Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling?

It's a bit surprising to come across Harold Bloom's confession that the literary work that has been his greatest obsession is not, say, Hamlet or Henry IV, but a relatively little-known 1920 fantasy novel. After all, Bloom is our most famous bardolater. When I took an undergraduate class with him at Yale, he announced his trembling bafflement before Shakespeare's greatness in almost every lecture. In the course of his career, Bloom has named a handful of other literary eminences who compel from him a similar obeisance—Emerson, Milton, Blake, Kafka, and Freud are members in this select club—but one does not find David Lindsay on this list.

Yet, in his 1982 book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Bloom writes of Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus: "I have read it literally hundreds of times, indeed obsessively I have read several copies of it to shreds." The much-shredded book has, he says, "affected me personally with more intensity and obsessiveness than all the works of greater stature and resonance of our time." In fact, Bloom wrote his own fantasy novel—The Flight to Lucifer, published 40 years ago this year—in apparent response to Lindsay's. "I know of no book," he writes, "that has caused me such an anxiety of influence, an anxiety to be read everywhere in my fantasy imitating it."