Although a self-avowedly compulsive reader, Harold Bloom, our age's most venerable yet still most provocative literary critic, has more of a writer's sensibility. Key concepts in his work that are not immediately transparent to most readers of books—"belatedness," "the anxiety of influence," literary "contamination," the "agonistic" relationship of texts—need no explanation for those who write them. Few ambitious authors have not known the discouraging feeling that everything has already been said; that they will never find their own voice; that the voices of other authors they have loved and learned from keep creeping into it. From the fierce and usually secretive competition between a writer and his predecessors, Bloom has fashioned a critical vocabulary.

Even Bloom's central notion of "strong misreading" has more to do with writing. "Weak misreading," as he calls it, is common and of little interest; the consequence of inexperience, mental laziness, psychological resistance, or conformity to received opinion, it is what the modernist New Critics with whom the young Bloom studied sought to educate against. Unlike other postmodernists, Bloom has remained loyal to the New Critics' belief in objectively richer and poorer ways of writing and reading, and in universal criteria of literary evaluation. He made an impassioned plea for these criteria in his . . .

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