As a beginning graduate student in the early 1980s I encountered the collection since became famous: Deconstruction & Criticism. Famously, for Bloom, "criticism" was he alone, and "deconstruction" the four other gangs. But this is a superb collection that's possible only at a time in history. It is a representative work of five great critics, and at their near-best.
After almost thirty years and I still can't grasp the whole range of its possibility. Yet Bloom is mesmerizing:
A power of evasion may be the belated strong poet's most crucial gift, a psychic and linguistic cunning that energizes what most of us have over-idealized as the imagination. Self-preservation is the labor of the poem's litanies of evasion, of its dance-steps beyond the pleasure principle.
Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form" in Deconstruction & Criticism (1979)
I hold my breath and follow his steps, and again, and again...
