Harold Bloom happened to be at Cornell during one of the most famous student protests of the “canon wars,” one in which black students went en masse into the various campus libraries, pulled armfuls of books from the stacks, and threw them down on the circulation desks saying “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.” Bloom spotted the collected poems of Keats in one young woman’s pile and asked her, “Are you quite sure that the poetry of John Keats is irrelevant to you? Have you read any of the poems of Keats?” She glared back and repeated, “These books are irrelevant to me as a black student.”
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