Obituary: Harold Bloom died on October 14th

AS HE SLUMPED in his chair, listening to some interviewer or student, Harold Bloom could seem a very picture of gloom. His jowly head leaned lower on his hand; his eyes sank deeper in their dark circles; his impressive belly sagged outward with each breath. Inside that head reposed all Shakespeare’s works, both plays and Sonnets; all the poetry of William Blake, including the most obscure; Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and as much of the Bible as was composed in Hebrew. Besides a good deal else. He was a monument of memory and exposition, a rock round which eager pupils gathered. But to his mind he was also a tired creature who was losing, or had lost, a war. He was Samuel Johnson, best of critics, who nonetheless grappled with “vile melancholy” all his life. And he was Falstaff, the philosopher of Eastcheap, the charismatic larger-than-life spirit of misrule, who was rejected in the end by Prince Hal for simply offering him a teacher’s love.

Goodness knows, he had reason to be discouraged. Over the decades that he had taught English literature, principally at Yale, he had found himself steadily surrounded by enemies. At first it was only the New Critics, F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot and the rest, with their promotion of dry Anglican Metaphysicals and their hatred of the Romantics he adored: Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats. By the 1960s he had managed to install his favourites on the syllabus again. Yet all around him the belief persisted that literature should be studied theoretically and reductively, for its structure and etymologies, as if genius could not appear and astonish out of a clear sky. My dear, as he would sigh to students giving him such piffle for the umpteenth time, that wouldn’t do.