Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) was an American literary critic and scholar best known for his theory that poets create originality by struggling with influential predecessors.

The Anxiety of Influence: Harold Bloom’s 1973 book arguing that poets achieve originality through revisionary struggles with influential predecessors. This book first set out the theory most closely associated with Bloom.
Clinamen: Bloom’s term for a poet’s corrective swerve from a precursor, as if the precursor’s poem had gone slightly astray. It names the first revisionary move in Bloom’s sequence.
William Shakespeare: The English playwright and poet whose works include Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Bloom treated Shakespeare as the central, unmatched figure of the Western literary canon.
The Western Canon: Harold Bloom’s 1994 book defending a canon of major Western literary works and authors. It carries Bloom’s account of literary value from poetic theory into cultural argument.
The Western canon debate: Public and scholarly disputes over which works belong in the central curriculum of Western literature. Bloom’s defense of canonical works became a prominent intervention in these disputes.
Poetic influence: The ways earlier poetry shapes the language, forms, and ambitions of later poets. Bloom treated influence as an active struggle, not simple imitation.
Tessera: Bloom’s term for completing a precursor’s work by claiming that the precursor’s meaning was incomplete. It shows how a later poet can absorb a predecessor while seeming to surpass them.
Samuel Johnson: The English writer and critic whose works include A Dictionary of the English Language and Lives of the Poets. Bloom’s account of the canon gave Johnson a prominent place among major critics and poets.
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human: Harold Bloom’s 1998 book arguing that Shakespeare transformed how people imagine human character. The book makes Bloom’s exceptional estimate of Shakespeare explicit.
Canon formation: The historical process through which works gain or lose recognized literary status. Bloom’s influential selections drew attention to how literary prestige is established.

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