James Wood: Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety Of Influence”

“You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement—the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature—had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work.” – The New Yorker