During his writing of The Western Canon,[1] Harold Bloom must have reflected wryly, more than once, on a remark he quotes from Johnson: “he that writes must be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom everyone has a right to attack.” Pre-publication furor over the book centered on the well-publicized appearance, in an appendix, of a list of over 850 works representing the achievements of Western literature from the earliest times to the present day. This silly idea has inevitably led to profitless wrangling about the inclusion and exclusion of this or that author or work, and has distracted attention from Bloom’s arguments. Accordingly, after this paragraph, I shall ignore the list. However, it does have one use. It reminds us of the Great Books, and of F. R. Leavis’s characteristically bracing discussion of that madcap project in Commentary for 1953. Detecting behind it “the axiom that it is an offense against democracy to advocate for anybody anything that everybody can’t have,” Leavis declared: “If democratic equality of opportunity requires that standards should be lowered, then I am against democracy.” So, in that sense, is Professor Bloom, who commits himself to the provocative view that “the strongest poetry is cognitively and imaginatively too difficult to be read deeply by more than a relative few of any social group, gender, race, or ethnic origin.” Fortunately for literary criticism, Bloom himself belongs to the relative few of all these different socio-sexual categories.

Unlike many of Bloom’s readers,