>Bloom would butter them up. To Ashbury: “If you are not a Poet Absolute, then none now exists.” To Cole: “There is no poet now writing in English under the age of 60 who is your equal.” To Ammons he wrote that he kept an upstairs and a downstairs copy of his “Selected Poems” because “every house should have two Ammonses.” Bloom would sometimes offer to send along his own work, appending a falsely modest line such as: “Will mail you a copy for your fireplace.”>Every so often, he’d request something in return for his attention. He asked both Ammons and Cole to dedicate poems to him. “I may not be remembered for anything I’ve written,” he told Cole, “but I’ll be remembered for a few of the poems that have been dedicated to me.”>Here is a snippet of a 1970 letter to Ammons, written when Bloom was approaching 40, about the woes of calorie counting: My temper worsens as my diet continues. I’m trying to make it each 24 hours on a steak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water and cigars. The weight comes off, but miserable slow, perhaps (mystically) because it’s been there so long it feels a right to stay. I was so grotesque when I started (255) that being 232 now isn’t much comfort.>White prints Ammons’s wonderful response: “I mourn for and eulogize the 23 lost pounds of you. I wonder where they are, and whether they possess the tincture of Haroldness still.”How would you rate Bloom's plus-sized influence on literary critcism?
>>25386454this is so fucking gay holy shit are all litsissies like this?
>>25386454>teak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water and cigarsbloomie was on the vogue diet
>>25386778Kek no wonder this worked they were fucking nuking their stomachs
