SOURCE: A review of The Breaking of the Vessels, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XLI, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 99-101.

In the following review, O'Hara contends that The Breaking of the Vessels is "both more extreme" and "more predictable" than Bloom's other works, and that the author seems to have moved from "precocious and prolific youth to decadent and despairing ancientness without ever having attained critical maturity."

Harold Bloom has been a controversial figure in American literary criticism for some time. His first book, Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), set itself squarely against the ruling critical orthodoxy of the time which denigrated the great Romantic poet as (in Arnold's notorious phrase) "an ineffectual angel" beating his golden wings vainly in a void of idealistic abstraction. Bloom argued instead that Shelley was much more of a self-consciousvisionary craftsman in the style of Northrop Frye's Blake than he was ever given...