King James: The Harold Bloom Version

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.