proximoception

The first Bloom I read was The Anxiety of Influence, a bit after A Map of Misreading came out. That was displayed everywhere in the bookstore, and as a freshman I thought it was a psychology text. But a friend was sitting in on his DeVane lectures that spring, so I went; they turned into Kabbalah and Criticism (Bloom's favorite of his own books) and Poetry and Repression (my favorite of the middle period). And I agree that the recent books are strikingly good, especially The Western Canon, but also Genius. On Shakespeare he's unfailingly interesting, but does miss a lot of Empsonian and Cavellian tricks. And I've been having occasion to read his headnotes to the Oxford Anthology -- he did the Romantic volume, Trilling the Victorian (though each is double-billed) -- and they're really really really great. What's amazing about him is that intuitive sense of depth after depth which a now-superseded culture of psychoanalysis made it possible to acknowledge without tedious explanation. (I don't mean his readings are psychoanalytic, though they sometimes are: I mean that he sees right away, makes you see right away, that anything can be deep, can be of mortal importance; that mortal importance doesn't have to be argued for in person or in poem.)

He's also great at changing his mind -- appreciating what he hadn't. And you're right: unlike his only rival at Yale, Paul de Man, he was a) uninterested in cultivating discipleship; and b) interested in people for depths of personality and motivation and not just intellectual power.