Harold Bloom, a man of letters in the old style and an authentic heir to the great Romantic writers, has died aged 89. He affected me deeply. He has importan for Buddhists and others pursuing a spiritual life in the modern world
The sadness I feel at learning of the death, aged 89, of the great literary critic Harold Bloom, is matched by a disbelief that he was living at all; that is, living in a modern world to which he seemed so alien. I had a similar feeling when Sangharakshita died a year ago. Both men had their faults, no doubt, but they absorbed themselves so completely in the greatest works of literature (and, in Sangharakshita’s case, Buddhism), and absorbed those great works into themselves so fully, that each of them became joined to those works – at least in my mind. Their own books, and both men wrote a great many, open doorway fo me to the worlds those works disclose.
I won’t bother you with an account of Bloom’s life and career as many such pieces are being published. My reflections are more personal. I met Bloom once properly, and once briefly. The proper meeting was at his house in New Haven, close to Yale University where he was Sterling Professor of Humanities. As editor of Dharma Life magazine and I had realised I had he chance to meet and interview just about anyone I wished who I thought was relevant to western Buddhists. Bloom was top of my list, and I travelled to the US, Dhammarati joining me to take the photos, largely for the sake of meeting him.
I read some of Bloom’s work on the Romantic poets, from the early part of his career, when I was studying literature at university, and recognised a quality which I found in only a few other critics (I would include Wilson Knight, Helen Vendler, Northrop Frye and a few others) that chimed with a question I was asking in the course of my studies. I loved the literature I was reading, to the extent that I could absorb it, but what was I trying to achieve through studying it? I learned how to analyse a novel, a play or especially a poem; but what had I added when the poem already said exactly what it wanted to say in exactly the right words? What was the value of translating a poetic or dramatic way of thinking into an analytic one?
I learned to see literary works as milestones in intellectual and cultural history, to interpret them through a framework such as Freudian psychoanalysis and to deconstruct a poem’s efforts create meaning by revealing the hidden assumptions it concealed or expressed. But was the result more valuable than the original, or did the analysis simply reduce the poem to a lesser mode of thought?
Bloom’s project as a critic is showing readers how they might approach literature in the belief that they have something to learn from it at the deepest levels of experience and that great literature is better able to challenge our intellectual frameworks than the other way around. For example, Bloom disputes Freud’s belief that Hamlet had an Oedipus complex by suggesting that Freud had a Hamlet complex. If this last sentence is lost on you, o if you understand it but think it is nonsense, then Bloom might not be your man. He was, nonetheless, the great champion of an approach to reading and studying literature that starts with a faith that a work of art, if it has real quality, opens up fresh ways of thinking, feeling and experiencing ourselves. We turn to art in other words, to understand ourselves in terms that come from art, and we find there a language that is not reducible to concepts, however many it many contain, and possesses a depth and subtlety we cannot find in any other way.
From this perspective, the task of the critic is to raise him or herself to the level of the poem – Pater’s idea of aesthetic criticism hovers behind Bloom’s writing and that of the modern poets he loved best – or at least to engage with and communicate the imaginative energy that animates it. His principal method is to explore the poet’s relation with other poets, the precursors who had mapped out what is possible to think and say in a given genre, challenging the later poet to absorb their lessons at the deepest possible level and then find a way past them.
In my view, Bloom’s best works were written in the 1970s, especially his monographs on Yeats and Wallace Stephens, not the later works which are better known and are easy prey to parody. These books have a revelatory quality, and Bloom’s prose often rises towards the level of his subjects as he traces the imaginative currents that enabled their poetry to come new-minted, even after several hundred years of English poetry, and to be both traditional and modern in a culture where these modes had diverged. He theorised this as ‘the anxiety of influence’, a phrase and concept that have entered the language.
The monographs are subtler than Bloom’s books on the High Romantics which he wrote in the 1960s, though these revolutionised the field. They showed that beyond the emotionality and lyricism of Wordsworth, Coleridge and the rest (which had made them unpopular with TS Eliot and the New Criticism) was a mode of prophecy that is still important. These works have much to commend themselves to Buddhists along with the work of the Romantic poets themselves, which remain the greatest resource for any post-theistic spirituality, including that of western Buddhists. Bloom’s later books expand his scope to the whole of western literature, centring his discussions on Shakespeare, with a particular interest in American literature, with Emerson and Whitman at its head.
I read them as a vast exploration of the spiritual resources the literary tradition can offer all of us, and if we bear this in mind, Bloom’s opposition to Marxist, feminist and New Historical approaches to literature becomes understandable. These are fine if we want to deepen our understanding of society in the light of Marxism, feminism and so on, but doing so will not help us see what we can learn from great works of art, taken on their own terms, regardless of whether their creators were dead, white European males. English departments, on the whole, no longer regard themselves as oases of secular spirituality, and I mourn the change.
Bloom’s idea of the anxiety of influence affected me in many ways: as I think about family relationship, intellectual influences and above all the experience of having my own spiritual teacher in Sangharakshita. As I reflect on his work, the thread of his Romanticism becomes increasingly clear in Sangharakshita’s writings and so do his own anxieties of influence. Most of his serious poetry was written before he was 30, and the decisive influence is Shelley, who he constantly echoes. Sangharakshita escaped that influence by turning from poetry to prose, only to engage a host of Buddhist anxieties, which his writing henceforth vehemently defied.
Bloom’s thinking illuminates the tensions that inevitably arise between the spiritually aspiring student and his or her teacher, who at the same time opens up the territory of spiritual life, defines its contours and populates it with his or her personality. As students or disciples we want to be receptive and to be independent, devoted and yet autonomous, and perhaps it is inevitable that a teacher’s influence starts to feel oppressive (at least for many, if not all of us). Then a teacher’s flaws present a way to evade their influence, but Bloom taught me that rejecting one’s sources of inspiration leads only to weakness. Strength comes from exposing oneself to the strongest influences, loving them deeply, and embracing the tensions that follow, even if this manifests as ambivalence or animosity. This seems to me a more realistic account of teacher-student relations than either the traditional idealisations, or the contemporary debunking.
My discussion with Bloom in New Haven ranged widely, including such questions as the nature of the imagination and the spiritual resources to be found in both literary and religious traditions. As we said goodbye, he took my hand and said ‘Bless you’ and there followed a moment of embarrassment as we felt that what was perhaps meant as an endearment contained a truth. I felt a sense of blessing or benediction that seemed to me a gift of the highest order.
Before and after our meeting I have continued to constantly read Blooms many works and I love them all. Even the bad ones.
Vishvapani’s Dharma Life interview with Harold Bloom https://thebuddhistcentre.com/features/cultures-peak-interview-harold-bloom-vishvapani
