But besides being a damn good critic, Bloom was/is also a bit weird -- or, using political categories as an analogy, he was an opportunist.
I can see how Anxiety of Influence could jolt many readers out of whatever complacency they felt before reading it. Perhaps that is the reason it had a political impact on Doug?? But it doesn't really hold water: whatever limited validity it might have applies to a very tiny patch of literary history: English poetry from Milton to Stevens.
Carrol
On 6/1/2011 9:07 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Jun 2011 09:23:33 -0400
> Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
>> I kind of adore [Harold Bloom]. Reading the Anxiety
>> of Influence as a sophomore is one of the things that
>> led me out of the Party of the Right
>>
> It's amazing how quirky and sui-generis our pathways are.
>
> If you had asked me to name a writer who could have knocked
> a kid off his right-wing hobbyhorse on the way to Damascus and
> put the fear of Marx in him, Bloom is not somebody I would have
> thought of. On the contrary: all that dreary ranking and canonizing
> and winnowing -- Shakespeare wrote 38 plays, and 24 of them
> are masterpieces -- seem quite Philistine and reactionary
> to me.
>
> But really, there's no telling how a given text will jam
> itself into the unique N-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that constitutes
> an individual mind.
>
> Chalk one up for Bloomie; our Doug was a brand
> for the burning, and the Great Manatee snatched him from the fire.
> Laus digno.
>
> Irrelevantly, it is extraordinary how the mailing-list form
> fosters quarrels. Doug and I started out *agreeing* about
> NPR, if memory serves.
>
>