For the epigraph of his book “Shakespeare,” Bloom chose a quotation from Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols” that is an extraordinary statement to place at the beginning of a book about Shakespeare, or, indeed, about any sort of literature: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. It is the lyric urge and the strife of poetic parturition that he values, more than the poem itself. Bloom likes his poems bloody, trailing ruptured veins and muscles torn in struggle. He reads poems as though reliving their creation. In fact, it’s not just historicizing that Bloom rejects-it’s pastness per se. Anything that time has made foreign is a period piece, bric-a-brac. The truth is, Bloom has no interest in history as such-no interest, that is, in the difference between one time and another-because to him all poetry that is valuable is timeless. In his view, the fact that Shakespeare lived in sixteenth-century England does no credit to the time or the place, because Shakespeare’s genius was sui generis-it emerged out of nowhere. Unlike the cultural conservatives with whom he is often (wrongly) grouped, he does not long for a more genteel or simpler era. But it would not be right to say that Bloom is nostalgic for the past. Bloom loves Emerson and Whitman but he doesn’t believe them: to him, belatedness is now a permanent condition of man, and there can be no overcoming it-no return, even in America, to an original fullness or freshness or purity of spirit. In his view, Western literature reached its apogee in Shakespeare, and it has been downhill ever since. In his misery, he is magnificent.īloom is a prophet of decline. “But happiness seemed a trivial quality compared to whatever Harold was.” Bloom is not low so much as over the top. “He did not seem happy,” a former student says. Bloom, in his lyric sadness, his grandiloquent fatigue, and his messianic loneliness, is a great soul.

And the second is to believe that miserable is a bad thing to be. One is to suppose that mere history-a change of scene-can alter a spirit. And I think there is in him a lurking sense that when the true messiah comes he will be very like Harold.”īut to think this way is to make two mistakes. “There’s always a pack of people sitting around him to see if any bread or fishes are going to be handed out. “He’s a wandering Jewish scholar from the first century,” Sir Frank Kermode, the English literary critic, says. One can picture him a feverish poet in nineteenth-century Russia, growing dotty and millennial like the elder Tolstoy. It is so easy, after all, to imagine him gleefully roistering through taverns like his Shakespearean hero, Falstaff, constructing a tottering folly of puns or denouncing Aristotelian aesthetics at some bacchanal in Rome (although the thought of Bloom in tights or a toga is alarming). It is tempting to say that Harold Bloom is a man marooned in the wrong place and time, and that living out his late years in twenty-first-century America is what’s making him miserable.

Harold bloom