LITERARY CRITICISM: The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of LifeBy Harold Bloom Yale University Press, 357pp. £25

THIS IS a fascinating book, perhaps Bloom's last, or so he seems to think: a gnostic swansong. But first I must declare an interest. In 1953, I was sent on a scholarship to Yale University, which had been the alma materof our then American ambassador, William Howard Taft III. I was startled to discover an American Oxbridge, complete with faux turrets and gargoyles, and even more surprised to register that the large undergraduate school was a WASP stronghold: "How much money does your father make?" demanded a Brooks-Brother's-suited young man, and I thought of my poor father, whose highest achievement in the New World was to become a token vendor in the New York City Subway.

Whereas the Graduate School was composed of older brains from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Some were already distinguished: Mel Friedman, who would become a Beckett scholar; Peter Swiggart, an expert on Faulkner; Leonora Leet, who would write challenging books on the Kabbalah. Leonora exemplified two things excluded from the main body of the university: she was a woman, and she was Jewish, as was a good proportion of the Graduate School. I knew little or nothing about Jews beyond that other Bloom, Leopold. And no one in the Grad School would enlighten me about what I later learnt was called the “quota system”, whereby ethnic minorities, especially Jews, were given only very restricted admission into America’s private undergraduate colleges.

The most impressive of these scholars was a shambling young man called Harold Bloom, who seemed to devour books; rumour had it that all his girlfriends were librarians, who would smuggle more out for him. We concurred in our admiration for Finnegans Wake, and he was possessed by the poetry of Hart Crane: “The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower . . .” he would intone, exhorting me to “listen to the long line, John!”.

We agreed on other things as well. In The Anatomy of Influence, Bloom asserts an opinion I heartily shared: he hated the Yale of that period, "centred on the undergraduates of Skull and Bones" whom he describes as "barbarous . . . if only because they assumed they were the United States and Yale, while I was a visitor".

While Bloom inscribes himself within the Jewish tradition of learning: “My vocation as a teacher was Jewish in origin . . . the spirit of the sages”, he has also “tried to build a hedge around the secular Western canon, my Torah . . . ” into which he admits Shakespeare, asserting that “If there is a single universal author, it must be Shakespeare”. Before his graduation, Saul Bellow was cautioned by a teacher, “I wouldn’t recommend that you study English. You weren’t born to it”. An enraged though daunted Bellow switched to Anthropology, but Bloom continued to embrace and celebrate “the best that has been thought and said” in the canon of literature in English.

And how well he succeeded! When I was teaching the Romantics, I was greatly helped by The Visionary Company, especially on sex in Wordsworth, a subject which astonished many of my 1970s Cork students. And I used his Blake’s Apocalypse to navigate my way through the prophetic books, a once-in-a-lifetime journey through English literature’s most fantastical realms.

But the book for which Bloom became most famous was The Anxiety of Influence.He describes the conception of it, which came as a surprise even to him: "If you carry the major British and American poets around with you by internalisation, after some years their complex relations to one another begin to form enigmatic patterns . . . I became puzzled that nearly every critic I encountered assumed idealistically that literary influence was a benign process . . . I awoke in a state of metaphysical terror and . . . began to write . . . The Anxiety of Influence".

There is, of course, something Freudian about the idea of slaying, or at least coming to terms with, your artistic elders, and writers often joke about this. “Always conscious of the hot breath,” wrote Kinsella to me about Yeats in our youth. I would like to think the rivalry becomes more affectionate with age, a family relationship which can encompass both caresses and curses.

Bloom then went on to assemble The Western Canon, which contains a friendly nod to contemporary Irish poetry. What ought to have been the most exciting section in The Anatomy of Influenceis his summary of his American contemporary poet friends. I know and admire several of them, but feel they have a fatal fluency.

The first Collected Poemsof that pleasant man, John Ashbery, are already one thousand pages, and even Bloom's enthusiasm begins to falter: "You wonder as you wander in later Ashbery how you can hope to apprehend an underground stream of poetry that goes on inside him all the time . . . I remain in love with this poetry, yet there is a problem of absorption with such florabundance".

Bloom's early love for Crane, however, remains undiminished. And he sees him as "like Whitman, a poet of the unformulated American Religion, the faithless faith of Emersonian Self-Reliance". Indeed, I feel he has made me a convert to the view that Crane's The Bridgeis the opposite of and answer to The Waste Land,and with its ardour and positive spirit, may mean more to us now than Eliot's gloom. Bloom still takes angry issue with "the sometime New Critics", such as Allen Tate, who judged The Bridge"a splendid failure". Many of them suffered from "Neo-Christianity, a literary disease of which Thomas Stearns Eliot was the Vicar of Academies . . . [it] was a kind of academic faith during the 1950s and 1960s but barely exists at the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century".

This angry note, like an Old Testament prophet or Jesus chastising Jerusalem, resounds in The Anatomy of Influence.He thunders, "Twenty-first-century America is in a state of decline . . . We have approached bankruptcy, fought wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. Our troops include felons, and mercenaries of many nations are among our 'contractors' . . . We have no Emerson or Whitman among us".

There are brighter moments in this treasure-trove of a book, such as his description of a visit to Yale in the 1960s by Auden, wearing “a frayed, buttonless overcoat, which my wife insisted on mending”. And “His luggage was an attaché case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems”. We are told that Auden described Bloom as “a dotty don”, and then assured him he liked dotty dons. This volume is a testimony to Bloom’s assertion that he is still “hopelessly passionate about the poets I loved best”. So perhaps Auden was right.

John Montague is a poet. His most recent volume, Speech Lessons, appeared in July from the Gallery Press