“The Biblical three-score years and ten no longer suffice to read more than a selection of the great writers in what can be called the Western tradition, let alone in all the world’s traditions. Who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read.”

Developing The Value of Reading and the Durability of Art, Bloom acknowledges that 70 years is not enough time to read every piece of literature, making the canon a critical guide for readers to maximize their efforts. In referencing the Bible, Bloom is integrating the influence of canonical works into his argument, while he also refines his context as the “Western tradition.” This passage highlights Bloom’s work as a reduction of the broad library of literature into a more manageable selection.

“Shakespeare and Dante are the center of the Canon because they excel all other Western writers in cognitive acuity, linguistic energy, and power of invention.”

Bloom’s arguments center on the justification for including certain authors in the canon, developing The Canon as a Representation of Artistic Merit. Here, he gives three broad reasons for canonicity: cognition, language, and invention, which repeat throughout the work. By placing Shakespeare and Dante above all later authors, Bloom is simultaneously arguing for his theory of the anxiety of influence.

“No single personage in Shakespeare, not even the charismatic Hamlet or the godlike Lear, matches Beatrice as an exuberantly daring invention. Only the J writer’s Yahweh and the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus are more surprising or exalted representations. Beatrice is the signature of Dante’s originality, and her triumphant placement well within the Christian machinery of salvation is her poet’s most audacious act of transforming his inherited faith into something much more his own.”

In analyzing Beatrice, Bloom connects Dante to both Shakespeare and the Bible, elevating Beatrice as a character who displays Dante’s originality, one of the criteria for canonization. Terms like “audacious” and “triumphant” highlight the value Bloom places on bold, authentic writing as signs of originality. Critically, though Bloom references the Bible’s significance, he does so to emphasize the importance of other works, both integrating the Bible into the canon and separating it from his inclusion of major works in his essays.

“Chaucer anticipates by centuries the inwardness we associate with the Renaissance and the Reformation: his men and women begin to develop a self-consciousness that only Shakespeare knew how to quicken into self- overhearing, subsequent startlement, and the arousal of the will to change. Incipient at moments in the Canterbury Tales, this anticipation of what, after Freud, we call depth psychology in contrast to moral psychology coursed on in Shakespeare to a fullness that Freud, as I have observed already, could do little more than prosify and codify.”

As with Shakespeare, part of Bloom’s argument regarding earlier writers is their ability to predict and excel later writers, as he argues here regarding Chaucer’s understanding of psychology. He also reiterates the elements he finds most valuable in these works, such as “self-overhearing” and the difference between originality and “codification.” By framing Freud as a lesser writer in comparison with Shakespeare and Chaucer, Bloom is reaffirming the placement of the earlier writers in the canon.

“One critic has gone so far as to suggest that Quijano is impelled to become Don Quixote because of barely repressed lust for his own niece, a notion nowhere in Cervantes’ text, but an indication of the desperation to which Cervantes has been known to drive his scholars. All Cervantes tells us is that his hero has gone mad, and we are given no clinical details whatsoever.”

Bloom frequently refers to the challenges of canonical texts as meriting scholarly and independent research and reading, furthering the value of reading and the durability of art. For Bloom, the difficulty of analyzing Don Quixote’s mental state is a critical part of what makes Don Quixote (1605) a canonical text worth rereading and discussing. Likewise, Bloom integrates the perspectives of other critics to highlight the ongoing discussions that form the field of literary studies.

“Molière is therefore likelier to survive in America than Montaigne is, even though Molière follows Montaigne in demonstrating the elusiveness of the truth, which is not a demonstration welcomed by the idealists and ideologues who have seized the academy in the name of social justice. New Puritans, like old ones, are not going to embrace Montaigne or Molière; but in Molière’s case that hardly matters.”

Discussing The Contrast of Aesthetic and Political Value in Literature, Bloom notes that the “New Puritans,” or the School of Resentment, are not likely to accept Moliere and Montaigne’s evasion of ideology, since they cannot serve the supposed political interests of the academy. However, Bloom exalts the aesthetic value of Montaigne and Moliere’s writing, in which Bloom sees the evasion of truth as an interesting, and thus valuable, trait. He asserts that Moliere will survive because his plays enter the purview of theater, which he separates from literary studies.

“Shakespeare was at once the source of Milton’s authentic if hidden poetic anxiety and, paradoxically, the engenderer of Milton’s canonicity. Of all post-Shakespearean writers it is Milton, rather than Goethe or Tolstoy or Ibsen, who best exploited the Shakespearean representation of character and its changes, even while working furiously to ward off the Shakespearean shadow.”

The “Shakespearean shadow” is a dominant line of discussion for Bloom, and it appears in most of the essays of The Western Canon. Part of the value of reading and the durability of art relies on the influence canonical writers have on later writers, such as Bloom’s argument here that Milton’s Satan integrates Shakespeare’s characterization of change. Critically, though Milton “work[ed] furiously” to avoid the shadow, that work is what Bloom argues makes Milton a canonical writer.

“Perhaps the precise term for Johnson is experiential critic, both of literature and of life. More than any other critic, Johnson demonstrates that the only method is the self, and that criticism is therefore a branch of wisdom literature. It is not a political or social science or a cult of gender and racial cheerleading, its present fate in Western universities.”

Combining the canon as a representation of artistic merit and the contrast of aesthetic and political value, Bloom exposes through his praise of Johnson how his literary criticism is rooted in “wisdom literature,” or the personal reading of literature for value. The artistic merit of a work can only be determined by “the self” as opposed to “political or social science,” which is the overarching argument of Bloom’s text. Bloom’s denigrating phrasing of his critics as “a cult of gender and racial cheerleading” sidesteps addressing Bloom’s own biases in elevating white male writers.

“If the essence of poetry is invention, as Dr. Johnson rightly maintained, then the classical Walpurgis Night shows us what poetry essentially is: a controlled wildness, a radical originality that subsumes previous strength, and, most of all, the creation of new myth. Goethe confirms his place in the literary canon by adding more strangeness to beauty…[and] extends the grotesque further than I would have thought it could go.”

Bloom reaffirms the value of “invention,” which he elaborates as an originality that surpasses the expectations of the reader, even noting his own surprise at Goethe’s “sublime.” Critically, the phrasing of “subsumes previous strength” recalls Bloom’s anxiety of influence, indicating that the canon as a representation of artistic merit is centered on surpassing or matching the abilities of earlier writers. Though Bloom does not mention Dante in this passage, references to “wildness,” “new myth,” and “adding…strangeness to beauty” all refer back to Bloom’s commentary on Dante’s canonicity.

“The rightness of allowing an immensely old beggar to die as he has lived, in the eye of Nature; the terrible pathos of Margaret, a peasant woman wholly humane and lovable, who is destroyed by her powers of memory and hope; these are matters available to every human consciousness in every age, regardless of gender, race, social class, ideology.”

While Bloom affirms Wordsworth’s study of poverty and misfortune, he also rejects the idea that marginalization plays any role in appreciating the aesthetics of these experiences. In furthering the contrast of aesthetic and political value in literature, Bloom insists that readers can either appreciate Wordsworth’s poetry aesthetically, or investigate the political and social elements of the text, but he claims they cannot do both without degrading the aesthetic value of the poems.

“One needs to be circular in trying to center Whitman, in order to account for his absolute centrality in the American literary canon. We have had remarkable women poets: Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Swenson. Even if a dozen of that eminence yet spring up among us, they will not decenter Walt, because as a writer he was no more a male phenomenon than was Shakespeare, or Henry James.”

Bloom highlights a critical element of the contrast of aesthetic and political value in literature by rejecting Whitman, Shakespeare, and James as men, which he does to affirm the supposed irrelevance of gender and sex on canonicity. Explicitly and contradictorily, Bloom then claims that no woman could ever write anything sufficiently superior to Whitman’s poems as to “decenter” him, which exposes the sexism inherent in Bloom’s argument.

“Her canonicity results from her achieved strangeness, her uncanny relation to the tradition. Even more, it ensues from her cognitive strength and rhetorical agility, not from her gender or from any gender-derived ideology.”

As in his discussion of Whitman, Bloom emphasizes that Emily Dickinson is part of the canon as a representation of artistic merit by rejecting the “gender-derived ideology” of Feminist criticism. For Bloom, acknowledging the challenges Dickinson faced as a woman would be an insult to the aesthetic value of her work, which comes from her “achieved strangeness,” the mark of all canonical writers.

“Feminist critics have been exercised by the notion that Esther is the victim of a patrilinear society, and they tend not to admire John Jarndyce, much against Dickens’s entire art of representation. Dickens, as a great literary artist, is no more patriarchal than Shakespeare, and the creator of Rosalind and Cleopatra does not seem to me ideologically patriarchal.”

In comparing Dickens and Shakespeare, as with Whitman and James, Bloom emphasizes how Dickens, though a patriarchal figure in life, is not “ideologically patriarchal,” meaning his writing does not explicitly advocate for a patriarchal worldview. In making this claim, Bloom does not engage with Feminist critics who have pointed out the often stereotypical and flat characterization of many of Dickens’s female characters who are often presented as either “good” or “bad.”

“I have argued throughout this book that originality, in the sense of strangeness, is the quality that, more than any other, makes a work canonical. Tolstoy’s strangeness is itself strange, because it so paradoxically seems not strange at all at first. You always hear Tolstoy’s voice acting as the narrator, and that voice is direct, rational, confident, and benign.”

Bloom’s arrangement of “strangeness” in the canon is most explicit in this passage, as he discusses Tolstoy’s “paradox” of strangeness. By presenting the “strange” as “rational,” “direct,” and “confident,” Tolstoy tries to persuade the reader that his writing is not strange at all. The specific term “benign” highlights how Bloom appreciates Tolstoy’s writing as a passive presentation of strangeness, rather than a “malignant” aggression toward the reader’s sensibilities.

“With perhaps some mischief, I added that it made no difference therefore whether Hedda was a woman or a man, and just as actresses have played Hamlet, perhaps some actor would yet play Hedda. The audience was much happier when the scholarly Feminist replied that Hedda was a victim of society and of nature, being both unhappily married and unwillingly pregnant.”

Emphasizing the contrast of aesthetic and political value in literature, Bloom judges the popularity of his and his colleague’s perspectives by the reaction of the audience, concluding that his reading of Hedda Gabler (1890) is unpopular because it does not reaffirm the ideological leaning of the audience. Bloom does not seriously engage with the scholar’s point that Hedda’s situation as a woman “unhappily married and unwillingly pregnant” is a key part of her characterization, or that the reason why some female actors aspire to play Hamlet is because major leading roles for women are far fewer by comparison in canonical works.

“It is not Hamlet who lies upon the famous couch in Dr. Freud’s office, but Freud who hovers with the rest of us in a miasma of corruption in the halls at Elsinore, and Freud has no special privilege as we jostle one another in the corridors: Goethe, Coleridge, Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, Harold Goddard, and all the rest of us, since everyone who reads Hamlet or attends its performance is compelled to become an interpreter.”

Throughout the essays, Bloom highlights Hamlet as an exceptional character in which all readers can find parts of themselves. Hamlet (1609) combines The Canon as a Representation of Artistic Merit and The Value of Reading and the Durability of Art, since Bloom sees Hamlet’s influence in almost all later writers and credits Shakespeare with understanding psychology before Freud could “interpret” it.

“Proust’s main concern is not social history or sexual liberation or the Dreyfus affair (though he was consistently an active supporter of Dreyfus). Aesthetic salvation is the enterprise of his vast novel; Proust challenges Freud as the major mythmaker of the Chaotic Era.”

Bloom sets aesthetic value against political value in discussing Proust, acknowledging Proust’s political concerns while asserting that Proust’s “enterprise” is aesthetic “mythmaking.” In affirming the contrast of aesthetic and political value in literature, though, Bloom exposes how politics inevitably influence aesthetics, noting how sexual orientation and religious heritage present themselves in Proust’s work. Though Bloom prefers to value Proust’s aesthetic contribution to the canon, he does not deny the political elements of his texts—a marked contrast with his denial of the importance of gender, race, and politics in the works of women and writers of color.

“That could be condensed (with some loss) as Joyce chanting, ‘I walk through myself, meeting the ghost of Shakespeare, but always meeting myself.’ Such a confession of influence, and of a self-confidence at having the strength to internalize Shakespeare, could be called Ulysses’s finest compliment to its own canonical splendor.”

Though discussing Joyce, Bloom explicitly notes how a writer’s relation to Shakespeare is directly relevant to the canon as a representation of artistic merit. In admitting his anxiety about Shakespeare, Joyce is establishing his “canonical splendor,” meaning that the connection to Shakespeare is itself a mark of canonicity. Broadly, the idea of meeting oneself through Shakespeare is the root of Bloom’s literary criticism across the essays.

“As a belated acolyte of that waning faith, I am necessarily devoted to Woolf’s fiction and criticism, and I therefore want to take up arms against her feminist followers, because I think they have mistaken their prophet. She would have had them battle for their rights, certainly, but hardly by devaluating the aesthetic in their unholy alliance with academic pseudo- Marxists, French mock philosophers, and multicultural opponents of all intellectual standards whatsoever.”

Bloom presents the most explicit rationale behind the contrast of aesthetic and political value in literature, here, as he presents two ways to appreciate Woolf: either by affirming her aesthetic value or devaluing her aesthetic value by affirming her Feminism. Bloom implies a guilt by association, as well, portraying Feminist “followers” as benign but attributing the issue of “devaluating the aesthetic” in the “alliance” with other members of the School of Resentment. This argument does not address Woolf’s own views on the matter, such as her sustained exploration of matters of gender and art in A Room of One’s Own (1929).

“We have adopted Kafka as the most canonical writer of our century because all of us epitomize the split between being and consciousness that is his true subject, a subject he identified with being Jewish, or at least as being particularly exilic Jewish.”

Though Bloom largely rejects the idea of integrating the identity of the author into his reading of text, he makes an exception for Kafka, whom Bloom regards as a uniquely Jewish writer. Still, following the canon as a representation of artistic merit, Bloom highlights how Kafka’s “exilic Jewish” writing capture a split in consciousness that “all of us” can appreciate, appealing to a sense of universality in Kafka’s writing. This contrast highlights how multiple readings of a text can present valid reasoning and conclusions, but it also once again reinforces how Bloom is highly selective when choosing which forms of identity are allowed to matter in approaching an artist’s work.

“Even if Borges were not the prime founder of Hispanic American literature (as he is), even if his stories did not possess authentic aesthetic value (as they do), he would still be one of the canonical writers of the Chaotic Age because, more than any other writer except Kafka, whom he deliberately emulates, he is the literary metaphysician of the age.”

For Borges, Bloom affirms the value of reading and the durability of art over the canon as a representation of artistic merit, asserting that Borges, with or without the canon, is the “literary metaphysician” of the Chaotic Age. This exception argues that the canon is not necessarily a complete collection of the most important works unless it encompasses more than aesthetics or originality alone. Borges possesses the historic significance and aesthetic prowess to warrant canonization, but Bloom identifies his originality as something above and beyond these criteria.

“The canonical challenge of Endgame is that it comes close to the ending of the Canon; it is our moment of literature’s last stand, if literature means Shakespeare, Dante, Racine, Proust, Joyce […] It is almost as though he foretells the time when Dante, Proust, and Joyce will have no more deep readers, and Shakespeare and Racine will at last cease to be performed. That will be endgame indeed, and many who are now alive may live to see it.”

Part of Bloom’s argument is a defense of the canon against supposed attacks, which lead him to predict the “endgame” of the Western canon—a time at which readers will no longer appreciate the authors Bloom discusses. Endgame (1957), for Bloom, marks the end of the canon because he does not have further writers and works to discuss, but it also represents a theoretical transition into a New Theocratic Age in which he assumes the entire Western canon will be replaced or eliminated.

“Finding myself now surrounded by professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and of various sexual persuasions; by multiculturalists unlimited, I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible. All of these Resenters of the aesthetic value of literature are not going to go away, and they will raise up institutional resenters after them.”

Bloom’s outline of the School of Resentment is framed as a devaluation of his own interests, implying that the existence of “professors of hip-hop” is degrading to the existing professors of literature. The “Balkanization” of literary studies refers to the branches of contemporary literary studies, which encompass cultural studies, gender studies, and more, which Bloom predicts will “raise up institutional resenters after them,” meaning students who become teachers and continue the curriculum of “resentment.” This passage reveals Bloom’s strong biases against those who do not easily conform to a white, male canon or a traditional approach to literary criticism.