Only a great writer will challenge that fortress of certainty. Such a vision immediately plays havoc with the stability of texts and authors, indeed with the whole order of culture. No text can be complete because on the one hand it is an attempt to struggle free of earlier texts impinging on it and, on the other, it is preparing itself to savage texts not yet written by authors not yet born. Instead of texts and authors, there are wills struggling to overcome other wills, there are patricides and infanticides whose paradox is that poetry is, if not the manifest result of such violence, then the constantly impressive evidence. So compelling is this vision in its Oedipal ravagement, pathos and psychological drama that one wonders why it has never before been the subject of a critical study.
Bloom is the most rare of critics.
He has what seems to be a totally detailed command of English poetry and its scholarship, as well as an intimate acquaintance with the major avant-garde critical theories of the last quarter century. Yet for Bloom this gigantic apparatus, to which he has assimilated Freudian theory and the Kabbalistic doctrines of Isaac Luria, a 16th-century Jewish mystic, is no mere scholarly baggage. Since it is the essence of Bloom's vision that every poem is the result of a critical act, by which another, earlier poem is deliberately misread, and hence re-written, it follows also that Bloom's sense of the poems he has read is intensely combative, constantly experienced, actively felt. This is polemical, or as Bloom prefers, antithetical criticism at its fiercest and most brilliant. First, that of time.