THE PROPHET OF DECLINE.(literary critic Harold Bloom)

It is tempting to say that Harold Bloom is a man marooned in the wrong place and time, and that living out his late years in twenty-first-century America is what's making him miserable. It is so easy, after all, to imagine him gleefully roistering through taverns like his Shakespearean hero, Falstaff, constructing a tottering folly of puns; or denouncing Aristotelian aesthetics at some bacchanal in Rome (although the thought of Bloom in tights or a toga is alarming). One can picture him a feverish poet in nineteenth-century Russia, growing dotty and millennial like the elder Tolstoy. "He's a wandering Jewish scholar from the first century," Sir Frank Kermode, the English literary critic, says. "There's always a pack of people sitting around him to see if any bread or fishes are going to be handed out. And I think there is in him a lurking sense that when the true messiah comes he will be very like Harold."

But to think this way is to make two mistakes. One is to suppose that mere history--a change of scene--can alter a spirit. That is a very un-Bloomian notion. And the second is to believe that miserable is a bad thing to be. Bloom, in his lyric sadness, his grandiloquent fatigue, and his messianic loneliness, is a great soul. "He did not seem happy," a former student says. "But happiness seemed a trivial quality compared to whatever Harold was." Bloom is not low so much as over the top. In his misery, he is magnificent.

Bloom is a prophet of decline. In his view, Western literature reached its apogee in Shakespeare, and it has been downhill ever since. Bloom loves Emerson and Whitman but he doesn't believe them: to him, belatedness is now a permanent condition of man, and there can be no overcoming it--no return, even in America, to an original fullness or freshness or purity of spirit. But it would not be right to say that Bloom is nostalgic for the past. Unlike the cultural conservatives with whom he is often (wrongly) grouped, he does not long for a more genteel or simpler era. In his view, the fact that Shakespeare lived in sixteenth-century England does no credit to the time or the place, because Shakespeare's genius was sui generis--it emerged out of nowhere. The truth is, Bloom has no interest in history as such--no interest, that is, in the difference between one time and another--because to him all poetry that is valuable is timeless. Anything that time has made foreign is a period piece, bric-a-brac.

In fact, it's not just historicizing that Bloom rejects--it's pastness per se. He reads poems as though reliving their creation. Bloom likes his poems bloody, trailing ruptured veins and muscles torn in struggle. It is the lyric urge and the strife of poetic parturition that he values, more than the poem itself. For the epigraph of his book "Shakespeare," Bloom chose a quotation from Nietzsche's "Twilight of the Idols" that is an extraordinary statement to place at the beginning of a book about Shakespeare, or, indeed, about any sort of literature: "That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking."

Bloom is a literary critic at Yale and New York University, an authority on the Romantic poets and on Yeats and Wallace Stevens. He is the author of "The Anxiety of Influence" and, more recently, of best-selling books such as "The Western Canon," "The Book of J," and "How to Read and Why." Next month, he publishes his twenty-eighth book, eight hundred pages long, titled "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Minds." Despite these critical credentials, however, Bloom is not, for the most part, a close reader. He doesn't dissect stanzas, he doesn't worry words, because he doesn't read the way most people do. Bloom is famous for his memory and his reading speed. He has memorized a large proportion of canonical poetry written in English; once, when drunk, as an undergraduate at Cornell, he recited Hart Crane's long poem "The Bridge" backward, word by word. He claims that in his youth he read a thousand pages an hour. Bloom has had poems inside him for so long that he doesn't really read them anymore. They are not a series of lines following one after the other--they exist in him all at once. He has swallowed them whole.

Bloom, sitting, temporarily unattended, somewhere unfamiliar. He sits with his arms hugged around himself, head sunk, blinking miserably, in the posture of one who is obliged to wait in the rain without an umbrella or hope of shelter. From time to time, he hunches his shoulders and twists with a pained expression, as though trying to shift something heavy on his back.

Bloom's face is a cluster of big, swollen, sensing instruments: a heroic nose, nostrils dilating; plump, colossal lips; a giant's heavy eyes, rolling or tearing; thick, congested eyebrows, heaving up or thrusting down; deep fissures in the forehead. There is no mere skin on his face--it is all membrane. Bloom is an intensely sensitive animal, vulnerable to the most delicate waft of emotion. His stomach is prodigious, like a great cathedral, in which all the uncountable poems and plays that he has swallowed roil and commingle with his own passions. Bloom has suffered heart attacks and stomach ulcers and is intermittently, and with tepid conviction, on a diet. But his Falstaffian fat is part of his majesty.