Adam Phillips at Salmagundi:
In a piece written by the critic Kenneth Gross, an ex-student of Harold Bloom, we read that “Bloom was always alive to Blake’s way of joining visionary, esoteric wildness and blunt sceptical, satirical rage. He treasured Blake’s cheerful independence, his dark sense of humour, his willingness to think through for himself all ideas and traditions, his hatred of the mind’s capacity to accept and forge limitations for itself and others, and his ambition of ‘opening up the reader’s own buried capacity for imaginative self-liberation.’”
This is as good an account as any of the spirit and preoccupations of Bloom’s work; it being the singular, original, idiosyncratic independence and radical non-compliance of Blake’s vision that Bloom celebrated, and aspired to. (Bloom said in an interview that when he read Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, it was the best book he had ever read, and that after many readings he knew it by heart.) The Anxiety of Influence—at once a history of poetic tradition, and a story about the individual development of what Bloom called “strong poets”—was the book that first fully exemplified, or theorised, what Bloom, in Gross’s account, valued about Blake.
more here.
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