First appeared in the Boston Globe.
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/11/13/divine_misreadings
ERUDITE, PROLIFIC, not infrequently melancholy--especially
about being nearly 75--Harold Bloom occupies a unique position in American
letters; he is, in effect, our reader laureate. A professor at Yale for five
decades, he has tried in dozens of books to teach the country as a whole about
literature, assigning reading lists along the way. Reading lists, in fact, are
among his specialties: Bloom has labored to define that much-contested reading
list known as the Western Canon, and, in the process, has thoroughly
assimilated vast chunks of it.
