Bloom declares where he should argue

From A Non-Western Canon: What Would a List of Humanity's 100 Greatest Writers Look Like? by T. Greer. He (she?) opens with a discussion of literary canon and of course Harold Bloom.

My personal assessment of Bloom is that he was an excellent salesman and a stupendous reader, but an uninspired critic. With the concept of a 'canon' or a 'classic' I have no argument. It seems obvious to me that some works are better than others and more obvious still that if a book is still being read several centuries after it was written it is likely one of those better works–or barring that, a work whose intellectual or artistic legacy makes it a necessary piece of the larger puzzle. The trouble with Bloom was not his elephant love for the canon, but his inability to articulate anything but this passion (and disgust with those who sought to defile it). The truth is that Bloom adds nothing to the great works he champions. This weakness is seen most clearly in his many volumes on Shakespeare; in less exaggerated form it mars the judgments Bloom throws around in The Western Canon or Genius.

Bloom declares where he should argue, emotes where he should analyze, and effuses where he should unveil. Bloom deplored young Hal to the center of his bones; his love for Falstaff soaked through his soul down into his toes. You'll discover this within a minute of reading any of Bloom's criticism of the Bard. Upon Falstaff he bestows the title "the grandest personality in all of Shakespeare."[1] But peer at his pages long enough and you quickly realize the truth: Bloom asserts this title; he does not argue for it, much less prove it. He rarely bothered trying to prove anything. Instead he stacks his pages with one overwrought judgement after another–and the best of these judgements are usually not even his, but some quote lifted from Hazlitt, Johnson, or some other ancient critic.

Bloom read all of the ancient critics. Bloom's erudition was his genius. He was staggeringly, smashingly, outlandishly well read. What could be read, he did read. Harold Bloom, champion avatar of librarians everywhere! This was the source of his cultural authority. He can declare that Moliere is one of the three—and three only!—playwrights of the last six hundred years that deserve canonization because he has read them all, damn't. He should know; you should trust him.

But if Bloom's prodigious reading was his rest and his strength, it was also, I suspect, key to his failures.

I have many more of Bloom's books than I am ever likely to read.