We also owe to Bloom the career of one of our greatest Spenserians. Here is the beloved Thomas Roche describing (in Spenser Studies XVIII) how he came to study Spenser at Cambridge:

 

            Academic life was pretty dim too. Fortunately for me, I lived directly above a young man who was completing his dissertation on Shelley for Frederick Pottle at Yale. I had seen him shambling around the Library in New Haven but had made no attempt to get to know him. Proximity prevailed, and that is how I got to know Harold Bloom, whose daily miseries and jeremiads galvanized the life of the whole college. In honor of Christopher Smart, one of the then five Pembroke poets, Bloom organized The Smart Set, which met for a formal dinner twice a term in memory of Kit Smart's total lack of concern for sartorial proprieties; the only requirements of The Smart Set were the ability to hold one's liquor fairly well and old clothes, much to the consternation of the college servants. I think that Bloom got the whole idea to inaugurate his Cornish fisherman's outfit, heavy knitted sweater and baggy trousers, an outfit that caused him grief soon after the dinner. One of the members of The Smart Set was a young poet named Ted Hughes, who thought it might be a lark to get Harold out on the river in a punt because, like Marc Anthony, Harold was and is a land person. With our captive Falstaff seated firmly in the center of the punt, Ted shoved off, but Harold demanded to be let out at the landing of Trinity College where he forgot his principles of physics. As he stepped toward the landing, the punt was pushed back, and we saw Bloom, hanging onto his glasses, subside beneath the placid surface of the Cam. Clambering out and cursing us, he dripped his way back to Pembroke.          

Shortly after I arrived at Pembroke, it was announced that C. S. Lewis had accepted the Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and Bloom decided that I must read Spenser with him because we were both Christian. I suspect some revenge here since Bloom loathed Lewis for his bad theology. Nonetheless, even though I assured Bloom that I had read only Book I of The Faerie Queene, he insisted, and I wrote Lewis to ask to read with him. The next day I got the following reply: "Dear Roche, I have left Oxford to avoid students, in particular American students, Yrs, csl." Prompted by Bloom, I went to Matthew Hodgart, who must have told Lewis that I was a New Critic from Yale, for the next day I got the following note from Lewis: "Dear Roche, come to my rooms at 4 on Thursday, having read SC." I did, but I must admit that I had to ask Bloom what SC was, and that was the beginning of my career as a Spenserian, and it all began at Pembroke.

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