Harold Bloom. Timothy Bahti. Geoffrey Hartman. George Steiner. Highly literate critics whose work I ought to appreciate, but whose prose style is so turgid and overwrought that I rebel. Those who complain about neo-colonial critics could also take a look at these “conservative” Comparative Literature professors. There is a connection, of course: the “Yale” style of Bloom and Hartman is taken up by Yale Ph.D. and Derrida translator Gayatri Spivak. I have never found anything useful in anything written by Harold Bloom. Some specific, identifiable, usable idea would be nice! Bloom has no ear for language—a serious handicap for a specialist in poetry. His own writing betrays him: as Joseph Epstein (a writer I usually dislike) pointed out recently, anyone who writes like that is no aesthete.