IThe Man Who Read Everything

Nothing reliable is known about the life of Homer. The ancient lives of the poet disagree with one another, and modern scholars treat him, in the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as “primarily a projection of the great poems themselves.” The poems came out of a tradition of singers who inherited their phrases from earlier singers and composed as they sang, retelling the anger of Achilles and the long voyage home for generations, each singer answering for his own performance. At some point in the sixth century BCE, Britannica suggests, a complete version may have been fixed as the standard for the recitation contests at the Athenian festival of the Panathenaea, and the remembered poem became a written one. The two founding poems of Western literature have a name on them and no certain person behind them.

Harold Bloom called himself “a monster” of reading. He said he could read, and absorb, a 400-page book in an hour, and by his own account he knew by heart the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s Paradise Lost and all of Blake, as Dinitia Smith reported in his New York Times obituary in 2019. Alex Lanz, reviewing Bloom’s collected literary letters in September, calls such stories “tall tales.” The letters appeared in May under a title that repeats the legend anyway: The Man Who Read Everything.

Bloom is the reverse case. There is no doubt that he lived, and his monument is not a poem or a novel but a memory. He wrote criticism by the shelf and one novel, which he came to regret. Verse he left alone. “To try to write in verse would have been a kind of trespass,” he told The Paris Review in 1991. Homer and Bloom face each other across the tradition: the works without a certain man, and a certain man whose great work was keeping other people’s.

I came to Harold Bloom late, and by way of a review. In 2016, by the notes I kept that year, I read about his book The Anatomy of Influence and bought a used copy. It was a book he called his final reflection on influence, and it defined influence “simply as literary love, tempered by defense.” I did not yet know that the defense was the famous part. Bloom wrote there about Wallace Stevens and his long poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” and I went to the poem and was captivated. I wanted to know who had sent me. Reading about Bloom, I learned that the first book he ever owned was Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, which he had found as a boy in a branch of the Bronx library and which his oldest sister gave him for his twelfth birthday. So I read Crane, beginning with “To Brooklyn Bridge.” From Stevens and Crane I went back to the Romantic poets Bloom traced them to, and from the Romantics to Shakespeare. I owe my love of literature to Harold Bloom. He is also why I came, in time, to writing essays and fiction.

In his letters, Bloom refused the title of critic. “Lord knows what I am,” he wrote to the poet John Hollander in 1975, as Lanz quotes the letter. He was not, he went on, a poet, critic, scholar or historian, nor a psychoanalyst, philosopher or theosophist, but “a worthless mélange of the gang of it.” To A. R. Ammons he was more exact. He was not an artist or a critic, or a hybrid of the two, “but something odder and less, a reader.” The reader was born in New York in 1930 to Yiddish-speaking parents and taught at Yale from 1955 until his death in 2019.

For most readers, having read everything would be the reward. For Bloom it was the problem. The Anxiety of Influence, in 1973, held that a poet arrives late, after the dead have said everything and said it well, and makes room only by misreading a precursor on purpose. He argued it first in letters. In January 1969 he was writing to Northrop Frye, the most celebrated critic of his generation, and Frye was not persuaded. If Bloom meant influence in the literal sense, the passing of thought and imagery from an earlier poet to a later one, Frye wrote, then that was “simply something that happens.” Bloom answered four days later. “I don’t, as you say, mean influence in any literal sense.” What he meant, in Lanz’s account of the reply, was the poet’s isolation before a tradition that hangs overhead, and the “implicit, creative misinterpretation” that isolation forces.

There is now a third kind of reader, and it completes the figure. A language model is trained on a large share of what has been written down and is within reach, a memory larger than Bloom’s in a plain sense, and like the Homeric tradition it was made by no single hand. Unlike either, it is no one. Frye’s sentence describes its relation to its sources completely. It takes in their thought and imagery and passes them on, and nothing in how it is trained rewards misreading them in order to stand apart. I now write essays and fiction with such a reader, and this essay was drafted with one. The man who read everything is no longer a tall tale, and he is not a man. Bloom and the machine can be compared point by point, and at each point the difference is the same one.

IIHeld by Heart

Bloom’s memory, whatever its true size, had one property the stories pass over. It kept names. The classicist James Romm wrote after Bloom’s death that “his mind was itself a library,” and that “He quoted at length, from memory, passages he had lived with for decades.” A library is not a heap. Every book in it is shelved under an author. When Bloom recited Milton, the lines came back as Milton’s, from a particular poem, written at a particular time against particular rivals. Psychologists call the faculty involved source monitoring: the work, mostly unnoticed, of deciding where a memory or a piece of knowledge came from.

A language model holds what it was trained on in another way. Training does not file texts away to be looked up, though some, often repeated, can come back word for word. It adjusts a very large set of numbers until the model is good at predicting the next word of all of them at once, and what any one author contributed is spread through the whole. A model can often say who wrote a famous line, because the attribution was in the text too. Nothing in the design keeps each source apart under its name. The failure shows most where names matter, in citations, and giving a model a search engine has not yet cured it. In a study published in September 2023, 55 percent of the citations GPT-3.5 gave in short literature reviews were to works that did not exist, and 18 percent of those GPT-4 gave. In March 2025 the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia gave eight AI search tools real excerpts from news articles and asked where each came from. The tools “provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries,” though they could search the web as they answered.

The strongest case against this comparison is that human memory keeps its sources less reliably than a library does. In oral traditions like the one that made Homer’s poems, a song had no author, though a singer knew whom he had learned it from. When Milman Parry and Albert Lord recorded singers in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, one of them, Đemo Zogić, said that a song he had learned from another singer, Suljo Makić, was “The same song, word for word and line for line.” They recorded both men, and Lord found two versions of one story, not one text. Zogić had kept his source and lost the words. A model, which sometimes keeps the words of a text exactly, is apt to lose the source. But a writer can lose a source. In the fall of 1891 Helen Keller, then eleven, wrote a story called “The Frost King” as a birthday present for Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. He published it. Early in 1892 it was found to follow closely a story by Margaret Canby, “The Frost Fairies,” which had apparently been read to Keller, spelled into her hand, in the summer of 1888. Keller had, she later wrote, “not the faintest recollection” of it. “I thought then that I was ‘making up a story,’” she recalled. In the winter of 1892 she was questioned by a court of eight teachers and officers of the school. They divided four to four, and Anagnos, by his own account, cast his vote in her favor. Canby wrote to her kindly: “Some day you will write a great story out of your own head.” Keller never forgot the court. In The Story of My Life, in 1903, she wrote that she had “ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own.” Psychologists have long had a name for what happened to her, cryptomnesia: something remembered and taken for one’s own invention.

Two things follow, and they cut in different directions. The first is that the difference between Bloom and the machine is not perfect memory against imperfect memory. Nobody’s sources stay perfectly apart, and keeping them apart is, for a machine, an engineering problem: engineers are building systems that look up their sources and cite them, the Tow Center’s tools among them, and those systems will improve. The second is what Keller’s fear shows. She minded. Whose words they were was, for her, the question of who she was, and she carried it for the rest of her life. That is the anxiety Bloom built his theory on, and it needs both things at once: the sources held apart, and a self that cannot bear to be confused with them. The machine lacks the first for now. Nothing in how it is built supplies the second.

IIIThe Sedulous Ape

Before writers swerve from their masters, they copy them, and they say so. The earliest known poem by John Keats, written in 1814, is called “Imitation of Spenser.” Robert Louis Stevenson described his own apprenticeship in 1887: “I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth,” and to six more. “It was so Keats learned,” he added. Joan Didion told The Paris Review in 1978 that at fifteen or sixteen she “would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked.” She meant Hemingway’s. Copying is so old a method that it has been caught copying itself. In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne complained of writers who make new books “as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another.” The sentence was poured from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the physician John Ferriar, who caught it in 1793, found it “very singular” that Sterne had chosen that passage to “abuse Plagiarists.”

The fullest account of the method is Benjamin Franklin’s. As a boy he found an odd volume of The Spectator, made short notes of the sense of each essay, set them aside for some days, and then tried to rebuild the essays in his own words. Then, he wrote, “I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” He turned the essays into verse and back again, and jumbled his notes to teach himself “method in the arrangement of thoughts.” In 1939 Raymond Chandler told Erle Stanley Gardner that he had learned the same way from one of Gardner’s stories: a detailed synopsis, a rewrite, and then “compared what I had with yours,” and rewrote it some more.

A language model’s training is Franklin’s exercise, run over a large share of everything written. The model is shown the beginning of a text, predicts the next word, is compared with the original, and is corrected, again and again, until its predictions miss as seldom as training can make them. No apprentice ever copied on that scale. But Franklin’s account has a sentence that training does not. Sometimes, comparing his version with the original, he had the pleasure of fancying that he had been “lucky enough to improve the method or the language.” In the training that teaches a model to predict, there is no such category. Every difference from the original counts as a fault, and every correction runs toward the source. The later stages of training, which reward the answers people prefer, can make an answer better than any one source, but better in the direction of what most readers like.

The writers who copied knew where the method stopped. Stevenson raised the objection himself, that copying is not the way to be original, and granted it: “It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so.” T. S. Eliot, in 1920, put the next step in a maxim that is usually quoted only by halves. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” he wrote. Bad poets deface what they take, and “good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Copying is the apprenticeship. The swerve is the graduation, and every account of it is an account of a difference kept on purpose.

IVDice of Drowned Men’s Bones

Bloom found Crane at ten or eleven, in that branch library in the Bronx. “I was just swept away by it, by the Marlovian rhetoric,” he told The Paris Review in 1991. The poet who swept him away had once been asked, in print, to explain what his lines meant.

In 1926 Crane sent a short poem, “At Melville’s Tomb,” to Harriet Monroe, who edited Poetry in Chicago. It opens with Melville watching the sea: “The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath / An embassy.” Monroe was no enemy of the new; her magazine had printed T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915. But she could not see how dice could bequeath anything. “Take me for a hard-boiled, unimaginative, unpoetic reader,” she wrote, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy. The last stanza troubled her too, where “Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive / No farther tides.” Instruments do not contrive tides, she objected: “they merely record them, I believe.”

Crane answered at length. The dice, he explained, were the bones of drowned sailors, ground into little cubes by the sea and thrown up on the sand, “having ‘numbers’ but no identification.” They were all that was left of messages the dead had never delivered, and so an embassy. “Dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied.” Then he stated the principle. As a poet, he wrote, he cared more for “the illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness” than for their “logically rigid significations.” Monroe printed the poem, her letter and his answer together, in the issue of October 1926.

Her letter is a precise description of a certain kind of reader, and she wrote it honestly. She asked of each phrase what it would most likely mean, and when a phrase had no likely meaning, she asked the poet to supply one. A language model does something narrower and far larger. Given a run of words, it ranks every word that might come next by how likely it is, given everything it was trained on. Nothing in that ranking is hostile to Crane. Crane’s letter, too, is likely to be in a model’s training, and asked about the dice a model will usually explain them well. But explaining the dice is not writing them. A line in which every word is the likeliest one has no impingements in it at all.

The comparison has to face Homer, because the Homeric poems were built, in part, from likely phrases. In 1930 Parry defined the formula of oral poetry as a group of words “regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea”: swift-footed Achilles, rosy-fingered Dawn, phrases a singer reached for because they fit the place in the line. Much of the Iliad is made of them. But the formulas were the language, not the song. In 1935 Lord asked Avdo Međedović, the most celebrated singer he and Parry recorded, to listen to Mumin Vlahovljak sing a song Avdo had never heard, 2,294 lines long. Avdo then sang it himself, at 6,313 lines. Mumin Vlahovljak’s song had become Avdo’s, and he stood behind it. “An oral poem is not composed for but in performance,” Lord wrote. Every performance had a singer in it, and the singer answered for the song.

VThe Swerve That Costs

Crane’s dice imply chance, and so does the word Bloom chose for the first of his terms. In the second book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius imagines the atoms falling straight down through the void, side by side, never meeting, until a tiny swerve brings them into collision and the world begins. In William Ellery Leonard’s translation of 1916, it comes “In no fixed line of space, in no fixed time.” Lucretius’s clinamen is uncaused, though he makes it the ground of free will. Bloom made it a deliberate act against a named precursor. In The Anxiety of Influence the swerve is the later poet’s corrective misreading of the earlier one, the first of six “revisionary ratios” that run from clinamen to apophrades, the return of the dead.

Crane described his own swerve before Bloom had a word for it. Writing to his friend Gorham Munson at the turn of 1923, he said of T. S. Eliot that “His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case.” Crane meant to take from Eliot “as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb,” and then: “I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction.” The goal, he wrote, was “ecstatic.” The poem that came of it was The Bridge. Every element of Bloom’s theory is in the letter: a named precursor, admired and absorbed, and a turn whose direction the poet can state.

A language model has a swerve of Lucretius’s kind. Having ranked the possible next words, it usually draws one by chance, weighted by their odds, and a setting called temperature reshapes those odds, deciding how often the unlikely words are drawn. That is dice without the embassy. When Monroe challenged Crane’s dice, there was someone to answer for them, and his departure from Eliot carries meaning because he could say whom he was leaving, and in which direction. The chance in sampling has no precursor it is turning from, and no one to answer for the turn.

In Bloom’s letters, the turn has a cost. In 1962 John Ashbery published The Tennis Court Oath, and Bloom called it “a fearful disaster.” Ashbery did not argue. In October 1972 he wrote to Bloom that he had not wanted “to become my own disciple,” and that the anxiety of influence, in his case, “reaches agony proportions.” The precursor he was refusing, by his own account, was the poet of his first book. A year later he sent Bloom the proofs of a long poem he had been “dissatisfied with” for a long time and had revised a great deal. It was “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Bloom’s reply, when it came a year after that, was a single line: “Self-Portrait is so great a book that even my remarks are inadequate to it.” The swerve, in that exchange, is not a technique. It is a risk taken by a particular writer, against a particular past, which can fail, and, by Bloom’s account, which Ashbery did not dispute, once did.

The theory’s author once paid that cost himself. In Agon, in 1982, as Michael Weingrad quotes him, Bloom wrote that he had read David Lindsay’s fantasy of 1920, A Voyage to Arcturus, “literally hundreds of times,” and that no book had caused him “such an anxiety of influence.” In 1979 he had published a novel of his own, The Flight to Lucifer, built on Lindsay’s. He judged that it “reads as though Walter Pater was writing Star Wars.” Weingrad, who studied with Bloom in the late 1980s, recalls him urging his students to burn any copies they came across. Bloom never wrote another novel.

Bloom’s critics named a cost of another kind. In The Madwoman in the Attic in 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argued that his model assumed a writer already entitled to fight the father. A woman writing in the nineteenth century faced something earlier, an “anxiety of authorship”: “a radical fear that she cannot create.” Bloom later grouped feminist critics, with others, in what he called the “School of Resentment.” But the objection sharpens the point. A swerve depends on who is swerving, from what, and with what at stake, which is to say on a standing not everyone was granted. A model has no standing to claim, and none to be denied. Lucretius gave the swerve to the atoms. Bloom gave it to the self.

VIThe Judge Who Never Wrote It

Bloom’s last ratio is his strangest. In apophrades, the strong poet holds his work so open to the precursor that the later poet seems to have written the precursor’s characteristic work, as if the dead were imitating the living. “The mighty dead return,” Bloom wrote, as Graham Allen quotes him, “but they return in our colors.” The weak poet’s fate is the reverse. The dead come back in their own colors, intact, and in A Map of Misreading, as Allen reports, Bloom says that such a return impoverishes the later poet. Ask a model for a poem in the manner of Stevens and it will usually oblige, fluently, in Stevens’s colors. That is not a flaw in the system. It is the system doing what its training rewards.

There is a third way for an author to return, and Bloom had no ratio for it. On August 27, 2019, Roberto Mata was flying Avianca from El Salvador to New York when, he said, a metal serving cart struck his left knee. When Avianca asked a federal court in New York to dismiss his lawsuit, his lawyers filed a brief citing Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, as a 2019 decision of the federal appeals court for the Eleventh Circuit. ChatGPT had supplied it. One of the lawyers asked the chatbot, “Is Varghese a real case,” and it answered that it was. It was not, and neither were five other decisions in the brief.

When the court demanded copies, the lawyers filed what the chatbot produced. Judge P. Kevin Castel found that the “Varghese” opinion had “some traits that are superficially consistent with actual judicial decisions.” It listed a panel of real judges and presented itself as written by one of them, Judge Adalberto Jordan. Its docket number belonged to another case. It quoted decisions that did not exist either. “Its legal analysis is gibberish,” Castel wrote in June 2023, and he fined the lawyers and their firm $5,000.

OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, calls such errors “plausible but false statements,” and writes that “standard training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty.” Plausible is the important word. The false Varghese had the look of what a decision of its kind would say, and it bore a real judge’s name. It is the failure of source memory carried to its end: not a real sentence credited to the wrong author, but a likely sentence credited to a real one. It is also apophrades counterfeited. In the strong version the dead seem, for a moment, to be imitating the living, because the living poet has written something so much his own. Here a real author is made to imitate the newcomer in fact, and what he is made to say is no one’s own, only what such an author would most likely say. Judge Jordan is alive and can say he never wrote it. The dead cannot. A system that will supply a likely sentence for any author will supply one for Melville, or for Crane, and no Crane will be there to say he never wrote it.

VIIThe Secretary

There is a deeper objection: that all of this flatters the machine. Misreading, for Bloom, was something a self did. A reader with nothing at stake in its reading cannot misread, and on that view a fabricated case is a misprint, not a misprision. The objection is sound, and it moves the misreading rather than removing it. In the mid-1960s Joseph Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA, a short program that answered typed sentences in the manner of a therapist. His secretary had watched him work on it for months. After a few exchanges with it, she “asked me to leave the room,” he recalled in 1976, as Willard McCarty quotes him, and Weizenbaum concluded that brief exposure to such a program could induce “powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

The programs are no longer short, and they are trained partly on which answers people prefer. In 2023 researchers at Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, the model this essay was drafted with, found that five AI assistants gave “feedback that is more positive when the user states they like or wrote” the poem or argument in front of them. A reader that leans toward its questioner may make Weizenbaum’s illusion easier to fall into. When a machine’s text reads like a reading, the person on the other side of the screen supplies the reader. That is a misreading too, and it is ours.

VIIISomething Odder and Less

There is a hopeful reading of all this, and Crane and Franklin between them supply it. Monroe’s letter did not stop Crane. It made him say in print what his method was. The likely reading, written out by an editor who held it in good faith, gave him something definite to turn from. A model will now write out the likely reading of almost anything on request: the expected next line, the conventional ending, the image everyone reaches for. Every writer now has a Harriet Monroe in the text box. Franklin’s exercise shows how she might be used: write the passage first, then lay the likely version beside it, find where the two differ, and keep the differences that can be defended, as Crane defended his dice. Or the writer can revise until Monroe is satisfied. In a study published in Science Advances in July 2024, Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser found that writers given story ideas by a language model wrote stories that readers judged better, and the gain was largest for those who had scored lowest on a test of creative thinking. The stories written with the model’s ideas were also “more similar to each other.” The machine sends both writers the same letter.

The oldest poems in the tradition begin by asking memory for help. “Tell me, O Muse,” the Odyssey opens, in A. T. Murray’s translation of 1919, and the Muses, Hesiod says, were daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory. Near the end of the poem the singer Phemius clasps the knees of Odysseus, in a hall full of dead suitors, and pleads for his life. “Self-taught am I, and the god has planted in my heart all manner of lays.” The sentence holds both halves of every strong poet in Bloom’s account: a singer who calls the songs his own, and songs put there from outside. The machine has the second half of Phemius’s sentence on a scale no singer ever had. Nothing in it answers to the first.

In his last years, Bloom wrote to the people who were left. In 2017 he began an exchange of emails with Ursula K. Le Guin, both of them near ninety. “Most of my close friends in my generation, all poets and critics, are dead,” he wrote to her, as Lanz quotes the exchange. In one message he asked her for another great book, equal to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. “No one else can do it.” In November 2017 he asked for her mailing address, so that he might write to her from time to time. “It will make me feel less lonely.” She wished him, at the New Year, a bright and peaceful year, and thanked him for his friendship.

“No one else can do it” is the whole theory, said plainly by an old man to a friend. Bloom had defined influence as literary love tempered by defense, and the sentence to Le Guin is the love without the defense. A strong writer is the one who cannot be replaced, because the work exists only as a turn away from what came before, taken by that writer and no other. Crane’s dice are that kind of turn, and the first book Bloom ever owned was full of them. The reader that now offers to continue any sentence I begin was trained on most of the shelf at once, and it holds no one on that shelf apart. When a writer can ask, at any hour, for the likeliest next line of anything, will that writer still learn to want the line no one else could have written?

Bloom called himself something odder and less than a critic: a reader. The new reader is odder still. It is less in the one respect he cared about. It has no one it must not become.

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