I'm not sure what you want me to say here. Bloom is a well-read and probably brilliant man. I stand by my statement that people don't really read him in the academy like they used to, and that his switch to being a popularizer of the canon has detracted overall from his position. I'm not saying that people haven't read him, especially lay-people or people interested in the Yale School. The Anxiety of Influence is still an important book, though it hasn't come up in my work and probably won't if I continue along my current path. Bloom is not representative of literary studies as it stands today, nor is he representative of a critical practice that younger scholars value and partake in. I can say this while simultaneously refraining from making a judgement on his reading of Stevens or Crane. The thing that annoys me most about this exchange is that I don't think that Bloom never produced good work; I just don't think his recent work building up the canon is at all significant to the field of literary study today, something he might even happily agree with.
Assuming that an entire field is full of poorly read idiots is not a great way to prove your point. Plenty of people in the profession dislike Greenblatt's work; it is well known that things like The Swerve are not great scholarship, and New Historicism was always critiqued for its utilization of history. There's not some giant contingent of people excusing it. The problem is not that people are no longer well-read.
AS I EXPLAINED: People in this sub often react harshly to Bloom's name, dismissing him very quickly despite the fact that he is the best known literary scholar alive. I was trying to explain why that is. In fact, many people dismiss him as readily as they do Sam Harris, if for different reasons (which I said). Admittedly, some of this may have to do with his interactions with students, but that's not what I'm trying to get at. Was I glib? Sure. Did that help my point? Eh, probably not. But condescending to "english majors" does not make me rethink my ways here.
I don't know what else to say, so I'm going to bow out of this conversation. This isn't useful for me, or the OP, who has long since fled.