“Literature is not an instrument of social change or an instrument of social reform,” he said in that same interview. “It is more a mode of human sensations and impressions, which do not reduce very well to societal rules or forms.”

The sound you heard on Monday, at word of Bloom’s death, was the cheering of some of his enemies. To dabble in the canon wars from anywhere near the right of center is to see oneself fired from that canon.

Bloom could be painfully oblivious to the ways in which shifting and enlarging of the canon was not merely necessary but joy-filled work. One reduces him to a caricature at one’s peril, however. To read him closely, to get down into the grass with him, is rarely to find a padlocked mind.

He saw how the women in Saul Bellow’s work were, to use his word, absurdities. In a later interview with the writer Amy Bloom (no relation), he noted how much great American poetry came from gay or bisexual writers. An uncompromising highbrow, Bloom sought to hoist his readers up to the level of what he saw as the greatest books.

He was born in New York City, where he grew up speaking Yiddish in an Orthodox Jewish household. His father was a garment worker from Odessa. He lost many relatives in the Holocaust. Bloom’s life was a bildungsroman with the bildung done quite early; he seems to have emerged from the womb a capacious reader, starting with The Bible and Hart Crane.

His abiding interest in religious thought led him to write “The Book of J” (1990), in which he asserted — without a great deal of evidence — that the first author of the Hebrew Bible was a learned woman in King Solomon’s court. He would later say, “Emerson is God,” and remark to an interviewer: “You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were.”