Bloom = Klapper?

“One day there will have to be a biography of Harold Bloom. It is inevitable. And rightly so. No other critic was so forceful and passionate a presence in the minds of so many readers. Even today, while I was reading the new book of letters written between Bloom and a series of poets, my neighbour came and chatted with me on the decking, and immediately upon seeing The Man Read Everything she said, ‘Oh I love Harold Bloom.” Until readers get the biography, these letters shall have to suffice. I could only wish for the book to be several times longer. Inevitably, whatever else is said about these letters, the usual debates will recur, about whether Bloom was a fraud, a nonsense monger, so crazy that one imagines him, as John Carey once said, convinced that there are death rays coming from the television. Many others have more muted and reasonable objections to Bloom’s avowedly anti-rationalist style. It is for each reader to decide such things—a principle Bloom would have insisted upon throughout his career...” Henry Oliver https://open.substack.com/pub/commonreader/p/the-man-who-read-everything?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios