One way to think of Harold Bloom is as a professor and scholar of Romantic poetry who has Romantic aspirations of his own. He writes in the passionate style of Emerson and Shelley, and he has a penchant like Blake's for system-building. Bloom would subscribe to that poet's declaration in Jerusalem that his business isn't to reason and compare, but to create. The characters in Blake's cosmological fiction are named Urizen, Los, Enitharmon; in Bloom's they include Wordsworth, Shelley, Emerson, Stevens and Blake.

LRB 1 June 1989 | PDF Download