I've finally encountered videos of Harold Bloom, which I could not refuse to view--painful/embarrassing though I do find Bloom's shallow punditry to be...

But look, O obscenely fat person: There are indeed a certain number of exemplary things and works of genius scattered throughout the history of any culture, which, as they lie, may be summed into an (ideally, representative) Canon. And that's what us Johnny-come-lately, Byzantine tiers-up snd classifiers, literary critics--late-comers (skeptics and satyrists) to the feast of a dominant ancient culture--have come into the world to do. Not you. You are, for my money, an embarrassingly incompetent canonist: You include things in your prescriptive canon, such as the Hebrew Bible, which have no place in any well-thought-out canon; and you exclude things, such as the comedies of Marivaux and Goldoni, which any decently educated canonist would include.