LITERARY LOVE

1 5 R L I T E R A R Y L O V E H A R O L D B L O O M When I was very young, freedom beckoned through the poets I first loved: Hart Crane, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, John Milton, and above all William Shakespeare in Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth , and Antony and Cleopatra. The sense of freedom they conferred liberated me into a primal exuberance. If women and men initially become poets by a Second Birth, my own sense of being twice-born made me an incipient critic. I do not recall reading any literary criticism, as opposed to literary biography, until I was an undergraduate. At seventeen I purchased Northrop Frye’s study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry , soon after its publication. What Hart Crane was to me at ten, Frye became at seventeen, an overwhelming experience. Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, 11 July 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, ‘‘The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.’’ Six years later, that had evolved into The Anxiety of Influence, a book Frye rightly rejected from his Christian Platonist stance. Now, in my eightieth year, I would not have the patience to reread anything by 1 6 B L O O M Y Frye but I possess almost all of Hart Crane by memory, recite much of it daily and continue teaching him. I came to value other contemporary critics – Empson and Kenneth Burke particularly – but have now dispensed with reading them also. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Walter Pater, Emerson, Oscar Wilde I go on reading as I do the poets. Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place literary, which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy , politics, or institutionalized religion. At its strongest, Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Sainte-Beuve, Valéry, among others, it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet even to distinguish between literature and life is doubtless misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form. At ten to twelve years of age, I read for the lustres, in Emerson’s phrase. These seemed to memorize themselves in me. Hosts of poets have followed, and the pleasures of possession by memory have sustained me for many decades. If you carry the major British and American poets around with you by internalization, after some years their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns. I was a graduate student writing a doctoral dissertation on Shelley before I began to realize that influence was the inevitable problem for me to solve if I could. Existing accounts of influence seemed to me mere source study, and I became puzzled that nearly every critic I encountered assumed idealistically that literary influence was a benign process. Possibly I overreacted to this, as I was a very emotional young man. It took me from 1953 until the summer of 1967 before my meditation clarified. It was then that I awoke in my state of metaphysical terror and after a dazed breakfast with my wife began to write the dithyrambthateventuallybecameTheAnxietyofInfluence.Ittook about three days to complete, and it baΔed me as I brooded. What was it? I could recognize that I had been thinking it a long time, not always consciously. It is a banal truism that the cultural present both derives from and reacts against anteriority. Twenty-first century America is now in a state of decline. 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 re- L I T E R A R Y L O V E 1 7 R traced. We have approached bankruptcy, fought wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. Our troops...