Blooms and brickbats

[MASCARO at HUMnet.UCLA.EDU]

A. Walser wants to know why people hate Bloom:

If you are really asking for reasons, here's mine: because of his preposterous 
devaluing of Poe.   Actually I like a lot of his criticism, but I can't abide the 
condescending way he puts down edgar.
john m

>	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."