Obituary: Harold Bloom died on October 14th

AS HE SLUMPED in his chair, listening to some interviewer or student, Harold Bloom could seem a very picture of gloom. His jowly head leaned lower on his hand; his eyes sank deeper in their dark circles; his impressive belly sagged outward with each breath. Inside that head reposed all Shakespeare’s works, both plays and Sonnets; all the poetry of William Blake, including the most obscure; Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and as much of the Bible as was composed in Hebrew. Besides a good deal else. He was a monument of memory and exposition, a rock round which eager pupils gathered. But to his mind he was also a tired creature who was losing, or had lost, a war. He was Samuel Johnson, best of critics, who nonetheless grappled with “vile melancholy” all his life. And he was Falstaff, the philosopher of Eastcheap, the charismatic larger-than-life spirit of misrule, who was rejected in the end by Prince Hal for simply offering him a teacher’s love.