and temporarily dominated by the Marlovian
figure of the overreacher, the first Hamlet had the crystalline-structure
Shakespeare, but the outward form Marlowe and Saxo Grammaticus.
However, in Shakespeare’s revision a ghost fit to be in an Icelandic saga
confronts a university intellectual, and it is as if characters from the Edda
pit themselves against the solitary skeptical Montaigne.372 Hamlet’s will
does not just oppose the forces of Danish society and Bloom deduces that
meaning gets started “by a new transcendentalizing of the secular, an
apotheosis that is also an annihilation of all the certainties of the cultural
past.”373 Thus, Hamlet ails because psychoanalysis is itself the illness of
which it purports to be the cure: is his father Hyperion or a satyr?
Shakespeare invents internalization of the self as a psychoanalytic agency,
Bloom says, only just admitting of the religious inner self that stands alone
in Lutheran Protestantism, but which becomes what Aristotle describes as
to pathos in the faux virtuous Hamlet’s secular scene of suffering. This new
transcendentalizing breaks the containing structure of the ur-Hamlet as
postulated by Bloom into shivers; Bloom thinks it Shakespeare’s problem to
show a subtler Hamlet inside a grosser one. Bloom argues that Shakespeare
represents change by showing characters pondering their own speeches and
backs up this claim with recourse to Hegel’s observation that Shakespeare
makes his personalities “free artists of themselves.”374 He heralds
Nietzsche as someone who “memorably got Hamlet right” since both
Hamlet and the Dionysian man have truly looked into the essence of things,
and hence, in their nausea, it is not reflection, but “true knowledge, an
insight into the horrible truth” that “outweighs any motive for action.”375
This leads to a comparison of Bloom’s two Dionysian men; the one, certain
in his gentleness that wit must give pleasure, and the other, in his savagery,
convinced that it must change because there is only one final form of
change.376 Bloom discovers a profoundly elegiac temper to the
preternaturally mature Hamlet due to the memorial the name bears to
Shakespeare’s son and to the playwright’s recently deceased father.
Mourning becomes a kind of metaphysical revisionism since Shakespeare’s
seniority required a form of self-revision because of his own morbid
temperament, though Hamlet’s verbal verve is such that bitter wittiness
transforms gloomy dolorousness. Implicit from this realization is Hamlet’s
revisioning of the self in lieu of revenging himself upon his uncle, which
becomes the will’s revenge upon time, such that speech becomes “agitation,
betrayal, restlessness and torment of self and of others.”377 Hamlet does
not love those around him; he is sarcastic toward the ghost and ultimately
becomes chillingly cold and lets things be. The play becomes a reflecting
pool of negatively capable contraries, for Bloom, in which there is no real
Hamlet and no real Shakespeare; neither has perceptible identity bar
feigning. Shakespeare was said by Keats to exhibit negative capability
because he created an Iago with the same facility as an Imogen, which
oxymoron of good and bad is the vortex of Bloom’s reading of Hamlet’s
progress from Platonist to Renaissance prince: “inwardness as a mode of
freedom is the mature Hamlet’s finest endowment, despite his sufferings,
and wit becomes another name for that inwardness and that freedom.”378
Hamlet is his own Falstaff, Bloom echoes after Goddard, because his wit
acts as a counter-Machiavel, a defense against a corrupt world. Falstaff is
wholly immanent and Hamlet supremely transcendent; but Hamlet’s world
is the growing inner self and thus we weep for Harold Bloom. Mr Hubris
rejects red herrings, weak misreadings of Hamlet as the man who thinks too
much, who could not make up his mind, who was too good for his task. His
cyclic conception of history is present in the notion that Shakespeare’s plays
are the wheel of all our lives; Bloom concludes that Elsinore’s disease is
everywhere; that something is rotten at the core of every state and that
Hamlet is apt to discover it even in his own personality, which is the
tragedy of the piece. Bloom states the case against Hamlet the killer of so
many, only to remark that his displaced-religious charisma is still the
Western hero of consciousness. The “real Me” in Bloom’s reading of
Whitman would seem a nascent poetic new-world inwardness that values
solitary freedom, and this conforms to Bloom’s liking for secular
transcendentalism; the heart of wit before wit’s impression becomes
transformed by another’s psychic misprision. Hamlet is Bloom’s real Me; a
literary creation to measure and tally against all agonists, including Mark’s
Jesus.
Bloom’s Bardolatory is of a winning kind that combines Coleridge’s
insight that “Shakespeare is the Spinozistic deity—an omnipresent
creativeness” with Dr Johnson’s emphasis upon invention in the sense of
Shakespeare as the inventor of the human.379 Bloom’s conception of
Shakespeare is not entirely that of an unmoved mover since he writes that
Chaucer, Marlowe, Montaigne, and Tyndale influenced his central genius,
though that of Luther is largely left unsaid. Thus, he asserts there is no end
to influence and, in Genius, that there is no end to genius:

There are two ancient (Roman) meanings of the word “genius”—one

is to beget, cause to be born, that is to be a paterfamilias. The other is
to be an attendant spirit for each person or place: to be either a good
or evil genius, and so to be someone who, for better or worse,
strongly influences someone else. This second meaning has been
more important than the first; our genius is thus our inclination or
 natural gift, our inborn intellectual or imaginative power, not our
power to beget power in others.380

Bloom’s argument is that great works of literature influence later works,

whereas those that do not are mere period pieces locked into their cultural
moment. Eliotic “talent” does what it can, and derives from a Latin word
for money, while Bloomian genius does what it must, and actively
originates instead of passively duplicating the tastes of the age: “All genius
. . . is idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary and ultimately stands alone.”381
Bloom is adamant that he pursues not a religion of literature, but a Gnostic
“knowledge that frees the creative mind from theology, from historicizing,
and from any divinity that is totally distinct from what is most imaginative
in the self.”382 Bloom writes in Genius that “Jonas . . . said of the ancient
Gnostics that they experienced ‘the intoxication of unprecedentedness’, ”
then adds that the quality of being without precedence is what strong poets
strive for, “freedom for the creative self, for the expansion of the mind’s
consciousness of itself.”383 Genius has the primary ability to absorb
readers in the sense of grabbing their attention, but secondarily, a genius
can assimilate us to their cognitive stance. Bloom states that the word
genius plays upon the family fathering force of Roman antiquity, as well as
the alter ego, but also states that genius augments tradition and the self by
means of the Roman figure of authority, and argues that “upon augmenting
the foundation,” the past is carried “alive into the present.”384 Bloom
justifies his absorbed appreciation of genius on the recognition of the
sublime feeling one gets from reading the very best writers; Emerson’s “it is
the God in you that responds to the God without” and Longinus’s “touched
by the true sublime your soul is naturally lifted up.”385 For Bloom the
ultimate genius is Shakespeare, who contains us at the limit of what we
know to be human, a genius who created multiple and entirely believable
consciousnesses distinct from the personality of the playwright, whatever
that might have been.
Despite Bloom’s celebration of Shakespeare as the genius of secular
consciousness, there is a contrary view which states that the birth of
Protestantism influences the development of the modern self. The code for
Bloom’s book on Shakespeare, in which Shakespearean characters are
interpreted as mishearing each other and overhearing themselves in order to
change within, is said by Bloom to be replicated in Wilde’s “One should
never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.”386 It
naturally follows from this Wildean witticism that “a truth ceases to be true
when more than one person believes in it” and then finally, “to the claims of
conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.”387 Bloom believes in
the necessity of misreading titanic personalities and their battles with the
mighty dead, which become sincere tussles with spontaneous inspiration
from the perspective of cold-blooded editors. For instance, in Acts 16:16-18
Paul casts out a demon of divination in the name of Christ and yet to
exorcise divination is to symbolically edit the inspired preaching of Jesus,
the apocalyptic revolutionary, into Paul’s antinomian quest to convert the
Gentiles to an early form of Christianity still based around the Temple. The
shared anti-divinatory message of Kings 17, where the second golden calf
scene occurs, means that Pauline faith had not quite made a clean break
with the Jewish Law, and yet Paul describes the Law as bondage to
schoolmasters (Gal. 4.9, 3.25). The extent to which Bloomian genius,
understood as anxious misprision, can be said to depend on his dyspepsia
for Paul and John’s relegation of the Jewish Testament to the Old Testament
is the extent to which there is a religious element at work in Bloom’s
thinking, a Jewish allegiance. Bloom celebrates the genius of Yeshua but
writes that “the Jesus of the New Testament is a literary character, just as
are the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible and the Allah of the Koran.”388 He
argues that Paul, the earliest New Testament author, “had virtually no
interest in the historical Jesus, probably because those who had known
Jesus were almost all opponents of Paul.”389 For Bloom Jesus is the most
charismatic of Jews and a man who died a Jew rather than as Paul’s Christ;
thus, Bloom turns to Nietzsche on the psychology of Paul:

. . . he had many things on his conscience—hatred, murder, sorcery,

idolatry, debauchery, drunkenness, and orgiastic revelry—and to
however great an extent he tried to soothe his conscience, and, even
more, his desire for power, by the extreme fanaticism of his worship
for and defense of the Law, there were times when the thought struck
 him: “It is all in vain! The anguish of the unfulfilled Law cannot be
overcome.” . . . The Law was the Cross on which he felt himself
crucified. How he hated it! What a grudge he owed it! How he began
to look round on all sides to find a means for its total annihilation,
that he might no longer be obliged to fulfill it himself! And at last a
liberating thought, together with a vision—which was only to be
expected in the case of an epileptic like himself—flashed into his
mind: to him, the stern upholder of the Law—who, in his innermost
heart, was tired to death of it—there appeared on the lonely path that
Christ, with the divine effulgence on His countenance, and Paul
heard the words: “Why persecutest thou Me?”390

Nietzsche would later characterize Paul as a genius of hatred, who nailed

Jesus to his own cross and Bloom appends Shaw’s insight that Paul did
nothing that Jesus would have done, “and says nothing that Jesus would
have said.”391 Luther idealized Paul, and Bloom draws upon Luther’s
thesis that the Jewish Christians attacked Paul when he returned to the
Temple because, as the very last convert of Christ, he was “a latecomer and
is our inferior.”392 Nietzsche made a cunning comparison of Luther with
Paul, arguing that “Luther must have experienced similar feelings, when, in
his cloister, he endeavored to become the ideal man of his imagination” and
that therefore “Luther one day began to hate the ecclesiastical ideal, and the
Pope.”393 Bloom bellicosely refers to the genius of Paul and John as
misreaders of the Jewish Covenant and hence looks for alternative
examples of inwardness in the Jewish tradition and, consequently, discovers
fiery inwardness in prophetic Jeremiads: “John hates me and I respond in
kind.”394 Bloom does not hate Paul because of his reverence for Gamaliel:
“The former Pharisee was a great inventor who transformed Hellenistic
Christianity into a new kind of world religion.”395 I find it ironic that
Bloom emphasizes that “It is too easy for many Americans to mistake Paul
as a revivalist, whose total emphasis is upon rebirth through the forgiveness
of sin,” because this is the starting place for the American religion he
converted to as portrayed by Whitman.396 Bloom prefers the Jewish branch
of Christianity as symbolized by the Ebionite James, who Luther disliked
for putatively writing that “faith, if it have not works, is dead, being alone”
(James 2.17), to which Paul allegedly replied that a “man is justified by
faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom. 3.28).397 I think that by looking
within toward his conscience, rather than through a received Catholic
catechism, Luther provided Montaigne with the provocation to further argue
that conscience was not innate, or God-given, but placed there by custom to
ensnare the seeker after liberty. To complete the Bloomian grand gesture,
Hamlet’s resolution becomes sickly when conscience makes a coward of
him, and hence dialectic between Protestantism and skepticism gave
Shakespeare the hint with regard to the internalization of consciousness.
James I shouted, “No bishop, no king!” and Bloom studiously ignores the
thought that no Luther means no Tyndale, or that dialectic between Luther
and Montaigne helped influence the question of whether solid flesh or
introspective non-being stands at our center and which dualism Hamlet’s
personality nihilistically explores. Though there is a kind of inwardness that
the aphoristic Jesus shares with American Protestants, even if this
knowledge is alien to the mind of Paul, and this inward knowing is found in
Christ’s assertion in the Gospel of Thomas: “the kingdom is inside you,
waiting for you to find it,” or as Bloom comments, “the kingdom of God is
then an undiscovered tract of the inward self.”398 The succession of the
material Catholic faith by its younger but severer Protestant offshoot leads
to the internalization of consciousness that Bloom identifies in numerous
Protestant and post-Protestant writings. Without this troubled askesis of the
spirit, and its sometimes tormented relationship to the body of the past, the
aesthetic inwardness that Bloom identifies in the most memorable writers
simply would not be possible.
Bloom’s dislike of Paul means he passes over much that would help us
understand the mysteries of Whitman better. If the Me myself references the
sanctification of God within, as guided by the Holy Spirit, then justification
comes from without and is representative of the conversion experience; we
might say, sanctification is through works, while justification is through
faith. I want to suggest that the Whitmanian soul should be associated with
justification, and hence that “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is not just a poem
of confident imaginative triumph, but one of spiritual righteousness. I shall
argue that the influence of Emerson is used to rework Pauline Scripture
very much to Whitman’s advantage. In Emerson’s “The Poet,” we read that
“The Universe is the externisation of the soul,” that “poems are a corrupt
version of some text in nature with which they ought to tally,” and that
“symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good,
as ferries and horses are, for conveyance.”399 I would like to add to this list
a quotation from Specimen Days on the symbolic topic of ferries, “What
communion with the waters, the air, the exquisite chiaroscuro—the sky and
stars, that speak no word, nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so
communicative to the soul.”400 By closing the imaginary distances
between himself and his fellow passengers, Whitman’s poem ferries the
reader from first to second berth. In “The Over-Soul,” Emerson writes that
to obtain answers to the question of immortality one must “forego all low
curiosity” and accept “the tide of being which floats us into the secret of
nature” and that “The soul circumscribes all things,” it “abolishes space and
time,” and lastly that from the unity of the possession, all men have an
identical and somewhat Wordsworthian “common heart.”401 It is now
possible to connect all of the above to the curiosity that Whitman displays
toward his fellow passengers in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and to the
solitary fishing image of being struck from the float forever held in
solution, but by means of the ratio of tessera and with specific reference to
shard-like biblical allusions. There are more subtle allusions to the New
Testament in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” than the blatant face-to-face
allusions to 1 Corinthians 12 at the start of the poem; for instance, the
concomitant allusion, “But when that which is perfect is come, then that
which is in part shall be done away” (1 Cor. 10), in the line, “we love you—
there is perfection in you also/ You furnish your parts toward eternity.” To
see through a glass darkly is to be a follower of veiled Moses, but to see
face to face is to accept Christ as Savior. In the context of the poem, it is to
accept Whitman as the American Christ; thus, the phrase, “The similitudes
of the past and those of the future,” resembles Romans 5:14: “the similitude
of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come,”
although the one who comes is Whitman, since the poet depicts himself as
being haloed in the disintegration of the dark glass: “the fine centrifugal
spokes of light around the shape of my head.” The opaque line, “That I was
I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my
body,” recalls quite a few similar “should-be” formulations in the New
Testament, in which the believer knows the body of Christ but the world
does not (unless converted and hence justified),

That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may
hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted,
and their sins should be forgiven them. (Mk 4.12)

Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the

body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who
is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.
(Rom. 7.4)

That the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, and of the same body, and
partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel: (Eph. 3.6)

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that
we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us
not, because it knew him not. (1 Jn 3.1)

I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a liar like
unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying. (Jn 8.55)

Whitman is both American Adam and Christ; he wants for future

Americans to be heirs to his own body, which reminds that in Acts at 2.38-
39 the gift of the Holy Spirit is “for you and your children and for all who
are far off.” The phrase, “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things”
alludes to Acts as much as to the Emersonian reference to the soul’s
circumscription of all things: “And by him all that believe are justified from
all things” (Acts 13.39). Justification is concerned with Christ expiating
human guilt through an acceptance of the sacrifice of His body on the cross,
but Whitman spurns Original sin. In “The Over-Soul,” Emerson emphasizes
that curious questions with regard to the future are confessions of sin; the
Emersonian way is to instead acknowledge the unity of the human heart. In
the middle section of the poem, Whitman works through a guilt-complex
that he believes connects him to his readers, “It is not you alone who knows
what it is to be evil,” and lists the wayward sins of the carnal man: “guile,
anger, lust, hot wishes,” etc. These malignant items represent a dangerous
moment of doubt because they are constative confessions, and thus, I want
to remind that Hicks thought that if we make an image merely in
imagination, it is an idol; and to his iconoclastic injunction, I graft Paul’s
statement in Romans: “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified
him not as God . . . but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish
heart was darkened. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness
through the lusts of their own hearts . . . Being filled with all
unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full
of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity” (1.21-30). Whitman provides a
Pauline list of sins committed; he shows his spiritual scars to the reader. But
just before this, he has a crisis of confidence in his own poetic abilities that
are figured as great thoughts beset by dark patches, which figuration of
doubt gives rise to the Bloomian concept of the crisis-lyric. The imagery of
light and dark (patches) is central to the message of John at 3:19: “And this
is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved
darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Whitman is vain
enough to figure himself as Christ; usually the externalization of Deity
impedes the internalization of consciousness, but here the enigmatic crisis is
resolved through an admission of natural-born pride in Manhattan, and
there follows the benediction of a second birth, “have you not accepted?”
The justification of the reader has been achieved through acceptance of
Whitman as the meaning, not the name of Jesus. The ending to the poem
emphasizes that the text of America stands between the Over-Soul and the
American citizen: “Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul”
because Whitman knows that human life is but a shadow, a poor player
strutting his part on the American stage, choosing a part, great or small.
This theatricality explains the allusion to Edgar’s Poor-Tom confession in
the pre-Christian cosmos of King Lear and yet the echo of the natural man
is placed within a Pauline framework.402 From an iconoclastic perspective,
Whitman’s greatest sin is the glorification of the material world: “The
glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings.” Blank
suspicions will later all but overwhelm him in “As I Ebb’d,” but for now,
the tide of the imagination is high.
 In Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, Bloom considers Plato’s contest with
Homer to be the educator of Athens and yet begins by thinking through
what he perceives as the competition between the Yahwist and Homer: “our
civilization is still split between a Hellenic cognition and aesthetic and a
Hebraic morality and religion.”403 Still, Bloom scolds Plato for sentencing
the atheists to either death or imprisonment in The Laws, in which text Plato
writes in his own persona and without the irony of using his supreme
fiction, Socrates, as a mouthpiece: “The dissembling atheist deserves to die
for his sins . . . whereas the other kind needs simply admonition combined
with incarceration.”404 The gods of Homer and the Hebrews share an
uncanny sublime that Plato and his followers try to obliterate in the belief
that religion must be imposed by the state: “Plato accurately argues that
most citizens never grow up, and therefore need to be fed benign fictions
rather than the Homeric epics, where the gods are selfish, nasty spectators,
all too happy to see us suffering in their theater of cruelty.”405 In sublimed
erotic quest for the eternal forms of justice and beauty that exist beyond
man’s touch in the realms of immortality, Plato, like Henry V, would banish
lecherous Zeus and Falstaff because they are not exactly statist.406 In a
parallel way, the School of Resentment seeks to extirpate the Falstaff of
Yale because he is no cultural materialist and does not seek the just “great”
society in his sublime literary criticism, “the Republic inaugurates their
Puritanism.”407 Philosophy is the inward soul of wisdom, and according to
Plato, belongs to the gods, but poetry is the outward form of wisdom when
expressed at its most persuasive, and Bloom mentions Iris Murdoch’s
brilliant contention that in The Republic, Plato ascetically strives to mortify
metaphors in his rationalistic dialogues, and then F. M. Cornford’s reading
that Plato finds a structural analogy between the ideal state and the human
soul.408 Bloom discovers a strong Shelleyan parallel between the deaths of
Jesus and Socrates, who accepted their fates without becoming brutes in
those hagiographies/dialogues that describe their disputatious lives and
transcendent deaths. Bloom compares Pascal and Montaigne and thus
Pascal’s chiasmus: “man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate
thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute,” is sired by
Montaigne’s apothegm, “They want to get out of themselves and escape
from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they
change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower
themselves.”409 Montaigne’s thoughts on transcendentalism remind Bloom
of puritanical materialists: “These transcendental humours frighten me, like
lofty and inaccessible places; and nothing is so hard for me to stomach in
the life of Socrates as his ecstasies and possessions by his daemon.”410
Bloom reproofs Pascal as Montaigne’s weak ephebe, though not for being
an ironic quietist: “When I consider the short duration of my life,
swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill,
and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I
am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened,” whereas Montaigne
maintains a thoroughly skeptical attitude with regard to eternity: “It would
be an inequitable disproportion to receive eternal compensation in
consequence of so short a life.”411 Does not the continuation of Pascal’s
aphorism—why here rather than there—tap us twice on the shoulder with
memories of Bloom’s background? Bloom’s assertion that wisdom is to be
found in world literature answers Montaigne’s question: what do I know?
But what is it, Bloom asks, that provokes Platonists to instigate an askesis
of their humanity? An answer is found in Bacon’s essays: “Men fear death,
as children fear to go in the dark . . . the contemplation of death, as the
wages of sin and passage to another world, is holy and religious.”412
Montaigne chimes in agreement with Bacon: “There is nothing so beautiful
and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard
to acquire as the knowledge of how to live well and naturally; and the most
barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.”413 For this reason
Bloom advises bildung, Goethe’s word for an aesthetic education in the
classics and the contemplation of great lives, even the enigmatic life of
Jesus celebrated in the Gospel of Mark, but, as for the Platonizing Apostle
Paul, Bloom echoes Goethe: “Spare me . . . your absurdities!”414 Bloom
attacks the ascetic spirit because it is the apparent enemy of life as art, the
exact opposite of Falstaffian Bloom, who wishes for more life.415
The spiritual opposite to Bloom’s Epicureanism has to be seen as
Augustine’s wistful desire for the monastic life. Bloom writes of Augustine
that his thought reflects the trinity inasmuch as there are three crucial
concepts therein—intellect, memory, and will: “what joins intellect and
memory for Augustine is God’s will, working in the soul as the Pauline
principle of caritas, the love of the creator God for his creatures, man and
woman.”416 In the Confessions, Augustine suggests that memory is the
agent by which means the soul finds its way to God’s will in a conversion
experience, as Bloom puts it, “Memory is a power stronger than the self,
until the self understands: ‘You were with me, but I was not with you.’ ”417
Augustinian memory finds God’s will within the humbled self as opposed
to the world outside by means of the Neo-platonic dualism that by
confronting duration one discovers eternal salvation; via memorial
introspection, one’s inner soul is able to contemplate the ideal forms from
the material world of becoming—much as Wordsworth becomes healed by
contemplating memorized but re-imagined forms of Nature. Whitman too
confronts the well-joined carpentry of duration in “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry” and writes to future generations of Americans: “I am with you.”
There is a mysterious interplay between friendship and solitary optative
vision in the poem as the flying, or should this be floating, scheme, which
envelops all, disintegrates, only for America to become a republic of
neighbors. But wicked individualistic Manichaeism opposes emanative
Neo-Platonism and the shared sense of common American humanity that
Whitman appeals to is not exactly consonant with the One that
Wordsworth’s imagination perceives in moments of solitary vision, despite
Bloom’s reference to Shakespeare as sharing the creativity of Spinozistic
deity, which enthusiastic Bardolatory contradicts his deconstruction of
Coleridgean aesthetics. Americans possess a common human heart, but they
are more self-reliant than Europeans, and this providential individualism
forms the metaphorical float of Whitmanian teleology. Bloom finds another
three-in-one, that of poem, life, and history of mankind, in Augustine’s
homily on the memory of reciting a psalm as an existentialist metaphor for
being aware of mortality’s span. Bloom speaks of his lifelong obsession
with reading poetry and canonical memory in antithesis to Augustine’s
trinity that eventually swapped the cupiditas of his secular love for Virgil
for the ascetic Gospel of Love. Cupiditas is wanton like Eve and symbolic
of selfish epicurean excess, in short, the Stevensian metaphysical
materialism that defines Bloomian selfhood. Bloom’s concept of selfhood
quickens at the threshold vacated by God, or that selfhood which Augustine
defined as Promethean and Satanic idolatry. Bercovitch usefully, if
antithetically, remarks that the severe displacement of Protestant principles
that Bloom isolates begins in England “with the Puritan ‘vulgar prophets’
who claimed the prerogatives of Christ, with the Quaker doctrine of the
inner light” but that the Romantic poet “freed the individual to choose (or
invent) his identity.”418 Unlike Augustine, Plotinus, and Paul, who
denigrate the Gnostics, Bloom has a Manichean understanding of tradition
wherein authors deny their literary heritage and assert their independent
newness in relation to past orthodoxies. Nevertheless, Bloom chooses Plato
as an exemplar of the teacher who sublimes his homoerotic attraction for
his students into a love of wisdom “since love turns out to be another name
for philosophy . . . the authentic quester ascends to revelation, to the
astounding Beauty that is also the Good.”419 A parallel is drawn between
Hal and “the outrageous Professor Falstaff,” but whereas Socrates professes
a wise ignorance, Sir John “teaches by excess, by an over-flowing rather
than an ascesis.”420 Fatherly Falstaff gives love far too easily: “In the
English-speaking academic world, closely ruled by campus Puritans, we
now have knitting-circles of Madame Defarges, sadistically awaiting the
spectacle of the guillotine, fit punishment for ‘sexual harassment’, that poor
parody of the Socratic Eros.”421 Overhearing (rather than over-the-
shoulder reading or even the over-reader) is defined as the human will-to-
change and Hamlet is its prime exemplar, a character who “becomes the
theologian of his own consciousness.”422 Bloom’s rhetoric rises to the
Shakespearean occasion of an alternative form of self-fashioning than that
offered by brain-washing Marxists: “to hear yourself, at least for an instant,
without self-recognition, is to open your spirit to the tempests of
change.”423 The ever-augmenting inner spirit with its crucial faculty of
overhearing is invented by Shakespeare and then vividly redefined by
Milton, Bloom’s “oracle of the inward life.”424 Inner spirit and inward life
mutates into Milton’s “version of the Inner Light” that guided the
pugnacious Protestant, when “he went deep into internal exile by
composing Paradise Lost.”425 Milton here seems molded into a Hasidic
Jew, turning away from the political world of Christian Europe and Bloom
confesses that, as a Jewish Gnostic, he does not think Paradise Lost a
Christian epic. Thus, he writes that Milton believed in the God within and
quotes the key speech made by Satan, in which the arch-fiend mouths what
would become Bloom’s Emersonian mantra that the American Sublime is
fathered in that transatlantic abyss created by the “self-begot, self-
raised,/By our own quick’ning power” (V, 860-1). Satanic quickening is
here the opposite of the Pauline quickening of mortal bodies (Rom. 8.11),
that is the doctrine that the believer becomes spiritually alive the more he
renounces the sweet life of sin.
Reading Bloom’s ever-changing evaluations of authors that are subtly
altered by new insights is exactly like observing a Shakespearean character
over-hearing themselves thinking as they speak. But Bloom is no poet; he
cannot forget. He is iconoclastic in the sense of shattering New Critical
urns, which makes his preference for Orc as opposed to Urizen akin to the
rosebud metaphor in Citizen Kane. Bloom has spoken publicly against the
massacres that the Second Amendment has brought to American society,
and in his reading of Blood Meridian, he salutes Cormac McCarthy’s
identification of the albino Judge Holden with Moby Dick; in effect the
Second Commandment becomes the Second Amendment, as iconoclastic
violence is used as “protection” against “The the.” The dumbfoundering
Stevensian definite inarticulate here represents an urge to write the self into
life, while purging away the tidal detritus of what our daily lives dump in
memory, including precursors and received truth, that is the white whale as
the myth of a blank canvas. Bloom’s best prose is by no means filled with
critical clichés that emptily follow academic fashions; for him the canon is
formed by self-election, which he categorizes as a mixture of the
Alexandrine-Hellenic and Judeo-Christian, in the sense of Scripture become
secular scripture and sometimes vice versa. He deconstructs texts via a
combination of genealogy and close-reading and even applies these tactics
to the tenets of normative Judaism and Christianity. By means of a
canonical myth of memory, Bloom remembers Zion, and this revenge
against time’s ravages he rediscovers as a secular form of transcendence in
the poetry of great writing. Although his Jewishness causes him to have the
occasional blind-spot, Bloom’s vivacity is such that he self-creates more
than he receives from post-Protestant American society; therefore, my
closing metaphor is Shylock-Falstaff dialectic. Bloom seems at his most
vulnerable, bemoaning the figure of Shylock as the bitter Shakespearean
archetype that has cursed the Jew in history: “Shylock has been the Jew
throughout four centuries now, and still has great power to hurt.”426 If
Marlowe’s Barabas is a cardboard caricature, who poisons wells, then
Shylock is a well-rounded Jewish devil born of creative rivalry, and yet
Bloom announces that Shylock is a precursor of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s
development since “Shylock and Falstaff share an exuberance, negative in
Shylock, extravagantly positive in Falstaff.”427 Bloom notes that both
Shakespearean types are rejected at the end of their theatrical lives, but that
“we sooner can see Falstaff as a monk than Shylock as a Christian.”428 In
spite of Bloom’s avowal that American Jews are not in exile, he
nevertheless quotes James Shapiro’s meditation upon anti-Semitism as part
of his discussion of The Merchant of Venice: “To avert our gaze from what
the play reveals about the relationship between cultural myths and people’s
identities will not make irrational and exclusionary attitudes disappear.”429
This said, Bloom is at times critical of the American polis and hence he
styles himself as Falstaffian, or someone who loves life in a Nietzschean
sense, and yet hates societies given to military fantasies: “The Falstaffian
spirit is a great sustainer of civilization. It disappears when the state is too
powerful and when people worry too much about their souls. . . . There is
little of Falstaff’s substance in the world now, and, as the power of the state
expands, what is left will be liquidated.”430 But here an ironic analogy
with Judge Holden surfaces, since, as Hobsbawm proposes, the cowboy
represents a form of in-built anarchism in American society: “the ideal of
an individual uncontrolled by any constraints of state authority,” which he
contrasts with “the imposition of government and public order.”431 In
Bloom’s view, Falstaff menaces the recently crowned Henry V inwardly,
and from this observation it follows that the rowdily life-affirming Falstaff
becomes the dialectical opponent of Corinthian civility, the ascetic spirit of
statecraft and Agincourt addresses. Just like the sanctimonious Henry V of
the rejection scene, Bloom draws the analogy that, in The Republic, Plato
shuts the mythmakers out of his Just City.432 Bloom compares the
dismissal of Homer from the ideal republic to the shunning of Falstaff:
“Plato dismisses him (Homer) as Prince Hal/Henry V exiles Falstaff, whose
soul is not exactly statist.”433 Bloom’s existentialist self-identification with
Falstaffian being is such that he has acted the part of Falstaff on two
occasions, and for him the paradoxical secret to Falstaff’s character is
extravagant freedom: “I prefer to love Falstaff, the image of freedom’s wit,
and the language of wit’s freedom.”434 Shakespeare’s invention is self-
consciously paralleled with Don Quixote, who “resists yielding to the
authority of church and state. When he ceases to assert his autonomy, there
is nothing left except to be Alonso Quixano the Good again, and no action
remaining except to die.”435 From his garrulous collegiate perspective,
Bloom compares the relationship of Hal and Falstaff to that of Alexander
and Aristotle, “Falstaff is . . . as much Prince Hal’s tutor as Aristotle was
Alexander’s.”436 It was said of Aristotle that he wished to conquer the
realms of knowledge in emulation of his student’s desire to conquer the
known world, which prompts me to describe Bloom as the authentic Jewish
super-brain of the world’s last Christian super-power, the Falstaffian
educator of Urizenic America.437
 Notes

Preface
1 W. C. Martyn, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England: A History (New
York: Kessinger, 2010), p. 390.
2 Stephen Marx, “The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers,”
Studies in English Literature 1500–1800 (Winter 1992), no page
number. http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Publications/prophet.html
[Accessed 16 February 2013]. George Fox, The Journal of George
Fox, ed. by John Nickalls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1952), p. 198.
3 http://www.radioopensource.org/harold-blooms-melville/ [Accessed 16
February 2013].
4 Andrew Collier, Christianity and Marxism: A Philosophical
Contribution to Their Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2001), p.
63.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2002), p. 308.
8 Collier, Christianity and Marxism, p. 63.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose,
ed. J. Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982).
12 Bloom, Genius, pp. 309–10.
13 Christopher Hitchens, “Stand up for Denmark! Why are we not
defending our ally?,” Idealist (21 February 2006).
 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/
02/stand_up_for_denmark.html [Accessed 22 February 2013].

Introduction
1 Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the
Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991), p. 27.
2 Harold Bloom, Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism (New
Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988), p. 318.
3 Adam Fitzgerald, “The Anatomy of Influence: An Interview with
Harold Bloom,” Boston Review (April 2011), no page number.
http://bostonreview.net/NPM/adam_fitzgerald_harold_bloom.php
[Accessed 12 January 2013].
4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) p. 35.
5 Ibid., p. 37.
6 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 87.
7 Ibid.
8 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 24.
9 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), pp. 117–18. Reinhard
Bendix, Max Weber (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 59.
10 Ibid., p. 61.
11 Ibid., p. 275.
12 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 125–6.
13 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 137.
14 Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1964), p. 5.
15 Harold Bloom, The Book of J, trans. David Rosenberg (New York:
Grove Press, 1990), p. 35.
16 Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,
and Resurrection (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 187–8.
17 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 356.
18 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii. Harold Bloom, The Western
Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Macmillan,
1994), p. 23.
19 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii.
20 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 23.
21 Bloom, Genius, p. ix.
22 Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continuum,
2005), p. 36.
23 Harold Bloom, “The Glories of Yiddish,” New York Review of Books (6
November 2008), no page number.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/06/the-glories-of-
yiddish/ [Accessed 28 May 2013]
24 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 117.
25 Cynthia Ozick, “Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom,” in Art and Ardor:
Essays by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Knopf, 1983), pp. 178–99. See
also Sanford Pinsker, “Jewish Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
Modern Critical Views Cynthia Ozick, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1986), p. 122.
26 Graham Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 130. Harold
Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press,
1976), p. 75.
27 Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of The Post
Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 32. Harold
Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” in American
Religious Poems: An Anthology, eds. Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba
(New York: The Library of America, 2006), p. xxxvi.
28 Cynthia Ozick, “Judaism & Harold Bloom,” Commentary 67, 1 (1979),
46–7.
29 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 11.
30 Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 29.
31 Timothy Parrish, “Creation’s Covenant: The Art of Cynthia Ozick,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, 4 (2001), 440–64.
32 Bloom, “Introduction” to Modern Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick, p. 5.
33 Ibid., pp. 2, 4.
34 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 7.
35 Quoted from Victor Stranderg, “The Art of Cynthia Ozick,” in Modern
Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick, pp. 83–4.
36 David Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), p. 222.
37 Parrish, “Creation’s Covenant: The Art of Cynthia Ozick,” p. 10.
38 Sanford Pinsker, “Jewish Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
Modern Critical Views: Cynthia Ozick, p. 122.
39 Interview with Brian Lamb,” Booknotes (3 September 2000).
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
40 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (London: Fontana Press, 1987), p. 218.
41 Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 218–19.
42 Ibid., p. 219.
43 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 23.
44 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
45 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
46 Ibid., p. 25.
47 Bloom, Genius, pp. 748–50.
48 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 25.
49 Ibid., p. 15.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., p. 14.
52 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p.
198.
53 Ibid., p. 329.
54 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 26.
55 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 81.
56 Ibid., p. 339.
57 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 307.
58 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 244.
59 Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 18. Bloom, Omens of
Millennium, p. 244.
60 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, pp. 234, 247.
61 Ibid., p. 236.
62 Ibid., p. 252.
63 Bloom, Genius, p. 75.
64 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 357.
65 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 278.
66 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. xi.
67 Robert Moynihan (ed.), A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold
Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man (New York:
Archon, 1986), p. 38.
68 Thomas Carlyle, Sartus Resartus (Edinburgh: CanonGate Classics,
1999), p. 112.
69 S. T. Coleridge, Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H.
Coleridge, 2 Vols (London: William Heinemann, 1995), II, p. 709.
70 Norma Rosen, Touching Evil (Michigan: Wayne State University Press,
1969), p. 3. See also Emily Miller Budick, “The Holocaust in the
Jewish American Literary Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Jewish American Literature, eds. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P.
Kramer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 212.
71 Harold Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011), p. 144.
72 Bloom, Genius, pp. 799–800.
73 Ibid., p. 805.
74 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 66.
75 Ibid., p. 337.
76 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p.
xxiii.
77 Ibid., p. xxv.
78 Ibid., p. 6.
79 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 34.
80 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 63.
81 Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Penguin,
2004), pp. 37, 39.
82 Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and
Contemporary Literature (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1992), p. 38.
83 Antonio Weiss, “Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1,” The Paris
Review 118 (Spring 1991), no page number.
 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 9 May 2013]. See also Bloom, The Book of
J, p. 15. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New
York: Schocken Books, 1941), p. 17.
84 Bloom, Genius, p. 86.
85 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 69.
86 Ibid., p. 70.
87 Jonathan Rosen, “So Who Is King of the Jews?,” New York Times (27
November 2005), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/27rosen.html?
pagewanted=all [Accessed 28 May 2013].
88 Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 113.
89 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 242.
90 Ibid., p. 243.
91 Ibid., p. 25.
92 Ibid., p. 26.
93 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 339.
94 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 57.
95 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 43.
96 Ibid., p. 84.
97 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 332.
98 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 187.
99 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom be Found?, p. 6.
100 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 332.
101 Ibid., p. 339.
102 Ibid., p. 329.
103 Harold Bloom, “Literature as the Bible,” New York Times (31 March
1988), no page number.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1988/mar/31/literature-as-
the-bible/?pagination=false [Accessed 10 May 2013].
104 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 136–7.
105 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 69.
106 Winston Churchill, “Atlantic Charter, August 24, 1941, Broadcast,
London,” in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963,
ed. R. S. James, 8 Vols (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), VI, p. 6467.
107 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London:
HarperCollins, 1986), p. 186.
108 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 20.
109 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 5.
110 Ibid.
111 Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic
Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), p. 327.
112 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1986), p. x.
113 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 337–8.
114 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 42. Bloom, The Shadow of a Great
Rock, p. 215.
115 William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David
Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
116 Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 400.
117 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 333.
118 Ibid., p. 408.
119 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 146.
120 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 409.
121 Ibid., p. 333.
122 Ibid., p. 365.
123 Ibid., pp. 330–1.
124 Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” p. xxxiii.
125 Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005),
p. 221.
126 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 356.
127 Ibid., p. 358.
128 Ibid., p. 363.
129 Ibid., p. 395.
130 Ibid., p. 390.
131 Ibid., pp. 398, 400.
132 Ibid., p. 408.
133 Ibid., pp. 408, 417.
134 Ibid., pp. 418–19.
135 Bloom, The Book of J, pp. 14–15.
136 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 22.
137 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 349–50.
138 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 23.
139 Ibid.
140 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 7.
141 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 50.
142 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 42.
143 Ibid., p. 23.
144 Ibid., p. 37.
145 Ibid., p. 326.
146 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
147 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: The Athlone
Press, 1980), p. 319.
148 Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1982), p. 16.
149 Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, p. 320.
150 Ibid., p. 324.
151 Ibid., p. 326.
152 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 35, 37.
153 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and
Faber, 1984), p. 4.
154 Frank Lentricchia, “Introduction to The Breaking of the Vessels,” in The
Breaking of the Vessels, ed. Harold Bloom (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), p. x. Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict,
pp. 17–18.
155 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 29.
156 Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, p. 326.
157 Ibid., p. 328.
158 Ibid., p. 329.
159 Ibid.
160 Ibid., p. 331.
161 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York:
Forth Estate, 1998), pp. 424–6.
162 Ibid., p. 427.
163 Ibid., pp. 428–31.
164 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 207.

Chapter 1
1 Geoffrey Hartman, A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–
1998 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. xiv.
2 John Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990), p. 39.
3 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 483.
4 Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), p. 28.
5 Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society (New York: Methuen, 1987), p.
68.
6 Jean-Pierre Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 33.
7 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 64.
8 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 3.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, pp. 16–17. S. T. Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 Vols
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), II, p. 72.
11 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philosophical Lectures, ed. Kathleen Coburn
(London: The Pilot Press, 1949), pp. 114, 175. See also
http://www.catherinemwallace.com/Home/coleridge/coleridges-theory-
of-language [Accessed 21 May 2013].
12 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, I, p. 23.
13 Paul de Man, Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of
Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 267.
Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), p. 32.
14 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London:
Methuen, 1934), p. 48.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 53.
17 Ibid., p. 50.
18 Bloom, Genius, p. 371.
19 Ibid.
20 Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, p. 49.
21 Bloom, “Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,” in Anatomy of
Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), p. viii.
22 Bloom, “Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,” p. ix.
23 Ibid., p. vii.
24 Ibid., p. x.
25 Ibid.
26 Robert Preyer, “Voyagers of the Imagination,” Yale Review 51, 2
(1961), 316–19.
27 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 121.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 118.
30 Bloom, “Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,” pp. vii, ix.
31 Ibid., p. x. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 119.
32 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 64.
33 Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1959), pp. 60–1.
34 Preyer, “Voyagers of the Imagination,” pp. 316–19.
35 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 118. Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p.
31.
36 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1969), pp. 169–70. Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 12.
37 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaker, p. 61.
38 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life,
Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), p. 34.
39 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 33–4.
40 Ibid., p. 20.
41 Geoffrey Hartman, A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a
Displaced Child of Europe (New York: Fordham University Press,
2007), p. 47.
42 Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p. 194.
43 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 17.
44 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987), p. 110.
45 Hartman, A Critic’s Journey, p. xxi.
46 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 207.
47 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 195.
48 Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, pp. 60–1.
49 Ibid., p. 61.
50 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xi.
51 Ibid., p. xii.
52 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 95.
53 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xii.
54 Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), pp. 14–19.
55 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xi. Ricks, Allusion to the
Poets, pp. 5–6.
56 Quoted from Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the
English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 4.
57 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxii.
58 Ibid., p. 36.
59 Ibid., p. 37.
60 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, pp. 226–7.
61 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 31.
62 Geoffrey Hartman, “Introduction to New Perspectives on Coleridge
and Wordsworth,” in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth,
ed. G. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. xi.
63 Ibid.
64 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 16.
65 Harold Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” in Deconstruction and
Criticism, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 16.
66 Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (London: Methuen,
1987), p. 178.
67 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 9.
68 S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, London:
Princeton University Press, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993), p. 193.
69 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 16–17.
70 Ibid., p. 17.
71 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 97.
72 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 65.
73 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 30.
74 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 156.
75 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 10.
76 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 12.
77 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, pp. 60, 402.
78 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
79 Ibid., p. 17.
80 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 10.
81 Ibid., p. 11.
82 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 294–5.
83 Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau,
Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Yale University Press,
1979), pp. 110–11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed.
Karle Schlecta (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1956), p. 3:314.
84 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 197.
85 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 98.
86 Harold Bloom, Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 62.
87 George Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1970), p. 211.
88 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 99.
92 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 10–11.
93 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 88.
94 Ibid., p. 91.
95 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
96 Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 40–1.
97 Ibid., p. 49.
98 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 50. Bloom, Figures of Capable
Imagination, p. 11.
 99 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 18.
100 Ibid., pp. 19, 24.
101 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 100.
102 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 59.
103 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 8–9.
104 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 37.
105 Ibid., p. 36.
106 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987).
107 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 19.
108 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 63.
109 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 19.
110 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 28.
111 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 101.
112 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 41. Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p.
11.
113 Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley, p. 210.
114 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 11.
115 Ibid.
116 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 20.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid., p. 102.
120 Ibid., p. 103.
121 Lucy Newlyn, “Foreword,” in The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of
Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature, eds. Damian
Walford Davies and Richard Turley (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2006), p. viii.
122 R. V. Young, “The Critic as Gnostic,” Modern Age 47, 1 (Winter 2005),
19–29.

Chapter 2
1 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 4.
 2 Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, pp. 51, 68. Agata Bielik-Robson, The
Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2011), p. 333.
3 Harold Bloom, The Labyrinth (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009),
pp. xv–xvii.
4 Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment, p. 37.
5 De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 110–11. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Werke in drei Bänden, p. 3:314.
6 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London:
Routledge, 1979), p. 279.
7 See especially Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 97–8.
8 Florian Rötzer, “Französische Philosophen im Gespräch” (Munchen,
1986), p. 74. http://www.newkabbalah.com/JDK.pdf [Accessed 18
August 2013].
9 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 43.
10 De Man, Blindness & Insight, p. 276.
11 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 56.
12 Ibid., p. 66.
13 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 50.
14 Geoffrey Hartman, “Preface,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. H.
Bloom (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. viii.
15 M. H. Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and
Theory (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 244.
16 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 8.
17 Ibid., p. 10.
18 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 25.
19 Ibid.
20 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston: North Western University Press,
1973), p. 156. See also J. Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then (London:
HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1991), p. 104.
21 Miller, Theory Now and Then, pp. 122–3.
22 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1932), pp. 671–2. Miller, Theory Now and Then, p. 137.
23 Miller, Theory Now and Then, p. 107.
24 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 102.
25 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of
Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998), p. 53. See also http://www.newkabbalah.com/JDK.pdf
[Accessed 18 August 2013].
26 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 289.
27 Ibid., p. 285.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 286.
30 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 193.
31 Alethea Haytor, Opium and The Romantic Imagination (London:
Faber, 1968), pp. 94–5. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an
English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 70.
32 Jonathan Bate, “The Literature of Power: Coleridge and De Quincey,”
in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honor of J. B. Beer,
eds. Tim Fulford and Morton Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993),
p. 137.
33 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 1.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 5.
36 Ibid., p. 16.
37 Ibid., p. 27.
38 Ibid., p. 40.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 55.
41 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 15. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in
Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941), p. 17. Antonio
Weiss, “Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1,” The Paris Review
118 (Spring 1991), no page number.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 28 May 2013].
42 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 42.
43 Ibid., pp. 42–3.
44 Ibid., p. 42.
45 Ibid., p. 43.
46 Ibid., p. 44.
47 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after
Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 113.
48 Frank Kermode, “Paul de Man’s Abyss,” London Review of Books 11,
6 (16 March 1989), pp. 3–7.
49 Jakobson, Language in Literature, p. 113.
50 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 188. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (Worcester:
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 34–5.
51 Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 45.
52 Gayatri Spivak, “Introduction to Of Grammatology,” in Of
Grammatology, ed. Jacques Derrida, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xv.
53 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction Theory and Practice (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 109.
54 Ibid., p. 48.
55 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 5.
56 Ibid., p. 6.
57 Ibid.
58 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Walters (New York:
Continuum, 1981), p. 80.
59 Ibid., p. 97.
60 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 43.
61 Ibid.
62 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. xxxix.
63 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 48.
64 Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics (London:
Routledge, 1988), pp. 50–1.
65 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 25.
66 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 49.
67 Ibid., p. 50.
68 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 9.
69 Ibid.
70 Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 279.
71 Ibid., p. 280.
72 Ibid.
 Chapter 3
1 Walter Nash, Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (London: Blackwell,
1989), p. 1.
2 Abrams, Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Theory, p.
250.
3 Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, p. 9.
4 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. xix–xx.
5 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 300.
6 Ibid., p. 205.
7 Abrams, Doing Things with Texts, p. 319.
8 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 106.
9 Ibid., p. 117.
10 Ibid., p. 301.
11 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, pp. 7–8.
12 Ibid., p. 8.
13 J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 339.
14 Miller, Theory Now and Then, pp. 348–9.
15 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 108.
16 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 8–9.
17 Ibid., p. 8.
18 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 207. See also Miller, Theory Then
and Now, p. 349.
19 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 8. Bloom, The Western
Canon, p. 40.
20 Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, p.
18.
21 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 143.
22 Ibid., p. 142.
23 Ibid.
24 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 182.
25 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 25.
26 Ibid., pp. 25–6.
27 Ibid., p. 26.
28 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 38.
29 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 94.
30 De Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 274.
31 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 73.
32 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 386.
33 Ibid., p. 401.
34 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 45.
35 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 76.
36 Ibid., p. 70.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 74.
39 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 17.
40 Allen, Harold Bloom A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 45–6.
41 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 77.
42 Ibid., p. 64.
43 Ibid., p. 65.
44 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 392.
45 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 67.
46 Ibid.
47 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 80.
48 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 69.
49 Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language: From
Chaucer Through Robert Frost (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), p.
883.
50 Ibid., pp. 76–7.
51 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. xviii–xxiii.
52 Ibid., p. xxiii.
53 Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom Towards Historical Rhetorics, p. 28.
Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 8.
54 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 112.
55 Ibid.
56 Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction, p.
100.
57 Ibid., p. 94.
58 Ibid., p. 263.
59 Ibid., p. 274.
60 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 70.
61 Fletcher, Allegory, p. 62.
62 Ibid., p. 44.
63 Harold Bloom, “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” in New
Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, p. 265.
64 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of The Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), p. 311.
65 Ibid.
66 Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of
Aesthetic Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 182.
67 Kate Soper, What is Nature: Culture Politics and the Non-Human
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 32.
68 Paul de Man, “The Jews and Us,” in Responses: On Paul de Man’s
Wartime Journalism, eds. Werner Harmacher and Paul Hertz (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 29.
69 Jacques Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), p. 201. Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of
the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry XIV
(1988), 590–652.
70 Quoted from Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 204.
71 Quoted from Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of
Aesthetic Ideology, p. 190, but see also Geoffrey Hartman, “Blindness
and Insight,” The New Republic (7 March 1998), pp. 26–31, 31.
72 Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 258.
73 Ibid., p. 260.
74 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 328.
75 Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de Man, p. 259.
76 Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, p.
57.
77 Quoted from Eamonne Dunne, J. Hillis Miller And The Possibilities of
Reading: Literature After Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2012),
p. 43.
78 Quoted from John Harwood, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of
Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 198.
79 De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 300. Derrida, Mémoires for Paul de
Man, p. 228.
80 De Man, Mémoires for Paul de Man, pp. 228–9, Allegories of Reading,
p. 288.
81 De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 4.
82 Ibid., p. 153.
83 Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998), pp. 1–3.
84 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
85 Ibid., p. 7.
86 Barbara Johnson, “The Surprise of Otherness: A Note on the War-time
Writings of Paul de Man,” in Literary Theory Today, eds. Peter Collier
and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.
13.
87 R. S. Thomas, What is a Welshman? (Swansea: Christopher Davies
Publishers, 1974), p. 12.
88 Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went Into The West (London: Aurum,
2006), pp. 35–7, 79.
89 Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Norton,
2014), pp. xvi, 440, 427.
90 R. S. Thomas, Song at the Year’s Turning (London: Rupert Hard-
Davis, 1955), p. 64. Rogers, The Man Who Went Into The West, p.
307. See also Alistair Heys, R.S. Thomas and Romanticism (Plovdiv:
The Pygmalion Press, 2004).
91 Peter Brooks, “The Strange Case of Paul de Man”, New York Review
of Books (3 April, 2014).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/strange-case-
paul-de-man/?
utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March+11+2014&utm_content=
March+11+2014+CID_bc4fac6a5a161cec184203d112277fb3&utm_so
urce=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=The%20Strange%
20Case%20of%20Paul%20de%20Man [Accessed 3 March 2014].
92 Rogers, The Man Who Went Into The West, p. 45.
93 Hartman, A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998, p. xxiii.
 Chapter 4
1 Quoted from John Harwood, Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of
Interpretation (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 1.
2 Harold Bloom, Novelists and Novels (New York: Checkmark Books,
2007), p. 21.
3 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii.
4 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 93.
5 Quoted from A. D. Nuttal, Two Concepts of Allegory (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 5.
6 Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 13.
7 Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy,
Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 96, 100.
8 Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern
Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 5.
9 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998),
p. 65.
10 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 13.
11 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 29.
Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 3.
12 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 51.
13 Ibid., pp. 34–5.
14 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 39.
15 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 32. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of
Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: University of Princeton Press,
1952), p. 23.
16 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 42.
17 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xvii.
18 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xvii.
19 W. B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1990).
20 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 149.
21 McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 1.
22 Ibid., p. 29.
23 S. T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New
York, 1875), pp. 437–8.
24 Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, p. 63.
25 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1972), p. 109.
26 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 9. McGann, The Beauty of
Inflections, p. 63.
27 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
28 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 9.
29 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 3. Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 23.
30 Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, p. 66.
31 Ibid., p. 67.
32 Ibid., p. 66.
33 Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 24.
34 Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “Ranting against Cant”, Atlantic Magazine
(July 2003), no page number.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/ranting-against-
cant/303095/ [Accessed 16 February 2013].
35 Bloom, The Western Canon, pp. 24–5.
36 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New
Historicism, p. 12.
37 Ibid., p. 13.
38 Ibid., p. 68.
39 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 411.
40 Ibid., p. 717.
41 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 524.
42 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 26.
43 Ibid.
44 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 664.
45 Ibid., p. 663.
46 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, pp. 19, 32–3.
47 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 24.
48 Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 665.
49 Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward
Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 14, 16,
45.
50 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 29.
51 Ibid., pp. 7, 29.
52 Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, p. x.
53 Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2001), p. 3.
54 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 5.
55 Harold Bloom, Sylvia Plath (New York: Chelsea House, 2001), p. 9.
56 Ibid.
57 Lillian Robinson, “Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon”, in The
New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed.
Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1989), p. 105.
58 Ibid., p. 110.
59 Ibid., p. 112.
60 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath”,
in Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath, ed. H. Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 2007), p. 9.
61 Linda Bundtzen, “ ‘Ariel’ as Plath at Her Most Triumphant,” in
Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath, p. 70.
62 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflicts, p. 141.
63 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of
Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988), p. 12.
64 Jerome McGann, Are the Humanities Inconsequent?: Interpreting
Marx’s Riddle of the Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), p. 39.
65 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 3.
66 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 28.
67 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), pp. 2, 9.
68 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6, Greenblatt, Learning to
Curse, p. 221.
69 Bloom, The Western Canon, pp. 30–1.
70 Ibid., p. 16.
71 Christopher Rollason, “On the Stone Raft: Harold Bloom in Catalonia
and Portugal,” in The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, eds. Roy
Sellars and Graham Allen (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), p. 160.
72 Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 16.
73 Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life,
Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1966), p. 31.

Chapter 5
1 Adam Begley, “Colossus among Critics: Harold Bloom,” New York
Times (25 September 1994), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-colossus.html
[Accessed 16 February 2013].
2 Peter Morris, “Harold Bloom, Parody, and the ‘Other Tradition’, ” in
The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, eds. Roy Sellars and Graham
Allen (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007), p. 439.
3 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 348.
4 Ibid., p. 347.
5 Sansford Pinsker, “Jewish Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views, p. 121.
6 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 23.
7 David Mikics, “Harold Bloom is God,” Tablet (2 January 2003), no
page number. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March
2013].
8 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
9 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 9 May 2013].
10 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 7.
11 Bloom, Genius, p. 181.
12 Harold Bloom, “The Glories of Yiddish,” New York Review of Books (6
November 2008), no page number.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/06/the-glories-of-
yiddish/?pagination=false [Accessed 28 May 2013].
13 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 167.
14 William Deresiewicz, “The Shaman,” New Republic (14 September
2011), no page number. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-
and-arts/magazine/94947/harold-bloom-the-anatomy-of-influence#
[Accessed 17 May 2013].
15 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 30.
16 Harold Bloom, “The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism,” New
York Times (7 May 2010), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Bloom-t.html?_r=0
[Accessed 28 May 2013].
17 Susanne Klingenstein, Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of
Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930–1990 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1998), p. 80.
18 Ibid., p. 81.
19 Abrams, Doing Things with Texts, pp. 287–8.
20 Ibid., p. 293.
21 Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels, p. 13.
22 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 395, 403.
23 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 3–4.
24 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
25 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 319.
26 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 46.
27 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to Musical Variations on Jewish
Thought,” in Musical Variations on Jewish Thought, ed. Oliver Revault
d’Allones (New York: George Braziller, 1984), p. 7.
28 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 351.
29 Harold Bloom, Agon, p. 325.
30 Ibid.
31 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 353.
32 Ibid.
33 Bloom, The American Religion, pp. 30, 32.
34 Harold Bloom, “Review of Gerschom Scholem: Kabbalah and
Counter-History,” New Republic (23 June 1979), pp. 36–7.
35 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 42.
36 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 81.
37 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York:
Schocken Publishing, 1995), p. 74.
38 Robert Alter, “Introduction to Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism,” p.
xviii.
39 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 465.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-
1-harold-bloom [Accessed 9 May 2013].
40 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New York: Schocken Publishing, 1996), p. 19.
41 Bernard McGinn, “Introduction to On the Kabbalah and Its
Symbolism,” p. ix.
42 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 236.
43 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 14–15.
44 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 3.
45 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. vii.
46 Ibid., p. 4.
47 Ibid., p. 3.
48 Ibid., p. 57.
49 Ibid., p. 59.
50 Ibid., p. 65.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 66.
53 Ibid., p. 69.
54 Ibid., p. 71.
55 Ibid., p. 235.
56 Ibid., p. 233.
57 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 20.
58 Ibid., p. 21.
59 Ibid., p. 31.
60 Ibid., p. 128.
61 Ibid., p. 138.
62 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 123.
63 Ibid., pp. 190, 242.
64 Ibid., pp. 367, 378.
65 Ibid., p. 52.
66 Ibid., p. 95.
67 Ibid., pp. 358–9.
68 Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Review of Yeats, Ireland and Fascism,”
Comparative Literature 97, 5 (December 1982), 1262–5.
69 Harold Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” in Modern Poetry: Essays
in Criticism, ed. John Hollander (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1968), p. 503.
70 Bloom, Yeats, p. 7.
71 Ibid., p. 103.
72 Ibid., p. 6.
73 Sandra Seigal, “Prolegomenon to Bloom: The Opposing Self,”
Diacritics 1, 4 (1971), 36.
74 Bloom, Yeats, p. 68.
75 Ibid., p. 7.
76 Ibid., p. 183.
77 Ibid., p. 78.
78 Ibid., p. 181.
79 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35.
80 Bloom, Agon, 92. Allen, Harold Bloom A Poetics of Conflict, pp. 22–3.
81 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 13.
82 Moynihan, A Recent Imagining, p. 34.
83 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 118.
84 Ibid., p. 21.
85 Ibid.
86 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 90.
87 Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism, p. 12.
88 Ibid., p. 3.
89 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 81.
90 Bloom, Yeats, p. 188.
91 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 39.
92 Ibid., p. 38.
93 Ibid., p. 37.
94 Ibid.
 95 Elaine Shepherd, Conceding an Absence (London: Macmillan, 1996),
p. 1.
96 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 193.
97 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 79.
98 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 37.
99 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 26.
100 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 60.
101 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. xii.
102 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxii.
103 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. x.
104 Ibid., p. 28.
105 Ibid., p. 31.
106 Ibid., p. 32.
107 Ibid., p. 15.
108 Ibid., p. 17.
109 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,
trans. W. T. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. viii.
110 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, pp. 4–5.
111 Ibid., p. 5.
112 Ibid., p. 42.
113 Ibid., p. 44.
114 Ibid., pp. 45–6.
115 Ibid., p. 47.
116 Ibid., p. 51.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 54.
119 Ibid., pp. 6, 55, 101.
120 Ibid., p. 62.
121 Bloom, Agon, p. 3.
122 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 5.
123 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
124 Ibid., p. 9.
125 Ibid., p. 16.
126 Ibid., p. 9.
127 Ibid., p. 14.
128 Ibid., p. 24.
129 Ibid., p. 25.
130 Ibid., p. 28.
131 Ibid., p. 29.
132 Ibid., p. 30.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., p. 31.
135 Ibid., p. 33.
136 Ibid., p. 34.
137 Ibid.
138 Ibid., p. 35.
139 Ibid., p. 38.
140 Ibid., pp. 37–8.
141 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 211–12.
142 Ibid., p. 46.
143 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 235.
144 Ibid., p. 237.
145 Ibid., p. 239.
146 Ibid., p. 244.
147 Ibid., p. 245.
148 Ibid., pp. 245–56.
149 Bloom, Agon, p. 158.
150 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 246.
151 Ibid., p. 247.
152 Ibid.
153 Ibid., p. 348.
154 Ibid., p. 349.
155 Ibid.
156 Ibid., p. 350.
157 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 252.
158 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 351.
159 Ibid.
160 Ibid.
161 Ibid., p. 352.
162 Ibid.
163 Ibid.
164 Ibid., p. 353.
165 Ibid.
166 Ibid., p. 354.
167 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 254.
168 Ibid., p. 248.
169 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March 2013].
170 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 354.
171 Ibid., p. 355.
172 Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 245.
173 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 357.
174 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 254. Bloom, Poetics of
Influence, p. 356.
175 Ibid., p. 262.
176 Ibid., p. 257.
177 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 407.
178 Ibid.
179 http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god [Accessed 25 March 2013].
180 Bloom, How to Read and Why?, p. 28.
181 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 5.
182 Ibid., p. 10.
183 Ibid.
184 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, p. 335.
185 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 18.
186 Ibid., p. 20.
187 Ibid., p. 22.
188 Ibid.
189 Ibid., p. 97.
190 Ibid., p. 121.
191 Ibid., p. 146.
192 Ibid.
193 Ibid., p. 148.
194 Ibid., p. 149.
195 Ibid., p. 152.
196 Ibid., p. 154.
197 Ibid., p. 162.
198 Ibid., p. 164.
199 Ibid., p. 167.
200 Ibid., p. 186.
201 Ibid., p. 166.
202 Ibid., pp. 166–7.
203 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 277–8.
204 Ibid., p. 291.
205 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35.
206 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, p. 293.
207 Ibid.
208 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 192.
209 Ibid., p. 278.
210 Ibid., p. 283.
211 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 42.
212 Ibid., p. 50.
213 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 45.
214 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 10.
215 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 50.
216 Ibid., p. 14.
217 Robert Alter, “Harold Bloom’s ‘J’, ” Commentary 90, 58 (November
1990), 28.
218 Ibid., p. 18.
219 Ibid., p. 19.
220 Ibid., p. 23.
221 Bloom, The Book of J, p. 29.
222 Ibid., p. 30.
223 Ibid., p. 31.
224 Ibid., p. 42.
225 Ibid., p. 259.
226 Ibid., p. 46.
227 Ibid., p. 44.
228 Ibid., p. 178.
229 Ibid., p. 183.
230 Ibid., p. 185.
231 Ibid., p. 210.
232 Ibid., p. 229.
233 Ibid., p. 233.
234 Ibid., p. 239.
235 Ibid., p. 244.
236 Ibid., p. 255.
237 Ibid., p. 262.
238 Ibid., p. 268.
239 Ibid., p. 282.
240 Ibid., p. 288.
241 Ibid., p. 293.
242 Ibid., p. 294.
243 Moshe Idel, “Enoch and Elijah: Some Remarks on Apotheosis,
Theophany and Jewish Mysticism,” in The Salt Companion to Harold
Bloom, p. 347.
244 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 28.
245 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 3.
246 Ibid., p. 78.
247 Ibid., p. 79.
248 Ibid., p. 82.
249 Ibid.
250 Ibid., p. 62.
251 Ibid., p. 64.
252 Ibid., p. 70.
253 Ibid.
254 Ibid., pp. 90–1.
255 Ibid., p. 114.
256 Ibid., p. 97.
257 Ibid.
258 Ibid., pp. 97–8.
259 Ibid., p. 98.
260 Ibid., p. 115.
261 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 102.
262 Ibid., p. 104.
263 Ibid., p. 119.
264 Ibid., p. 131.
265 Ibid., p. 149.
266 Ibid., p. 148–9.
267 Ibid., p. 138.
268 Ibid., p. 146.
269 Ibid., p. 182.
270 Ibid., p. 169.
271 Ibid., p. 185.
272 Ibid., p. 191.
273 Ibid., p. 206.
274 Bloom, Omens of the Millennium, p. 178.
275 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
276 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 218.
277 Ibid., p. 210.
278 Ibid., p. 213.
279 Ibid., p. 233.
280 Ibid., p. 214.
281 Ibid., p. 211.
282 Ibid., p. 155.
283 Ibid., p. 175.

Chapter 6
1 Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” p. xxxii.
2 Trevor Eppehimer, Protestantism (New York: Marshal Cavendish,
2007), pp. 9–43.
3 Quoted from Michael A. Mullet, Martin Luther (London: Routledge,
2004), p. 134.
4 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xviii.
5 Ibid.
6 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 286, 373.
7 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
8 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 38.
9 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 131–3.
10 Bloom, Poetics of Influence, pp. 413–14.
11 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xviii.
12 Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 7.
13 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 37.
14 Ibid., Bloom, “Introduction to American Religious Poems,” p. xxvii.
15 Ibid., Bloom, pp. xxviii, xxix.
16 http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/157968-1/Harold+Bloom.aspx
[Accessed 22 May 2013].
17 Ibid., Bloom, p. xxxiii.
18 Ibid., p. xxxiv.
19 Ibid., p. xxxv.
20 Ibid., p. xxxvi.
21 Ibid., pp. xxxviii, xliv.
22 Ibid., p. xliv.
23 Bloom, Agon, p. 327.
24 Harold Bloom Interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel,” Queen’s Quarterly
102, 3, (Fall 1995), 609–19.
http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/episode/2012/06/29/harold-
bloom-interview-from-1995/ [Accessed 28 May 2013].
25 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, p. 26.
26 Ibid., p. 27.
27 Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, p. 128.
28 Harold Bloom, “Who Will Praise the Lord?,” New York Review of
Books (22 November, 2007).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/nov/22/who-will-
praise-the-lord/?pagination=false [Accessed 22 May 2013].
29 Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock, p. 22.
30 Ibid., p. 264.
31 Ibid., pp. 257, 261.
32 Bloom, Novelists and Novels, pp. 198, 202.
33 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 264.
34 Bloom, Agon, p. 145.
35 Ibid., p. 151.
36 Adam Begley, “Colossus Among Literary Critics: Harold Bloom,” New
York Times on-line (25 September 1994).
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-colossus.html
[Accessed 28 May 2013].
37 Bloom, The Visionary Company, pp. xvii–xxiii.
38 Ibid., p. xvii.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. xxiii.
42 Ibid., p. 464.
43 Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, pp. 58, 62.
44 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 114.
45 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. xix.
46 Ibid., p. xxiv.
47 Ibid., p. 7.
48 Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 128.
49 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 129.
50 Ibid., p. 31.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 20.
53 Ibid., pp. 25–9.
54 Ibid., p. 407.
55 Ibid., p. 272.
56 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 132.
57 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 32.
58 Ibid., p. 17.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., p. 16.
61 Ibid., p. 19.
62 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
63 Ibid., p. 26.
64 Ibid., p. 23.
65 Ibid., p. 19.
66 Ibid., p. 22.
67 Ibid., p. 26.
68 Ibid., p. 21.
69 Ibid., p. 31.
70 Ibid., p. 19.
71 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 416.
72 Ibid., p. 242.
 73 Ibid., p. 117.
74 Ibid., p. 29.
75 Ibid., p. 81.
76 Ibid., p. 363.
77 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 123. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p.
95.
78 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 96.
79 Ibid.
80 Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism, p. 53.
81 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 96. See also Fite, Harold Bloom, p.
78.
82 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 28.
83 Ibid., pp. 367, 378.
84 Ibid., p. 402.
85 Ibid., p. 367.
86 Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision, p. 9.
87 Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, p. 160.
88 Ibid., p. 125.
89 Ibid., p. 128.
90 Ibid., p. 426. Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 4.
91 Ibid., pp. 289, 297.
92 Ibid., p. 252.
93 Ibid., p. 392.
94 Bloom, Yeats, p. 7.
95 Ibid., p. 57.
96 Ibid., p. 88. Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 517.
97 Bloom, Yeats, p. 73.
98 Ibid., p. 216.
99 Ibid., p. 215.
100 Ibid., p. 189.
101 Ibid., p. 471.
102 Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley, pp. 33, 35.
103 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 162.
104 Bloom, Yeats, p. 60.
105 Ibid., p. 63.
106 Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 502. Bloom, Poetry and
Repression, p. 206.
107 Bloom, “Yeats and the Romantics,” p. 501.
108 Ibid., p. 519.
109 Bloom, Yeats, p. 12.
110 Ibid., p. 68.
111 Ibid., p. 179.
112 Ibid., pp. 179–80.
113 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
114 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 186.
115 Ibid., pp. 185–94.
116 Bloom, Agon, p. 150.
117 Bloom, Yeats, p. 24.
118 Ibid., p. 35.
119 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 44.
120 Ibid.
121 Bloom, Yeats, p. 25.
122 Ibid., p. 181.
123 Ibid., pp. 32, 34.
124 Ibid., p. 33.
125 Ibid., p. 37.
126 Ibid., p. 35.
127 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 136–7.
128 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 113.
129 Ibid.
130 Ibid., p. 125.
131 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 138.
132 Ibid., pp. 131, 134.
133 Ibid., p. 139.
134 Ibid., p. 148.
135 Ibid., pp. 185–6.
136 Ibid., p. 187.
137 Ibid., p. 186.
138 Ibid., p. 187.
139 Ibid., p. 189.
140 Ibid., p. 190.
141 Ibid., p. 193.
142 Ibid., p. 187.
143 Ibid., p. 68.
144 Ibid., p. 166.
145 Ibid., p. 160.
146 Ibid., p. 164.
147 Ibid., p. 171.
148 Ibid., p. 173.
149 Ibid., p. 182. See also John Ruskin, Modern Painters, “Of the Pathetic
Fallacy,” 3, Pt. 4, § 8. (1856).
150 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, p. 182.
151 Ibid., p. 176.
152 Ibid., p. 190.
153 Ibid., p. 339.
154 Ibid., p. 340.
155 Ibid.
156 Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1999), pp. 646, 669. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the
Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. xxii.
157 Robert Nisbet, History and the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. ix.
158 E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 38,
43.
159 Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, p. 4.
160 Ibid.
161 Bloom, Agon, p. 215.
162 Ibid., p. 216.
163 Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, pp. 341–2.
164 Ibid., p. 343.
165 Ibid., p. 214.
166 Ibid.
167 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 164.
168 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 251.
169 Ibid.
170 Ibid., p. 243.
171 Ibid., p. 242.
172 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 63.
173 Ibid., p. 47.
174 Ibid., p. 48.
175 Ibid.
176 Ibid., p. 51.
177 Ibid., p. 52.
178 Ibid., p. 53.
179 Ibid., p. 54.
180 Ibid., p. 55.
181 Ibid., p. 57.
182 Ibid., p. 60.
183 Ibid., p. 64.
184 Ibid., pp. 50–1.
185 Ibid., p. 56.
186 Ibid., p. 70.
187 Ibid.
188 Bloom, Agon, p. 146.
189 Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, pp. 67, 70.
190 Ibid., pp. 72–3.
191 Ibid., p. 73.
192 Ibid., p. 74.
193 Ibid., p. 99.
194 Ibid., p. 69.
195 Ibid., p. 80.
196 Ibid., pp. 102, 109.
197 Ibid., p. 100.
198 Bloom, Agon, p. 148.
199 Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, p. 1.
200 Ibid., pp. 2–3.
201 Ibid., p. 51.
202 Ibid., pp. 51–2.
203 Ibid., p. 56.
204 Ibid., pp. 61–5.
205 Ibid., p. 76.
206 Ibid., p. 70.
207 Ibid., p. 74.
208 Ibid., p. 95.
209 Ibid., p. 98.
210 Ibid., p. 103.
211 Ibid., p. 120.
212 Ibid., p. 130.
213 Wallace Stevens, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (London: Faber,
1984).
214 Ibid., p. 132.
215 Ibid., p. 147.
216 Ibid., p. 163.
217 Ibid., p. 168.
218 Ibid., p. 170.
219 Ibid., p. 175.
220 Ibid., p. 194.
221 Ibid., pp. 189–90.
222 Ibid., p. 204.
223 Ibid., p. 208.
224 Ibid., p. 258.
225 Ibid., p. 266.
226 Ibid., p. 270.
227 Ibid., p. 280.
228 Ibid.
229 Ibid., p. 281.
230 Ibid., pp. 282–3.
231 Ibid., p. 306.
232 Ibid., p. 307.
233 Ibid., p. 328.
234 Ibid., p. 335.
235 Ibid., p. 336.
236 Ibid., p. 346.
237 Ibid., p. 350.
238 Ibid., Bloom, p. 381.
239 Bloom, Agon, p. 331.
240 Ibid., p. 332.
241 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, pp. 213–14.
242 Bloom, Agon, p. 9.
243 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 221.
244 Ibid., p. 214.
245 Ibid.
246 Bloom, Agon, p. 6.
247 Ibid., p. 7.
248 Ibid.
249 Ibid., p. 8.
250 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, p. 212.
251 Tertullian, The Writings of Tertullian II: Ante Nicene Christian Library
Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to AD 325 Part
Fifteen, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Whitefish:
Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 124.
252 Bloom, Agon, p. 17.
253 Ibid., p. 80.
254 Ibid., pp. 104–5.
255 Ibid., p. 125.
256 Ibid., p. 127.
257 Ibid., p. 93.
258 Ibid.
259 Ibid., p. 62.
260 Ibid., p. 114.
261 Ibid., p. 52.
262 Ibid., p. 74.
263 Ibid., pp. 63–4.
264 Ibid., p. 57.
265 Ibid., pp. 30–2.
266 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 240.
267 Ibid., p. 239.
268 Bloom, Agon, pp. 119–120.
269 Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 183.
270 Bloom, Agon, p. 121.
271 Ibid., p. 178.
272 Ibid., p. 150.
273 Ibid., p. 149.
274 Ibid., pp. 155–6.
275 Ibid., p. 67.
276 Ibid., p. 154.
277 Ibid., p. 170.
278 Ibid., p. 165.
279 Bloom, Omens of the Millennium, pp. 48–9.
280 Ibid., p. 49.
281 Bloom, Agon, p. 186.
282 Ibid., p. 195.
283 Ibid., p. 194.
284 Ibid., p. 189.
285 R. W. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures (New York:
The Library of America, 1983), p. 119.
286 George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Barbarism (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), p. 198. Quoted from The
Poetical Works of Robert Browning, XV Vols., ed. Ian Jack (Oxford:
Clarendon, 2000), IV, pp. 323–4.
287 Ibid., p. 26.
288 Ibid.
289 Ibid., p. 29.
290 Elias Hicks, “A Declaration,” &c., published by order of the Yearly
Meeting of “Orthodox Friends,” held in Phila., in the year 1828.
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013].
291 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 164–5.
292 Elias Hicks, Letters of E. Hicks (New York, 1834), p. 213.
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013].
293 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, p. 395.
294 Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Whitman (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 2006), p. 2.
295 Ibid., p. 3.
296 P. J. Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The
Transatlantic ‘light of all our day’ (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2005), p. 211.
297 Elias Hicks, The Letters of Elias Hicks (New York, 1834), p. 25.
http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/hicks.pdf [Accessed 14 July 2013].
298 Harold Bloom, “Introduction to Walt Whitman: Selected Poems,” in
Walt Whitman: Selected Poems, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: The
 Library of America, 2003), p. xx.
299 Harold Bloom, The Best of Poems of the English Language: From
Chaucer through Robert Frost (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp.
23–4.
300 Bloom, Genius, p. 307.
301 Ibid., pp. 307–8.
302 Ibid., p. 308.
303 Ibid., p. 309.
304 Ibid., p. 310.
305 Ibid.
306 Ibid., pp. 312–13.
307 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 35.
308 Ibid., p. 21.
309 Ibid., p. 22.
310 Ibid., p. 52.
311 Ibid., p. 22.
312 Ibid., p. 24.
313 Ibid., p. 25.
314 Ibid.
315 Ibid., p. 26.
316 Ibid., p. 52.
317 Ibid.
318 Ibid., pp. 51–2.
319 Ibid., p. 27.
320 Ibid.
321 Ibid.
322 Ibid., p. 29.
323 Ibid., p. 31.
324 Ibid., p. 32.
325 Ibid., p. 38.
326 Ibid., p. 39.
327 Ibid., p. 48.
328 Ibid., p. 49.
329 Ibid., p. 63.
330 Ibid., p. 191.
331 Ibid., p. 83.
332 Ibid., p. 105.
333 Ibid., pp. 84, 107.
334 Harold Bloom, “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthough?,”
New York Times (12 November 2011), no page number.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-
be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0 [Accessed 24
May 2013].
335 Bloom, The American Religion, p. 107.
336 Ibid., p. 114.
337 Ibid., p. 115.
338 Ibid., p. 128.
339 Ibid., p. 116.
340 Ibid., p. 265.
341 Ibid., p. 13.
342 Ibid., p. 265.
343 Ibid., p. 271.
344 Ibid., p. 265.
345 Ibid., p. 199.
346 Ibid., p. 202.
347 Ibid., p. 204.
348 Ibid.
349 Ibid., p. 205.
350 Ibid., p. 208.
351 Ibid., p. 213.
352 Ibid., p. 211.
353 Ibid., p. 221.
354 Ibid., p. 230.
355 Ibid., p. 233.
356 Ibid., p. 263.
357 Ibid., p. 43.
358 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 415.
359 Ibid., p. xviii.
360 Ibid.
361 Ibid., p. 726.
362 Ibid., p. 272.
363 Ibid., pp. 271–2.
364 Ibid., p. 272.
365 Ibid., p. 273.
366 Ibid., p. 277.
367 Ibid., p. 278.
368 Ibid., p. 296.
369 Ibid., p. 286.
370 Ibid., p. 383.
371 Ibid., p. 385.
372 Ibid., p. 387.
373 Ibid., p. 389.
374 Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths, p. 54.
375 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 394.
376 Ibid., p. 395.
377 Ibid., p. 400.
378 Ibid., p. 401.
379 Ibid., p. 722.
380 Bloom, Genius, p. 7.
381 Ibid., p. xi.
382 Ibid., p. xviii.
383 Ibid.
384 Ibid., p. 2.
385 Ibid., p. 3.
386 Ibid., p. 246.
387 Ibid., p. 247.
388 Ibid., p. 135.
389 Ibid., p. 137.
390 Ibid., p. 140.
391 Ibid., p. 141.
392 Ibid.
393 Ibid., p. 140.
394 Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh, p. 174.
395 Bloom, Genius, p. 142.
396 Ibid.
397 Ibid.
398 Ibid., p. 136.
399 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, pp. 453, 459, 463.
400 Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose,
p. 834.
401 Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays & Lectures, pp. 386–7, 394.
402 Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language, p. 550.
403 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 38.
404 Ibid., p. 52.
405 Ibid., pp. 38, 51.
406 Ibid., p. 48.
407 Ibid., p. 38.
408 Ibid., p. 48.
409 Ibid., p. 147.
410 Ibid., pp. 136, 147.
411 Ibid., p. 140.
412 Ibid., p. 152.
413 Ibid., p. 146.
414 Ibid., p. 200.
415 Ibid., pp. 227, 229.
416 Bloom, Genius, p. 85.
417 Ibid., p. 86.
418 Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, pp. 161–3.
419 Bloom, Genius, p. 129.
420 Ibid., pp. 22, 24.
421 Ibid., p. 24.
422 Ibid., p. 29.
423 Ibid.
424 Ibid., p. 49.
425 Ibid., pp. 49, 51.
426 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xliv.
427 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 278.
428 Ibid., p. 191.
429 Ibid., p. 175.
430 Ibid., p. 282.
431 Eric Hobsbawm, “The Myth of the Cowboy,” Guardian (20 March
2013). http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/20/myth-of-the-
cowboy [Accessed 28 May 2013].
432 Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking, p. 185.
433 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 48.
434 Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 288.
435 Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, p. 86.
436 Bloom, Shakespeare, p. 294.
437 Ibid.
 Index

Abrams, M. H. 24, 35, 57–8, 69–71, 86, 99–100, 150–1, 157

Adam Kadmon 39–40, 104, 106, 183, 186
Akiba, Joseph 7, 25–6, 101–2, 126, 130, 198
Allen, Graham 15, 23–4, 27, 29–30, 74, 93, 108, 149
Alter, Robert 132
Arnold, Matthew 27, 57, 121
Ashbery, John 124, 171
Auden, W. H. 90–1, 151, 161, 205
Auerbach, Eric 35, 85
Augustine 13, 17, 215–16
Austen, Jane 92, 150
Austin, J. L. 63–4

Bacon, Francis 23, 215

Bate, Jonathan 44, 61
Bate, W. J. 44, 109
Bercovitch, Sacvan 150, 188, 216
Bielik-Robson, Agata 72, 76
Blake, William 1–2, 8, 11, 13, 16, 22–4, 31, 38–46, 62, 69, 77, 79, 87, 91,
102–11, 117–18, 124, 126, 131–2, 136–7, 142, 146–8, 152–61, 165,
168–70, 179, 181, 193, 195–6, 199, 202, 205
Bloom, Harold
Agon 145, 178–86
The American Religion 2, 4, 8, 31, 145, 148, 194–202
American Religious Poems 4, 31
Anatomy of Influence 40, 42, 69, 167
The Anxiety of Influence 2–4, 6, 8, 15, 19, 21–2, 24, 29–31, 41–51, 53,
69, 72–3, 75, 77, 108–9
 Blake’s Apocalypse 8, 106–7, 109, 155–8
The Book of J 2, 4, 8, 20, 73, 124, 129–37
The Breaking of the Vessels 29, 43
Deconstruction and Criticism 53, 68, 70, 76, 81, 109
Figures of Capable Imagination 43, 120–3, 168–72
Genius 6, 10, 13, 193, 207–10, 215–16
How to Read and Why 89, 123, 126
Jesus and Yahweh 8, 138–43
Kabbalah and Criticism 6, 8, 29, 36, 56, 58, 67, 100, 113–18, 138
A Map of Misreading 8, 29, 42, 45, 53, 63, 73–5, 111–13
Omens of Millennium 10–11, 13, 17, 138, 186
Poetics of Influence 2, 5, 13, 27, 120–4
Poetry and Repression 7, 17, 32, 46, 53, 61–2, 66, 71, 118–20, 179
The Ringers in the Tower 8, 22, 65, 79, 86, 108, 154–5, 161–8
Ruin the Sacred Truths 1, 106, 124–9, 152, 178
The Shadow of a Great Rock 15, 22, 149
Shakespeare 8, 90, 145, 202–7
Shelley’s Mythmaking 8, 47, 103–7, 152
The Visionary Company 8, 39, 41, 86, 106, 151–4, 156, 159, 202
Wallace Stevens 24, 74, 172–8
The Western Canon 5, 8, 27–8, 35, 76, 83, 88–92, 95
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found 213–15, 218
Yeats 8, 107–8, 159–63
Boman, Thorleif 63, 119
Bornstein, George 47–8, 50, 160
Browning, Robert 90–1, 107, 151, 159–60, 163, 165, 187
Buber, Martin 22, 24, 97, 103–5
Burke, Kenneth 41, 68, 95, 203
Byron, George 86, 151, 153, 155, 170, 182

Calvin, John 2, 4, 101, 109, 126, 147, 169, 188, 198

Carlyle, Thomas 14, 150, 185
Celan, Paul 15–16, 123
Cervantes, Miguel 95, 218
Chaucer, Geoffrey 57, 203, 205, 207
Coleridge, S. T. 3, 14, 21–2, 31, 36–7, 40, 45–7, 50, 61–2, 77, 87, 93, 106,
109, 118, 125, 133, 150, 152–3, 155, 159, 167, 171–2, 176–7, 207,
215
Cordovero, Moses 114, 117–19
Covering Cherub 2–3, 42, 48, 50, 63, 79, 105, 107–11, 124, 128, 154
Crane, Hart 11, 13, 122, 124, 159–60
Curtius, E. R. 37, 111

Dante 7, 13, 24, 38, 85–6, 124

de Bolla, Peter 66–7, 76
de Leon, Moses 111, 115
de Man, Paul xiv, 19, 35, 37, 53–4, 57, 64, 69–81, 94
De Quincey, Thomas 61, 83, 167
Derrida, Jacques xiv, 35, 43, 46, 53–69, 78–81, 83, 115–16, 143
Dodds, E. R. 49, 180
Dryden, John 44, 90, 151

Eagleton, Terry 77, 94–5

Eliot, T. S. 13, 35, 37–8, 44, 83, 151, 154, 161
Emerson, R. W. 1, 6, 11–12, 18, 31, 40, 44, 50, 91, 100, 118–20, 124–5,
132, 140, 145, 147–8, 150–1, 168–74, 178–9, 184–93, 195, 199, 208,
211–12, 217
Empedocles 11, 170, 180, 186
Ezekiel 2, 15, 62, 105, 108, 110, 149, 157
Ezra the Scribe 130–1

Finkelstein, Norman 15–16

Fite, David 8, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26–7, 157, 168
Fletcher, Angus 16, 48, 49, 54, 73, 183
Foucault, Michel 89–90, 94
Fox, George 148–9, 188–9
Franklin, Benjamin 158
Freud, Anna 109, 119
Freud, Sigmund 19, 24–5, 42–51, 56, 59, 61–2, 64, 66–7, 76, 97, 101, 108–
11, 113–14, 118, 121–8, 141–2, 153–4, 156, 171, 180, 182–3, 187
Frye, Northrop 26–7, 35, 38–40, 42–3, 49, 60, 133, 155, 202

Gibbon, Edward 140, 158

Gilgamesh 24–6, 125
Ginsberg, Allen 122, 167–8
Gramsci, Antonio 27, 95
Greenblatt, Stephen 84–5, 88–94, 99

Hallam, Arthur 160, 164

Harap, Louis 98, 101
Hartman, Geoffrey 4, 35, 42, 45, 57, 79, 81, 99
Heidegger, Martin 15, 17, 19–20, 64, 77–8, 123–5
Heraclitus 11, 33, 162, 184
Hicks, Elias 149, 187–8, 191, 213
Hobsbawm, Eric 78, 88, 218
Hollander, John 14, 122, 160
Homer 16, 85, 124, 180, 190, 213–14, 218

Idel, Moshe 138, 186

Isaiah 106, 114, 139, 142, 149, 156–7

Jacob 22, 24, 76, 100, 106, 136, 157

Jakobson, Roman 42, 64, 71
James, Henry 10, 119, 150
James, William 195
Jameson, Frederic 92
Jeremiah 124–7
Jesus Christ 7, 13, 16, 24, 26–7, 41, 48–9, 51, 68–9, 86, 94, 119, 126, 130,
132, 138–42, 146–9, 156, 180, 187–202, 205, 207, 209–16
Job 40–1, 108, 124, 126, 133, 156
John 16, 26, 37, 48, 68, 119, 138–9, 141, 148, 150, 189–91, 194, 197, 209–
10, 213
Johnson, Barbara 53, 80
Johnson, Samuel 1, 45, 109, 151, 172, 207
Jonas, Hans 1, 4–5, 8, 10–12, 15–20, 28–9, 100, 116, 123, 179–80, 184, 208
J-Writer 4, 17, 24–6, 28, 73, 97, 101, 103, 119, 122, 124–6, 129–43, 198,
213

Kafka, Franz 24, 121–2, 124, 126–9, 132, 137

Keats, John 11, 31, 47, 74, 86, 107, 151, 153, 155, 163, 172–4, 207
Kennedy, Paul 166
Kermode, Frank 64
Kierkegaard, Søren 19, 25, 44, 79, 126, 169, 200

Lacan, Jacques 47, 62, 66–7

Layton, Bentley 5
Leavis, F. R. 84
Lentricchia, Frank 15, 29–31
Levinson, Marjorie 83–4
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 55, 60
Lewis, C. S. 13, 151
Locke, John 23, 59, 70
Longinus 38, 99, 208
Lucretius 42, 46
Luria, Isaac 5, 8, 29, 62, 112–13, 115–17, 143, 157
Luther, Martin 108, 146, 148–9, 207, 210

McCarthy, Cormac 217

McGann, Jerome 84, 86–8, 94, 154
Maimonides, Mosheh 67, 97, 101, 129–30
Marlowe, Christopher 41, 90, 189, 204–7, 217
Marx, Karl 27, 84, 87–9, 94–5, 216
Melville, Herman 49, 177, 192–3
Miller, J. H. 35, 53, 57, 59, 71
Miller, Perry 147, 150
Milton, John 2, 3, 5, 21–4, 31–2, 37–46, 62–3, 67–8, 74, 102, 106–9, 112,
124, 126, 133, 147–8, 151–7, 159, 163, 181, 183, 192, 200, 216–17
Montaigne, Michel 90, 206–7, 210, 214–15
Moses 26, 63, 67–8, 86, 100, 104, 107, 127, 130–1, 133–41, 143, 211
Moynihan, Robert 72, 99
Mullins, Edgar 200–1

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 19–20, 38, 44, 47, 50, 54, 60, 62–3, 67, 70–1, 73,
75–7, 94, 98, 100, 109, 115, 118, 123, 141, 169–70, 175, 179, 184–5,
201–2, 206, 209–10, 218
Norris, Christopher 65, 78

Orpheus 39, 170–1, 180, 186

Ozick, Cynthia 6–9, 25, 30

Parrish, Timothy 7, 8
Pater, Walter 46, 49–50, 117, 161–6, 169, 178
Paul 3, 13, 26, 42, 48, 69, 77, 86, 100, 103, 107, 109–10, 138–9, 145–6,
150, 153, 180, 188–90, 192, 195, 209–11, 213, 215–17
Philo of Alexandria 37, 133, 135
Pinsker, Sansford 98
Plath, Sylvia 92–3
Plato 9, 16, 25, 38, 54–6, 60, 63, 66, 70, 103, 113–14, 116, 121, 145, 149,
162, 179–80, 205–6, 213–14, 216, 218
Plotinus 113–14, 216
Pope, Alexander 44, 57, 146, 151
Popper, Karl 87
Pottle, Frederick 99
Preyer, Robert 39–40

Ransom, J. C. 37
Retamar, R. F. 91
Richards, I. A. 37
Richardson, Samuel 150
Ricks, Christopher 44, 92
Rieff, Philip 109–10
Robinson, Lillian 93
Rousseau, J. J. 55, 80–1
Ruskin, John 50, 163, 165–6, 173
Said, Edward 30
Santayana, George 187, 197
Satan 3, 21, 32, 40–1, 46, 91, 105–6, 109, 113, 126, 130, 135, 152, 154–5,
158, 181, 192, 200, 216–17
Scholem, Gershom 56, 97, 101–3, 111, 113–14, 118, 128–9, 138, 143
Schopenhauer, Arthur 120, 174, 182
Shakespeare, William 2, 7, 24, 31–2, 36–8, 41, 45, 49, 72, 86, 88–92, 94,
111, 119, 124–5, 127, 132, 135, 139, 145, 163, 165, 178, 182, 191,
196, 202–8, 210, 213, 215–18
Shelley, P. B. 8, 11, 31, 38, 47–8, 50, 79, 86, 104–5, 107–8, 151, 153–5,
159–60, 165, 172–4, 177–8, 184, 191, 214
Smith, Joseph 198–200
Socrates 54–5, 70, 73, 77, 195, 205, 213–14, 216
Soper, Kate 78
Spengler, Oswald 29
Spenser, Edmund 45, 63, 67, 151, 160
Spivak, G. C. 64
Stevens, Wallace 2–3, 31, 45, 50–1, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 145, 151, 159–
60, 163, 165, 168, 171–8, 191, 216–17
Swift, Jonathon 27, 49, 83, 169

Tennyson, Alfred 38, 163–4

Tertullian 77, 181
Trilling, Lionel 108, 121, 182
Tyndale, William 101, 149, 192, 207, 210

Valentinus 5–6, 8, 17, 20, 28, 102, 114, 123, 180–1, 183
Vico, Giambattista 6–7, 49, 62, 75, 182
Virgil 85–6, 124, 216

Weber, Max 3, 147

Weiskel, Thomas 22
Whitman, Walt 1, 3–4, 7, 16, 18, 31, 38, 46–9, 51, 63–5, 110, 118–20, 122,
124, 127, 143–5, 148–9, 168, 171–4, 176–8, 186–96, 199, 207, 210–
15
Wilde, Oscar 43, 57, 161–2, 189, 208
Williams, Raymond 84
Wimsatt, W. K. 37, 99
Winters, Yvor 169
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 75, 204
Wordsworth, William 3–4, 11–12, 14, 18, 21–5, 28, 31, 45–6, 50, 62, 74,
84, 87, 102, 104–8, 119, 124–6, 136, 143, 147, 150–5, 159–60, 162–
6, 170–3, 176–7, 186, 190, 211, 215

Yahweh 10, 13–18, 20, 22–7, 32, 40, 58, 61, 63, 68, 72–3, 76, 104–5, 118–
19, 123, 125–44, 175–6, 186, 209
Yeats 2, 14, 31–3, 46–8, 50, 75, 77, 80, 86, 107–8, 111, 145, 151, 159–63,
165, 167, 169, 173, 179–81
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© Alistair Heys, 2014

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