SOURCE: "The Book of Genius," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4788, January 6, 1995, pp. 3-4.

In the following review, Donoghue questions Bloom's choices and methods in the formation of a literary "canon".

In 1970, W. Jackson Bate published The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, in which he argued that the crucial predicament of English poets since the eighteenth century has been their conviction of belatedness: they feel that they have come into poetry too late and are forced to look with envy and dismay upon, "the Giant Race, before the Flood". Keats told his friend Richard Woodhouse that "there as nothing original to be written in poetry; that its riches were already exhausted—and all its beauties forestalled". Not that every poet was daunted by giants. Blake, in a more spirited mood than Keats, wrote: "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead." But...