My Teacher, Harold Bloom - The American Scholar

In the fall semester of 1966, when I was a sophomore at Yale College, I enrolled in Harold Bloom’s course on English Romantic poetry. As the youngest person ever to receive tenure in the English department, Bloom was already a legendary figure, and so his class had more than 200 students. This was an era when, believe it or not, Yale students considered the humanities, and especially literature, the prestige area of study. Those majoring in the sciences, or doing anything that led directly to a career other than university teaching, found themselves apologizing for wasting their gifts. The prevailing view of literature was romantic, and Bloom taught that all literature worthy of the name was romantic at the core. At the same time I was also taking a class on the later 18th-century—the age of Dr. Johnson—from Martin Price, and the contrast between these two eminent professors could not have been greater, all the more so because both of them explicated William Blake. Price was all nuance

My Teacher, Harold Bloom - The American Scholar Skip to content Web Essays My Teacher, Harold Bloom His example helped shape my own approach to literature By Gary Saul Morson | October 21, 2019 Alamy In the fall semester of 1966, when I was a sophomore at Yale College, I enrolled in Harold Bloom’s course on English Romantic poetry. As the youngest person ever to receive tenure in the English department, Bloom was already a legendary figure, and so his class had more than 200 students. This was an era when, believe it or not, Yale students considered the humanities, and especially literature, t

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