Bloom’s true scholarly and critical gifts always emerged around questions of “originality.” This was what The Anxiety of Influence was a theory of. The canon for Bloom wasn’t supposed to be about erecting a fence or border wall, as it’s often now currently conceived. Rather, it named a body or a microverse in which writers or critics could come to mark themselves out as original or merely rule-following. Originality is achieved only through a constant and often unconscious struggle with the works of the past. Bloom’s word for this struggle was reading. Only Bloom could write that plays read us better than we read them, by which he meant that something about our self-awareness doesn’t even come into being until the moment we encounter Shakespeare. This sounds elitist, but need not be so. Indeed, it’s something almost every teacher in the humanities implicitly believes, even if they change the subject of that sentence from Shakespeare to Marx, Judith Butler, or Kimberlé Crenshaw. Bloom was just more honest about naming that encounter—and that honesty could be frightening.

In accordance with a gnostic belief that this universe is but one of many, Bloom must have also tacitly acknowledged the existence of other microverses. The strong texts and precursors that made up that world’s canon were other than the one he knew and felt at home in, but he also wanted to make sure that people didn’t think willed ignorance, rupture, and censorship were adequate shortcuts to self-styled “originality.” Just as one doesn’t become free merely by killing off a tyrant, one doesn’t become original by not reading one’s precursors, even if they were bad people.

Marco Roth, “Regarding Bloom”