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=**HAROLD BLOOM**= == = = Harold Bloom is an aesthetic critic, meaning that he believes in the aesthetic, or artistic value of a work, rather than the politics or social factors behind it. He believed in the purity of the Romantic era literary work and sought to provide a standard for determining good versus bad writers.

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 * Biography:** Harold Bloom was born into a Russian Jewish immigrant family of New York in July of 1930. He completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University during which he developed a passion for Romantic literature, particularly Percy Shelley. This interest led him to complete a dissertation about Shelley’s works which earned him a Ph. D. at Yale. He has been a Humanities professor at Yale since the late 1950s. He is a celebrated aesthetics literary critic and has written countless books, articles, reviews, and introductions.

According to a biography by Jan Harris, although he frequently practiced close readings in his analysis of poetry and other work, Bloom’s notoriety began with his frequent challenges of New Critical theory, due in part to its rejection of the legitimacy of Romantic works. Bloom felt that imagination should be the absolute priority of writers and felt that New Criticism ignored this important aspect. Bloom’s rejection of many = = literary criticism genres made him quite a controversial figure. Both Harris’ and Joseph Rosenblum and Joshua Stein’s biographies delineate his controversial beliefs. Among them were:
 * Overview:**

Poets developed literature due to the influence of earlier literary traditions and he rejected the view that literary works had meaning outside their relation to other works. Because of his belief in this influence, he divided writers into a weak and a strong category. Authors whose works were considered original of those predating it were considered strong, while those that Bloom considered were merely derivative of other works, were considered weak. This was controversial because he considered that some highly respected authors, such as T.S. Elliot, were weak.
 * WEAK/STRONG WRITERS **

Bloom felt that there were several ways writers could develop literature original of its predecessors. He developed a vocabulary to describe these strategies, which included: //Clinamen- swerving to avoid the predecessor;// //Tessera- claiming to complete what the predecessor left unfinished;// //kenosis- insisting on discontinuity with the predecessor to stress one’s own originality;// //daemonization-finding something in the predecessor’s work that the earlier writer supposedly did not know was there// //askesis- rejecting the predecessor; and// //apophrodes- the return of the dead — making the modern writer the precursor rather than the follower (Harris).// ==
 * DEVELOPED TERMS THAT BLOOM FELT DESCRIBED STRATEGIES FOR BECOMING A STRONG WRITER **

= = = = Bloom’s most well-known work is his book //The Western Canon// in which he defends the idea of a canon, or a representative selection, of Western literary works. In it he listed 26 writers that he felt were central to Western literature. Among them were Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Austen, Whitman, Dickens, Tolstoy, Kafka, Woolf, and many others. Bloom = = felt that Shakespeare was the central element to the Western canon and that all other writers must be seen as writing in competition with him. He was also highly critical of = = = = what he called “The School of Resentment” which included feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, and Semioticans. = = = = = = Because of his controversial ideas, Bloom had many critics. According to the biography by Joseph Rosenblum and Joshua Stein, many said that his “Western Canon” was made up of too many “white dead males” (3) and it discounted many writers and their works that had high literary value and relevancy in real society. His division of writers as strong and weak was seen as arbitrary and elitist, especially considering his rejection of writers like Elliot. As mentioned in Alistair Hayes’ “The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom” some prize his teachings of the value of aesthetics in poetry and others consider that he is a “ a peerless reader of Romantic poetry, an almost lost art in today's academy” (1). Perhaps one of his most controversial comments was when he stated that writing and evaluating poetry is becoming more political and less dependent on the works aesthetic quality. He wrote in the Boston Review that "What matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the poet. . . . Our modish multiculturalism is a lie, a mask for mediocrity, and for the thought-control academic police, the Gestapo of our campuses." According to an article in “The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education” This prompted several of his academic contemporaries to makes remarks such as calling him a “racist,” a “crotchety elitist,” and “locked in the past” (Giovanni, Aubert, Hernton, Moore = = 1).
 * WESTERN CANON **
 * Criticism:**

In his work, The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens__, Bloom argues that Whitman and Stevens, and Hart Crane all wrote works derivative of Emerson’s //Journals// and sought to follow in Emerson’s tradition. He cites as evidence their similar Nature themes. With something as inspiring and universal as nature, it is difficult to state that it its inspirational qualities were all encompassed in the mind of Emerson and that anyone seeking to incorporate it in their own literature is guilty of being unoriginal or seeking to be following in another author’s footsteps.
 * Review:**

WORKS CITED Aubert, Alvin and Nikki Giovanni, Calvin Hernton, Leonard D. Moore. “Harold Bloom's Charge That Multiculturalism in American Poetry is a Mask for Mediocrity.” //The Journal of Blacks in Higher// Education 21 (1998): 111-113. Print Bloom, Harold. “The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stephens.” //The Massachusets Review// 7.1 (1966): 23-42. Print. Harris, Jan. “Bloom, Harold, 1930-.” //Literature Online Biography//. Literature Online. n.d. Web. 21 April 2011. Heys, Alistair. “The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom.” //The Byron Journal// 38.1 (2010): 99. Print. Rosenblum, Joseph ; Stein, Joshua. “Harold Bloom.” //Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised// //Edition// (2003): 1-2. Web. 21 April, 2011.