Of course, Bloom’s phenomenal memory and command of the canon give him an extraordinary sensitivity to echo and allusion. It’s no accident that his most famous work, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), gauges the gravitational pull that every poet exerts on his artistic progeny. Yet he argues that poetry remains among the most accessible of arts, with or without such mnemonic equipment. “You don’t have to absolutely, thoroughly, cognitively grasp a poem to be fascinated by it."

"When I was a little boy, already madly in love with William Blake and Hart Crane, I couldn’t possibly have understood what I was reading. There is certainly some layer of understanding that is non-rational. And for the common reader, allusiveness registers as a riddling, enigmatic element: a richness of impact that troubles us, even as we can’t quite locate where that trouble is from.”

Clearly his illness has left Bloom’s own trouble-making capacities intact. He is characteristically blunt about George W. Bush (“an old-fashioned, Gilded Age plutocrat”) and Stephen King (“I can’t get through a paragraph by him”). True, Bloom has finally abandoned his one-man crusade against J.K. Rowling: “Protesting Harry Potter is like standing in front of the Atlantic Ocean—it’s ridiculous, you haven’t got a chance.”

Yet on some level, he must like going toe-to-toe with the ocean. The book he’s just finished boasts an incendiary title, Jesus and Jahweh: One God or Two?, and clearly the author is already girding himself for battle. Fundamentalists, take heed: Harold Bloom views the New Testament (which he insists on calling the Belated Testament) as a deeply conflicted rewrite of the Old Testament. Not even the Good Book, it seems, is entirely immune to the anxiety of influence.

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This interview originally appeared in Newsday. Photo by Sue Graham Mingus.