The Critic's Loves

Harold Bloom wrote and edited so many books that it’s hard to imagine how he found the time between them to write letters. Yet write letters he did, and just as whatever he read, he read seriously, whatever he wrote he wrote seriously. That’s something I can attest from personal experience: as a former student of his at Yale, a grad school dropout, I ventured to send him a copy of my first book of poems when it was published in 2003. I suppose the most I had hoped for was a friendly note of acknowledgement. What came back was a long, handwritten letter, not discouraging, but containing some rather severe criticisms.