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“... affectionate and independent respect’. His stubborn affirmation of gratitude is directed against Harold Bloom, an antagonist whose views Ricks means to parry with vigilance. He derides Bloom for ‘his sentimental discrediting of influence’, and calls the theory of the anxiety of influence a ‘melodramatic ...”

“... fiercest of Yale deconstructors, with a rigour nor easily explained unless in ethical terms’. Harold Bloom, too, is admired, because of a related if antithetical fierceness: he ‘sets up as the opponent from within, meeting the deconstructors point for point on rhetorical ground of their own choosing’. ...”

“... subsequently included in a Yale collection of essays on Ashbery edited, and one-third written, by Harold Bloom, John Bayley sees the critical question ‘in terms of the contrast between Englishness and Americanness in the contemporary poetic voice’ – the ‘English voice’ dealing in ‘robust reality’ (which he concedes can sometimes be ‘a ...”

“... though they exhibit a considerable variety of interests, sociological, historical, theoretical; in Harold Bloom’s case ordinary language is defeated, for we need some such compound as cabbalistic-rhapsodic. None of them shows much interest in British writing, or the British literary scene, or in literary criticism as it is now practised and taught ...”

“... to support his scepticism at his home institution in the so-called École de Yale. In 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, all at the time Yale colleagues, put together a kind of manifesto entitled Deconstruction and Criticism. There were certain affinities among the five but the differences were ...”

“... writing, not sensing its strangeness, dangers, or pitfalls, and he consequently wrote too much ... Harold Bloom suggests that he can never be more than ‘a good minor poet’ because of his ‘distrust of figurative language, and his powerfully reductive tendency to historicise and literalise every manifestation of the Goddess he could discover, whether ...”

“... the sense intended by the author, for one has always a sense foreseen by the Holy Spirit. I expect Harold Bloom would agree. Even if one grants that much of the current unrest is about how to keep literary academics off the streets, the conflict between those who regard the text as a bucket with a determined and finite content and those who regard it as ...”

“... the 18th century. Her generation graduated about the time that the literary critics W.J. Bate and Harold Bloom began to meditate on the trials imposed on the modern writer by too much ancestry – the burden of the past, the anxiety of influence, and the artistic necessity of misreading old art in order to make new art. Ms Jong is hell-bent on ...”

“... in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens ...”

“... century. These writers aren’t rejecting their ancestors; there’s no anxiety of influence, as Harold Bloom calls it, but a benignant sort of Oedipal relationship. If they’re among the best, though not the most representative, of current thriller writers, it’s partly for having something, if only a fantasy, to oppose to the generally dehumanising ...”

“... repugnant to Eliot, came to fascinate the postmodernist generation, and led to important essays by Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller. Wolfgang Iser’s study of Pater was crucial to the genesis of reception theory at the University of Konstanz in the 1960s.Pater reportedly told his students that ‘the great thing is to read authors whole; read Plato ...”

“... they had been wrong. But even now, Plath is not immune from the smirking putdowns of critics like Harold Bloom, who (in the latest Paris Review) calls her ‘our era’s Felicia Hemans’, a ‘bad verse writer’. Bloom makes a cameo appearance in Bitter Fame as ‘Hal Bloom the ...”

“... maybe the other way around. ‘An imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism’: this is what Harold Bloom, in his Poetics of Influence, describes as a burden for the strong poet ‘in his own final phase’. If The Ghost Orchid is not a book by a strong poet in his final phase, it is certainly a book by a poet writing strongly about final ...”

“... between the state of science and that of contemporary literature, when he draws on the views of Harold Bloom, who holds that the creative Wellsprings have been drained by the giants of the past. The scientist thus shares the plight of the poet, and ‘irony’ is the only escape. Among the ‘ironic’ scientists are numbered many of the best-known ...”

“... some used to think, imitation merely operated as a sincere form of flattery. The American critic Harold Bloom annoyed many traditionalists in the Seventies by his psychoanalytic theory of literary influence, which proffers an aggressive account of how the new writer views his precursors: Bloom’s characteristically ...”