Blooms

[Andrew Clarke Walser]

	The recent put-downs of Harold Bloom puzzle me.  Do we dislike him
for his agonistic theory of creation?  For his work with Kabbalah?  For
that interminable series of TWENTIETH CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF . . .?
Or have we confused him with Allan Bloom, who wrote a few years back about
American minds snapping shut?
	If nothing else, Harold Bloom has had the good sense to praise
"the most vital contemporary American authors, the poets Ashberry and
Merrill and the prose writer of epic fictions, Pynchon." 

				Andrew Walser
				University of Illinois-Chicago