Aldous Huxley traveled with a custom trunk containing the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Huxley knew everything a person should know, and this allowed him to nominate John Milton as the last person who had read everything a person should read. After Milton, Huxley thought, there were just too many books. Harold Bloom was born in 1930, when Huxley was still mixing with Ottoline Morrell, whose guests read everything for her, and the Bloomsbury set, who only read each other’s books. Bloom read a lot, wrote a lot, and talked a lot in the age of Great Books courses and big enrollments. The Yale professor ranged widely, passionately, and sometimes recklessly across literature and the weekend supplements, but specialized in English Romanticism, Freudian theories of literary influence, and the works of Harold Bloom.

In Possessed by Memory, the ruminations that Bloom published before his death in 2019, he relates how, lost in the wood in midlife, he entered psychoanalysis. It didn’t work. His analyst complained that Bloom was using his office to stage a performance. In his later decades, Bloom assumed the role of the Falstaff of Yale’s faculty, a raddled titan neglected and stranded by the change of generations and critical taste. He quoted Oscar Wilde: Criticism, Wilde wrote in 1891, was “the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.”

I cannot see Bloom’s photograph without being possessed by the memory of Zero Mostel as Max Bialystok, the desperate impresario of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers. Bloom had the same tragicomic Jewish mien, lipid and livid; the same frantic operations of charm that tipped female visitors onto the couch; and the same frantic meta-textual dialogue with himself, as though, were his toga not snagged in the machinery of business, the couch he would prefer to recline on was that of Socrates. This is typically Jewish and American, but not uniquely so. Poets are always performers, and Bloom believed that “all criticism is prose poetry.”

Bloom acted out his thoughts and passions as the Victorian performance artists Carlyle, Emerson, Dickens, Twain, and Wilde had done, only in the university, not the theater. Academic criticism rose and fell in the span of Bloom’s eighty-nine years. In 1930, when Bloom was born, T. S. Eliot was the pinstriped eminence of both criticism and poetry. In 1922, Eliot produced The Waste Land and The Criterion, the most influential poem and journal of the century, while holding down a day job at Lloyd’s Bank. In Bloom’s teenage years, Eliot wrote Four Quartets while working for Faber & Faber. The domestication of literature in the university may have kept poets off the streets, but it did little good for literature or criticism. By the time of Bloom’s death in 2019, criticism had mutated into arcane political agitation. The number of English majors in the universities had collapsed. The English department no longer played the role that Emerson created and Bloom assumed, the interlocutor between the sources and inheritors of American civilization. Bloom was stranded with his memories.

The three periods of Bloom’s career align with the zenith, decay, and terminus of the academic arc. Bloom took a classics degree at Cornell, where he also studied Romanticism with M. H. Abrams; Bloom’s studies of Romanticism must be read in the light of Abrams’s Mirror and the Lamp. Bloom completed his Ph.D. on Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1955 at Yale, where would teach for the rest of his life. When Bloom started out, Modernism still set the terms of critical analysis. The New Criticism pursued Eliot’s “theory of impersonality” to its logical ends in close reading and formalism. Bloom’s first books, studies of Shelley, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, rejected this approach as narrow and arid. Shelley’s “visionary company,” Bloom argued, could not be understood without biography. The truth about literature, and life too, lay in the agon of mental strife. His contemporary and fellow Blakean Allen Ginsberg made much the same argument.

While the New Leftists rejected their parents’ liberalism as inhumane and mechanical, Bloom rejected the New Criticism, which insisted, like the new French theorists, that the author was not the poem, and the poem was a linguistic machine. The second phase of Bloom’s career also coincided with a political shift. In the late 1960s, as the counterculture tipped into violence and incoherence, Bloom suffered an extended episode of agon, possibly deriving from his realization that he was not a poet, only poetic. Despite or because of his non-compliance with the analytic regime, this crisis produced a Freudian reading of poetic creation, The Anxiety of Influence, in which poets write not from the old “melancholy” but modern “anxiety,” arising from an Oedipal combat with literary “fathers,” all the way back to Homer and the Bible. Only the “strong” poets survive.

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s,” Los says in Blake’s Milton. Bloom’s academic position strengthened, but anxiety was not far behind. Another system was already arising. Only a year earlier, Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus had dismissed Freudian theory as capitalist psychology. Feminist critics asked why Bloom only wrote about men. Black critics asked why he only wrote about whites. Bloom’s colleague Paul de Man, a Belgian-born post-structuralist who had gotten his start writing pro-Nazi propaganda, became a human spigot for the dissemination of French theory into Yale’s English department. Bloom, who now called himself a “Jewish Gnostic,” retrenched into occult systematizing and fondling his female students.

Bloom’s late-career third phase proved Wilde’s critical maxim and his own theory in The Anxiety of Influence. Derided and despised in the academy, he finally inhabited the Emersonian role of public educator. From 1990 on, he wrote for what was still called the “general reader,” with billowing sincerity, on the subjects that had formed his early reading: the Bible, American religion, the Western canon, and Shakespeare. His death elicited tributes, but as of yet there is no life-and-letters biography. Paul de Man would have called this an aporia, a telling absence.

Unlike its subject, The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom is slim and sometimes modest. But its emotional candor, its commitment to literature, and its giant leaps of associative thought distill a taste of the passion that make Bloom, for all his grandiosity and delusions, a good reader and a frequently brilliant communicator of the joys of imagination. The editor, Heather Cass White, has arranged Bloom’s correspondence with eight writers in overlapping chronological order.

The years of intellectual formation are suggested in exchanges with Alvin Feinman, whose career as poet and professor Bloom would promote; and the critic Northrop Frye, whose interests in Blake, the Bible, and the “anatomy of criticism” prefigured Bloom’s. In the middle years of Romantic revolt, Bloom befriends two professor-poets, his colleague at Yale John Hollander and A. R. Ammons, along with the poet John Ashbery. In the later phase of mysticism and mystification, Bloom discusses angels with the table-tapping poet James Merrill, leaves flattering messages on the answering machine of Henri Cole, and writes flirty letters to the novelist and poet Ursula Le Guin.

In 1958, Bloom writes to Feinman from London. He has abandoned an attempt at “Jewish-history fiction” and a “fragment on Romantic poetry,” but written a third of a “humorous” novel called The Enthusiasts, which features “obsessions taking the place of people.” He plans to write a “queer book” of “parody and variation with thousands (literally) of interlarded plagiarisms from every odd author I’ve read, with caricatures of friends and acquaintances serving as the obsessional skeletons to be fleshed by other men’s vocabularies.” This “pastiche” would resemble Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, only “contemporary, and as a narrative, with fragments of every oddball author the world has known.” It might take a decade, but Bloom hopes he might “create out of the white elephants of literature—something grotesque but colorful.”

By 1960, Bloom has identified Frye as the paternal figure he must wrestle with and overthrow. He praises Frye’s work on Blake but threatens to add something on “demonic epiphany” to Frye’s recent lecture at Yale, which he missed, and Frye’s forthcoming article, which he hasn’t yet read. In 1961, Bloom flatters Frye that his forthcoming book on Blake is “in essence a popular condensation of your work.” By 1963, Bloom is feeling strong enough to make his move. He tells Frye that he has never “been able to understand your admiration, however qualified, for Eliot’s criticism, or your clear appreciation for Eliot’s poetry.” He disagrees with Frye on Blake’s identification of art with apocalypse because he was “educated, before university, mostly by Talmudists.” Frye parries politely. After a break of five years, Bloom test-runs his “anxiety of influence” theory.

“You don’t say much about the general direction or scope of your book,” Frye replies. “If you mean influence in the literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one, I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament.”

This put-down comes toward the end of White’s selections from the Bloom–Frye correspondence. As Bloom cracks up, he turns to the “visionary company” of poets for confirmation of his theories. In 1970, Bloom tells Ammons that academics are “the true scum of the age” and Ammons is the heir to Emerson. Ammons tells Bloom that he is “the greatest critic in the country” and an “archetypal poet.” Bloom signs himself “Harry,” his childhood name, and sends Ammons his only two surviving poems. They are reprinted here. One is called “A Chant of Poetic Influence, or, The Taste of Defeat in the Morning.”

“Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently high,” Ammons writes in his journal in 1973. “I want to be ordinary, casual, a man of this world.” Bloom wanted Ammons to act like a Bloomian visionary. Ammons wanted to take Flaubert’s path: “Be regular and settled in your life, so you can be violent and original in your work.” By then, Bloom has stabilized and lobbed the epistolary baton to Ashbery. The Bloom–Ashbery letters of 1973 to 1975 are cool and professional. Bloom writes an article in praise of Ashbery. Ashbery calls reading it “a moving, exciting and even fearsome experience, rather like seeing one’s portrait by Ingres.” They discuss literary festivals and publishers. “Did my little book on Influence reach you?” Harold asks in 1973. No reply.

Seeking out Merrill, Bloom reverts to performative erudition in the key of Madame Blavatsky. “I have been scribbling at a quasi-occult tract, On the Sublime: Crossings, Auras, and Lustres,” Bloom tells Merrill in 1977, “and have traced my own use of a poetic ‘crossing’ the Kabbalistic Zennor or channels, and [Walter] Benjamin’s aura to the Kabbalistic zelem (a kind of astral body) and Emerson’s lustre to Wdworth’s Neoplatonic version of the astral body of Proclus. I recommend to you one text, the Chaldean Oracles (as rendered by Lewy), (unless they might conflict with the Merrillean Oracles).”

You don’t have to be “educated by Talmudists” to know that the “channels” of the Kabbalistic schema are sefirot. The disembodied halo of Benjamin’s aura does not float about a higher realm like an astral body, should an astral body float at all; it is an associative effect tethered to a reproduction of an artwork. But Bloom is now deep into his Gnostic era. This is a kind of performance art, in which, as with all magic shows, the distracting flourish sets up the big reveal. Bloom’s books are no longer academic monographs. They are a speculative anthropology of poetic origins, like Robert Graves’s White Goddess and Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Merrill believes that his séance poem Book of Ephraim, published in 1976, was communicated by a “personal angel.” Bloom decrees that it cannot be Ephraim, as Merrill believes, but encourages the poet to go deeper into the swamp of speculation. Merrill finds Bloom “a fount of solace,” but by 1979, Merrill is no closer to enlightenment. “As I have become more Gnostic by the day,” Bloom writes, “I brood much on the emergent theology of your visions, but so far they seem to me neither Gnostic nor orthodox. (I read Proust as Gnostic.) But, in our late time, an evasive poetic theology is doubtless best.”

A 1973 letter to John Hollander suggests the biographical agon that drove Bloom’s combat with the past and also traces some of Bloom’s evasions into the mystic. Bloom was not much interested in form or the functions of language. What mattered to him was a poem’s intellectual lineage. Like Huxley and Raphael Patai on religion, Bloom wanted to know how one set of ideas fitted into the recurrence of perennial ideas. But the more he read, the more he felt his limitations. As Cynthia Ozick said, he was an “elevated spirit who would be a poet but could not, so instead became a poem in himself.” The Anxiety of Influence was published only a few years before Tom Wolfe coined the term the “Me Decade.” Bloom was, in a diminished but Emersonian way, a “representative man” of his age.

“I fear, alas, that to write like Nietzsche or Emerson, you have to be N. or E.,” Bloom tells Hollander in 1973, “and I am merely L. Bloom, out of Grodno and Brest-Litovsk, the Rebbe Bloom who got the account wrong—as the Talmud said, contra Blake (who got everything wrong), ‘Where there is too much, something is missing,’ or to quote Judah Asheri, ‘The man who is everywhere is nowhere.’”

Harold Bloom is “L. Bloom,” the fictional “jewgreek” of Joyce’s Ulysses, but also the Rebbe Bloom who thinks Blake got it right and then changed his mind. He dazzles with the authority of the Talmud, but is he really an authority?

The saying “Where there is too much, something is missing” appears nowhere in the Babylonian Talmud. When the rabbis identify something as “missing,” it is not because of Bloom’s surfeit of information but an insufficiency. In Menachot 29b, for instance, the question of whether to correct or abandon a Torah scroll that contains scribal errors leads to rulings that while a scroll with a small number of written errors can be corrected, a scroll with missing letters should not be corrected.

“Where there is too much, something is missing” does, however, appear verbatim in Leo Rosten’s Treasury of Jewish Quotations, which was published in 1972, the year before Bloom wrote to Hollander. It is the first, unattributed quotation in Rosten’s section on “Excess.” The second, also unattributed quotation is “He who is everywhere is nowhere.” Judah Asheri, the thirteenth-century rabbi of Toledo, did not write that. The earliest written source is Seneca the Younger: “Ubique esse est nunquam esse,” in the second of the Epistles to Lucilius. What made Bloom think of Asheri?

Midway down the same page, Rosten gives an epigram attributed to the Testament of Judah Asheri: “Lamps are more often extinguished by too much oil than by too little.” The testament to which Rosten refers is an ethical will. But Asheri wrote something entirely different: “Food to a man is like oil to a lamp; if it have much it shines, if little it is quenched. Yet sooner is the lamp extinguished by redundancy than deficiency of oil.” The sentiment that Rosten attributed to Asheri, that a lamp is more likely to be extinguished by surfeit, probably came from the English intellectual and philanthropist Hannah More: “The constant habit of perusing devout books is so indispensable, that it has been termed the oil of the lamp of prayer. Too much reading, however, and too little meditation, may produce the effect of a lamp inverted; which is extinguished by the very excess of that ailment, whose property is to feed it.”

Bloom added a fake Talmudic gloss to the first of Rosten’s unattributed sayings. He added a fake medieval gloss to the second by adding the name of Asheri, to whom Rosten had erroneously attributed a sentiment from the age of English Romanticism. Hollander did not grow up speaking Yiddish, as Bloom had, but learned it in order to translate Yiddish verse. Bloom is bluffing, just as he is bluffing when he tells Merrill that he reads “Proust as Gnostic” and claims that “the best of Alvin Feinman’s poetry is as good as anything by a twentieth-century American.”

“Deprecate yourself, and you will achieve nothing,” Bloom had advised Feinman in 1963. In Bloom’s last years, the search for reputations to fix becomes pitiful. The answering machine messages to Henri Cole sound like Falstaff in search of Hal. The short exchanges with Ursula Le Guin read like two retirees exhorting each other to stay active. “The winter solstice has unsettled me,” Harold writes in 2017. “But it may be your astonishing poems. They are very different from the earlier ones. You are on the verge of a new power. Again do not answer. I want you to work.”

White’s selection suggests how much fun a full biography would be. Bloom saw himself as a “central man,” and he became a player in the American epic on the stage of the academy in the years of its pomp. His fights for the spotlight, first with the New Critics and then with the French theorists, encapsulate the high end of the long culture war of the twentieth century. As Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom (no relation) saw, the outcome meant the end of the American academy. There will be no more Blooms, Harold or Allan.

Bloom argued for the integrity of life and work, but life doesn’t work like that. If the work is any good, it outlasts the life. The cult of Bloom the man is already an academic memory of a lost age. Of the Romantic reputations that Bloom tried to fix, Shelley has taken a dive, Wordsworth has faded, Keats holds steady, and Byron hangs on by legend alone. Coleridge, a late entrant for the prize for the “man who had read everything,” is neglected. Only Blake, the pioneer of New Age nudism and self-systematizing, surges ever upward. He would have loved social media.

At his worst, Bloom exemplifies two of the worst academic traits, unconsidered conformity and tenured exhibitionism. In The Book of J, published in 1990, Bloom repeats the conventional attribution of the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible to the Yahwist (aka “J”) but makes the absurd case that J was a woman with a Wildean ear for irony. In his Gnostic era, Bloom often has no idea what he is talking about. In his late-career Lyceum circuitry, he knows what he is talking about but cannot resist donning the fustian.

At his best, which is mostly his earliest, Bloom tries to elevate critical understanding to the level of its object. This is what makes him worth reading up to The Anxiety of Influence. Many of Bloom’s misses are as thought-provoking as his hits. In the opening lines of his chapter on Blake in The Visionary Company, published in 1961, he places Blake “in the tradition of Spenser and Milton” and says that Blake, like Wordsworth, “sought to emulate and surpass” Paradise Lost. This is solid literary history, anxious or not. Bloom next asserts two false judgements: that Blake was “not a mystic or an esoteric philosopher” and that he was “not a theist in any orthodox sense.” This leads to the claim that “Blake’s God possesses no powers that differ in kind from the highest human gifts.” Bloom has zigzagged to the crux of Blake’s thought. That he may have Blake’s estimation of God and Man the wrong way around only gives us more to think about.

The same goes for The Anxiety of Influence. The pattern of affiliative subordination, impersonation, and revision that Bloom describes is clearly present in the poems. We might, like Northrop Frye, wonder whether the Freudian prism is the best lens for looking at it, and certainly whether it is the only lens we need. We might feel that Bloom is over-elaborating by contriving a six-step dance of poetic psychology and interposing himself between Freud, the poets, and the reader by giving each step a pretentious Greek name. But we may also find ourselves thinking and reading differently.

In “The Central Man,” an essay on Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens in the collection The Ringers in the Tower, from 1971, Bloom quoted Emerson’s journals:

We shall one day talk with the central man, and see again in the varying play of his features all the features which have characterized our darlings, and stamped themselves in fire on the heart: then, as the discourse rises out of the domestic and personal, and his countenance waxes grave and great, we shall fancy that we talk with Socrates, and behold his countenance: then the discourse changes, and the man, and we see the face and hear the tones of Shakespeare.

The face of the “central man” shifts from Shakespeare to Michelangelo, Dante, and Jesus, until, Emerson writes, “it appears that these great secular personalities were only expressions of his face chasing each other like the rack of clouds. Then all will subside, and I find myself alone. I dreamed and did not know my dreams.”