Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

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After Beckett's death in 1989 Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time" he said many years later. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca New York.

These theories dominated his writing for a decade after which he began to focus on what he named "religious criticism" in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). He has edited hundreds of anthologies for the Chelsea House publishing firm.