| Title | : | The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0195112210 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780195112214 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 204 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1973 |
Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorable quotations, this second edition of Bloom's classic work maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded - neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. A new introduction, centering upon Shakespeare and Marlowe explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking, and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past quarter of a century.
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry Reviews
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Harold Bloom is an easy guy to dislike, and even easier to make fun of. Watching his interviews has become somewhat of a hobby of mine, and in them he often seems sullen and dismissive. He’s a portly bloke with bushy eyebrows and a weird accent from teaching himself English at the age of six. He also has a tendency to say that your favorite author or favorite book is utter garbage, and that really seems to piss people off, as if no one should ever have their taste challenged or have to formulate even to themselves why it is they like something.
I try not to focus on what he says he doesn’t like. It took me a while to come around though; he has said numerous times that Blood Meridian is Cormac’s only good book, causing me to be like “WTF?!” He’s notoriously bashed Steven King and JK Rowling. And he said of David Foster Wallace, “He can’t think. He can’t write. He has no discernable talent.” Ouch. Postmodern scholars everywhere found a new champion of their Hate when that interview was published. Nevermind that what he says about these authors is pretty much true, especially if you look at the work without emotion (hard to do and kind of antithetical to the reading process I know). The thing about Bloom is however, he has read so much (he claims to have once been able to read 1,000 pages an hour and remember everything, and I believe him) that his tolerance for clunky dialogue and cute epiphanies is less than zero. People tend to only see him for his negative comments – which is a dire shame because he speaks much more about the things he likes – so that he has become the caricature of The Old White Man. He’s actually Jewish… and he is one of the most outspoken critics of what most people don’t even realize is “Academia” today.
The most important thing I’ll take from The Anxiety of Influence is that Bloom has moved beyond reading literature in the framework of personal taste. He has a good quote about poems being like baseball teams, some like this one, others like that one, and their isn’t really any right or wrong in what a person likes. Bloom even reads in literature beyond what the author her/himself might have claimed it to be about which is at once a most controversial statement and raises his form of criticism to the level of philosophy. Fittingly, he quotes Nietzsche frequently throughout the book, even though you can tell he doesn’t particularly like F.W. Cuz that’s not the point! He sees something true even in authors he wouldn't “like” on FB, and that is something that is almost lost on a culture that reads strictly for entertainment.
So what does he say exactly? He says that a great poet is consumed with anxiety when it comes to their precursor poets/poems, because a truly great poet can’t stand the fact that someone said the same thing better and more completely before him. Thus, in order to subsume his influences, he must go through a process of deliberately misreading his precursor, dehumanizing himself, breaking down everything that made him a poet to begin with, re-finding his poetic spirit (or daemon), until eventually, maybe, he is strong enough to do battle with his long-dead great poet precursor, his primary influencer, his Great Original. In the rare instances where this occurs successfully, it is possible Bloom claims, for a dead poet to resemble a living one, as if the dead had been influenced by someone that isn’t even born yet. Wow. That is heavy, to me. This is a very quick synopsis, but it encapsulates a lot of what excites me about reading: the genealogies of influence, conversing with dead spirits, becoming friends with someone you could never ever meet.
Of course it is an Anxiety, and there were parts of the book where I almost forgot why anyone should read in the first place. Reading for entertainment and escape is not a bad thing at all in my opinion. Surely all of writing can’t be some humorless battle with dead guys, where the primary goal is to best the writers you love the most and whom have given you sublime levels of comfort and reassurance. It seems counterintuitive. Bloom would argue to this point that a writer doesn’t even need to be conscious of the Anxiety of Influence; he need not even know who his precursor(s) is/are. The idea that the ego is only one, and possibly a minor, player in this whole writing thing – which at its best is really divination… well, that is admittedly controversial, but powerful nonetheless.
These concepts are expounded here in a framework of Bloom’s devising that relies heavily on Freud (and I admit I have not read Freud) as well as Gnostic beliefs (of which I only have ideas), not to mention countless authors from all disciplines, eras, and styles, whom he namedrops usually without even using the full name, as if it were too obvious. Bloom is operating at the highest levels here, and why shouldn’t he? He is an American Shaman and his Spirit World is that of literature. He does cite examples along the way, but I could have used more. This I hope will be addressed in the spiritual sequels to this book, A Map of Misreading and Kabbalah and Criticism.
To read beyond taste expands one’s mind. I believe it will eventually have the result of expanding one’s taste. Bloom takes this to the nth degree here and has taken heat for it since its first publication. Culture needs controversy however. We need someone to challenge our beliefs at the highest level. You don’t have to buy the philosophy, but at the very least, Bloom’s love for books and preternatural ability to read them is worthy of respect. -
Every time I reread this, I become more dissatisfied with Bloom's central thesis about the poet's necessary "misprision" in order to clear the way for creative expression. "Misreading," to me assumes a correct reading, and I've had it up to here with professorially mandated "correct" readings decades ago in college. Age and experience has convinced me that every reader's engagement with a text is "correct" for that reader, the question is the ability to convey our ideas of the text.
I also believe that all literature is a constant conversation, so in that sense there shouldn't be an anxiety of influence at all.
That aside, the prologue to the new edition, basically a love letter to Shakespeare, is sheer pleasure to read. -
My doctoral thesis on Marvell,"This Critical Age," grew from this book, Bate's "Burden of the Past" and others. However, I downgrade Bloom's dependence on Freud's son-father conflict, and his frank focus on "strong poets, major figures"--again, a masculine metaphor.* (In my notes I ask if Bloom's selections here suggest "a survey-course mind.") I recall he abandons Ben Jonson (and by corollary, Marvell) as long prior to the Romantic anxiety of influence. I agree there, since Marvell's poems are all critiques of other poems, all unanxious, very self-assured.
Bloom concludes that the subject of poetry for the last three centuries has been this anxiety, "each poet's fear that no proper work remains for him to perform"(148). What? Clearly false for Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, all of whom would agree with Ben Jonson that poetry is mainly hard work. Bloom notes that Stevens denies poetic influence, much less its anxiety, says he held off from reading the highly mannered, like Pound and Eliot (7).
Agreed, again, that "poetic influence need not make poets less original; as it often makes them more original"; this surely fits Andrew Marvell. Agreed on Shakespeare, who "belongs to the great age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central"(11).
Bloom cites Bate three years earlier, the poet inherits a melancholy from Enlightenment skepticism of his mutual inheritance of imaginative wealth from both the ancients and the Renaissance masters.
Maybe Bloom best applies to the Victorian misinterpreters (another name for those influenced) of Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Hopkins, Rossetti.
Strongly disagree with Bloom's "strong poets": "no certain Titanic figure has arisen since Milton and Wordsworth, not even Yeats or Stevens"(32). He encourages us to laugh at "the mind is its own place.../ can make a Heaven of Hell, or Hell of Heaven" (C.S. Lewis). But I assert with Marvell,
"Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that 's made
To a green thought in a green shade."
I find these the best writing on our minds, better than Freud. Perhaps, too, Marvell is equal to his inheritance from the Classics--after all, he taught Latin and other languages to Lord General Fairfax's daughter--and from the Renaissance.
* Arguably, the very best writers in England and America during the last couple centuries were women: Austen and Dickinson, not to mention the many women equal to lesser lights like Tennyson and Trollope. So what is the model of female inheritance and conflict? Freud doesn't have it. Who does?
** My brilliant AmColl friend Tom Weiskel became Harold Bloom's favorite young colleague. Tom never forgot a thing. I got the best grades in AmColl seminars, 92 and 91. Only Tom got straight A's, but he died young. Bloom invited my book on him, Parodies Lost, to his Linden St home a couple years before he died, saying "I think of Tom every day. I still grieve him." See review of Parodies Lost. -
Bloom is here an American Nietzschean ventriloquist speaking through the dummy of William Blake's corpse, a rhetorician almost as eloquent and just as evil as Milton's Satan.
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''All modern schools believe that metaphor, or figurative language of any kind, is founded upon a pattern of error, whether you ascribe an element of will or intentionality to it, as I do in my belief that writers creatively misunderstand one another, or whether you ascribe it, as deconstructionists do, to the nature of language. But when fallacy is universal, it doesn't seem to make much sense any more to talk about specific fallacies - affective, pathetic, intentional, or whatever. They have vanished in the general fog of what might be called error. As soon as you emphasize rhetoric to the point where rhetoric is a kind of quicksand, then the fallacies vanish.'' --HB
And would it were with the cases of affective phallacy on this site. -
"When he was 35, Harold Bloom fell into a deep depression, and in the midst of that depression he had a terrible nightmare that a giant winged creature was pressing down on his chest. He woke up gasping for breath, and the next day he began writing a book that would become The Anxiety of Influence, in which he argues that all great writers are obsessed with breaking away from the great writers of the past. The book made him famous, even though few people could understand it. A year after it was published, Bloom reread it himself, and found that he couldn't understand it either."
Thus far I am not understanding it either. Will keep you posted. -
Video-review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Lzb...
Amazingly dicky on several different levels, there is much to admire in the scope and amibitions underlying this theory of poetry. It might look old-school to the point of outdatedness, but it can still make any dedicated reader feel like they know way less then they should about the subject of their passion, which all things considered is always a great thing. -
I hate this book.
Harold Bloom is an idiot. -
من أفضل الكتب فى النقد الأدبى ، الى جانب كتب رينيه ويليك .يتناول المشكلة الأزلية هى وجل الكاتب من أن يستبين فى كتاباته أثر كتاب آخرين تأثر بهم
وذلك على الرغم من استحالة أن يكتب أحد من المؤلفين كتابا إلا بعد أن يهضم الكثير من أعمال السابقين عليه . -
Who does this guy think he is?
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It makes me anxious to think how influential it is.
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## from second reading ##
Video review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGLpH....
## from first reading ##
Bloom's first book is a phenomenon. He covers his 6 stages of revisionary ratios, through which poets may pass: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades; and the symbol of the Covering Cherub (Genesis, Ezekiel, Blake), which casts the longest shadow over every ephebe poet and conceals the way to self-birth.
"[S]trong poets make [poetic] history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves."
"[R]eally strong poets can read only themselves." -
I got introduced to Prof. Harold Bloom while watching Yale’s course on Literature and Critical Theory. I didn’t know how to feel about him and his theory of influence, but now that I’ve read his entire book in which he presented his theory in detail, I can say that It explained many things for me, and it changed the way I look to novels and poems that I find similar, some way or another, to another novel or poem.
The most important lesson that I’ve learnt is, influence is not a bad thing. It is natural and, sometimes, beneficial.
Harold Bloom is my favorite literary critic so far. I recommend reading his books. -
no. i thought i could read this, not thinking of the course in which this reading is assigned, but no. bloom comes off as attempting to be sensational via basically throwing shit at your every single favorite author and literary work but no; doing so does not make the critic groundbreaking. his book is like twitter accounts of famous newspapers where they make a shocking headline so that they'll get more link click hits. And oh, guess what in the link its all horseshit. i had to toss this book aside. no, just, NO.
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Harold Bloom cast a long shadow on the state of English literature with his publications, the boldest (in name at least) being The Western Canon, published in 1994. He championed writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, setting them as exemplars of what literature was, and denigrated other forms of literary criticism which he saw as politically motivated, such as feminist or Marxist schools of thought. Bloom envisioned literature as a battle for attention and priority, with books competing for the eyes of readers. A critic's job is to separate and valorize those deserving of attention, their judgements grounded in a set of aesthetic concerns.
My use of 'battle' is deliberate, because Bloom presents literature - in particular poetry - as a form of Freudian struggle between poets and their predecessors (he uses precursors). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) is the first book where Bloom sets out his argument for poetic canonization. It is followed by The Map of Misreading (1975) and The Anatomy of Influence (2011), each refining and expanding on the statements made in the first. Drawing on Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, Bloom posits that literature is animated by a tension between generations, one where the latter generation struggles to either emerge from the shadows or to eclipse the former, or risk imaginative death:"Ideas and images belong to discursiveness and to history, and are scarcely unique to poetry. Yet a poet's stance, his Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being, must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish, as a poet, if ever even he has managed his re-birth into poetic incarnation."
Bloom argues that the way for poets to successfully defeat their antecedents is by the act of "misprison", a deliberate misreading of the prior poet's intentions so as to carve out imaginative space to operate. This is characterized as a way to escape the influence of the earlier poet's voice and words. He sets out six methods of misprison which he terms as revisionary ratios - clinamen (to sweve), tessera (to complete), kenosis (to empty), daemonization (to counter), askesis (to curtail), and apophrades (to open). In six chapters, he discusses each of the six methods while suggesting poet who make use of them. The first and sixth chapters may be the easiest to read, while those interested in literary criticism may fine the interlude portion which separates parts 1-3 and 4-6 of value.
Bloom writes in an elaborate style. He drops the names of critics, thinkers and poets with ease, leaving the reader to map these writers and make sense of his words. Sometimes, his terminology is obscure (for example: a young poet is an "ephebe", a Greek term for a young warrior in training). Without some grounding or understanding of British literature, this will be a difficult book to get through. Some people may consider Bloom's writing incoherent or difficult. I imagine the former accusation would be dismissed, the latter sneered at. Criticisms of difficulty suggest that the criticizer does not 'really' understand what is being said. They are not taken seriously. But to take that line of thought to its logical conclusion is to believe that serious engagement with Bloom requires an education in literature on Bloom's terms. It would have to come from inside the ivory tower. It advantages those with the resources to read and digest all this literature, and to speak it convincingly: a form of capital in itself.
The seductiveness of Bloom's argument is, taken at face value, literature sorts itself neatly into greater and lesser works. This is untrue. Great literature can and often will fall into obscurity. Minor works can be published and marketed as prize winners. The Anxiety of Influence presents an argument for inserting a framework for meritocracy into discussions of literary value. While I don't believe Bloom sees his arguments as sacrosanct, his influence on the norms of what we find good or bad in literature is vast. Once centered, once institutionalized, once capital and power is accrued, it is difficult to dismantle or move away from. -
the notion of a productive misreading is extremely Deleuzian so of course I'm on board. I feel like this book is in the same class as The End of History, where it has spawned many wrong opinions about the nature of the work just from people reading the title. late in the book Bloom outright says he has little interest in the idea that one school influences the next since "these things just happen", which should've been clear from his earlier invoking of Lacan's use of the tessera in his 53 discourse to the Romans.
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Ser igualmente chato e interessante não é tarefa fácil.
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Uma teoria da poesia não pode não ser uma teoria da vida. Afigura-se demasiado fácil remover do contexto os pontos que Bloom faz acerca de poesia e da importância da ideia de influência no seu pensamento, para um pensamento da influência na própria vida.
A ansiedade da influência de Harold Bloom parece-me ser um livro terrivelmente mal interpretado actualmente. O que só prova o seu ponto principal freudiano: que a influência se faz agonisticamente.
"Anxiety" foi traduzido para português para "Angústia", apesar da proximidade fonética de 'Anxiety' para com 'ansiedade' e de 'angústia' para com 'angst'; no entanto, semanticamente, 'anxiety' não tem a violencia de 'angst', pelo que angústia é uma melhor tradução do que ansiedade (que em português se revelam ao contrário ou são, hoje em dia, usados em sentidos opostos aos que lhes associamos em inglês, como é caso de 'vulgar' e 'ordinário' e 'ordinary' e 'vulgar'). Os pontos feitos acerca deste assunto são defendidos por recurso à obra de Freud, pelo que o título não é um uso ilustrativo dos termos, no sentido em que podia ser metafórico: angústia e influência são ambos temas primordiais para a obra.
Em primeiro lugar, influência aqui não serve de redução, o poema ou poeta que chegou primeiro calhou chegar primeiro por força quase histórica (à falta de melhor termo). Não obstante, a existência de predecessores faz um poeta novo colocá-los num pedestal (chame-se-lhe “cânone”, também à falta de melhor) e, ao lê-los, uma queda (clinamen) é posta em marcha. Influência, para Bloom, funciona de um modo retrógrado, não em termos da sua conceptualização, mas do seu movimento: os novos poemas actualizam ao porem em acto os sons, palavras, frases ou ideias de outros que o antecederam. Do seu pedestal inferior, o poeta novo lança um gancho (Tessera) aos seus antecessores, seja por que via for, de modo a procurar alcançar um patamar como o deles. Tessera pode explicar-se por via da física espacial: um wormhole é uma abertura transdimensional que liga a outro tempo ou espaço, uma ruptura no ponto de ligação de duas teceduras; assim, o poeta novo, com um poema, abre um wormhole, que o associa a uma família de poemas e poetas; esta ruptura pode dar-se por afirmação, mas tende a dar-se por negação, um interessante exemplo é a agonia expressa por Nietzsche face ao pensamento Hegeliano e Kantiano, que o força a escrever uma antítese destes pensamentos.
Kenosis, o passo seguinte, prende-se com as ideias de Repetição e Descontinuidade; à boa maneira Kierkegaardiana, podemos planear tudo para efectuar uma plena repetição de um momento passado, mas não podemos planear o clima. O poeta novo que sobressai não é o que repete, é o que transgride. Este ponto acerca da repetição liga-se muito bem às minhas ideias acerca dos decadentistas e a sua relação com a bússola moral do fin-de-siècle; os decadentistas arriscaram novas experiências para suscitar informação estética aos seus poemas e terminaram julgados for the crime of butt-fancying. Depois de dar continuidade ou romper com a tradição, os temas ou preocupações do novo poeta passam por uma askesis enquanto os dos poetas antigos são postos em comparação com os novos e tudo termina com o inevitável regresso dos mortos, apophrades em movimentos inesperados como o que acontece em “Kafka e seus percursores” de Jorge Luís Borges, que defende que os poetas é que criam os seus percursores através da sua posição cronológica na vida de um leitor e não na comparação cronológica com a sequência de autores de cada época.
Não só enquanto leitores, mas também enquanto humanos vivos, sabemos que na vida existe também um jogo de influências. E não deixa de ser terrivelmente fácil adaptar os pontos de Bloom acerca de poesia à vida. Afinal, um dos sentidos da palavra "poético" é o de uma correspondência inesperada entre a vida e a literatura. Não obstante, e tal como os seis estágios do sofrimento propostos por Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, nem toda a gente passa paulatinamente por todos estes passos (Clinamen, Tessera, Kenosis, Capítulo Intermédio, Demonização, Askesis e Apophrades). Sugiro a leitura do poema com que o livro termina, acerca de movimentos tomados em vida, possibilidade, actualidade e o aborto da experiência que não pôde ser tida. -
It's hard to critique a book of criticism as its usefulness to one seems, to me, rather more subjective than even the overall value of a work of fiction. Also, as a writer, I will probably tend to be more critical of critics, resenting their critiques of what I do more than the attempts, either successful or failed, of fellow writers of fiction and poetry in their efforts at self-expression. So, that said...
Having heard capsulized versions of Bloom's argument here for years in Graduate school (particularly from John Freccero, who found it quite applicable to Dante's presentation of the pilgrim's relationship to the character of Virgil in Alighieri's Commedia) I was quite pleased to find a cheap second hand copy and to actually read the source of the many mere scholarly references and "see for myself," as it were. Sadly, though, I don't feel all that much more enlightened now having read the text. The general thesis still seems quite valid--but I had garnered that from the anecdotal references. Most of the examples given are from Romantic and modern poets whose work I really don't know well enough to judge the validity of the points, as Bloom does in his great erudition. I found the chapter on Askesis or purgation useful as I have written an historical novel about a fellow artist (the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini) in Purgatory so that works for me particularly well--how can such a work not engage the subject, and, through the anxiety of being subsumed by both subject as his aesthetics, not be a kind of purgation of certain baroque impulses in my own work? Check.
Bloom writes like a douche. Sad to say, because I went to a couple of his lectures in grad school and I have never, ever been so impressed with someone's store of knowledge and perspicacity in person--I quite liked him. The prose of this text, however, is a bit much for what it is--sounds overly sure of itself and superior and flouncy (whatever that means)--not qualities I saw in the man when I heard him speak.
So, ramble ramble. It's an interesting theory/approach but there is more to poetry than anxiety, and more to the human mind as expressed in literature than even Freud imagined, I believe, so its POV is somewhat limited/limiting, no? What do you think? -
While Harold Bloom's seminal work 'The Anxiety of Influence' is considered to be a confusing book for the majority of its readers and students, I believe that it offers a valid argument and contribution to literary criticism.
'The Anxiety of Influence' does not simply propose another manifesto for antithetical criticism, but posits an alternative way of regarding the astronomical force that is poetic influence: "We reduce-if at all-to another poem. The meaning of a poem can only be another poem." For Bloom, the issue is the concept of true poetic history, which incorporates a poet's whole 'family romance' (to put it as Bloom so charmingly put it himself). He describes the development of an ephebe ('disciple') in terms of his relation with the precursor ('forefather'), who assumes the god-like quality of omnipresence.
I admire the way Bloom described poetic misprision from clinamen (swerve from the precursor), to tessera (in which a poet antithetically and paradoxically 'completes' his precursor), kenosis ('emptying' through a willed loss in continuity), daemonization (the counter-sublime), askesis (purgation) and apophrades (the return of the dead, to use Bloom's phrase). For me, that simplifies his theory considerably. Bloom also elaborates: "Clinamen and tessera strive to complete the dead, and kenosis and daemonization work to repress memory of the dead, but askesis is the contest proper, the match-to-the-death with the dead." The precursor plays a huge role in Bloom's theory, and that is what is meant by his omnipresence.
However complex Bloom's theories may seem, it is hard to disagree with them, especially since there is a lot of passion imbued in what he says. His preface is one of the most spirited criticism of Shakespeare I have read in a long time, for example. No doubt his work will continue to be misunderstood, but in my opinion only by people who refuse to grasp the terrible reality that is the anxiety of influence. -
So this book came highly recommended, I'm interested in criticism, and generally I expected something challenging to read but at the same time illuminating.
The point is, I'm not feeling illuminated at all. This may be because I misunderstood the central idea. This may be also because I find it to be utter bullshit.
It is, to be fair, very interesting, and it may well shed some light on the creative process; but while I find it obvious that yes, poets do influence one another, I can't really agree with the idea of misreadings, since I think that texts can provoke different responses (Roman Ingarden's places of indeterminacy come here to mind), and I found the thing rather difficult to read in general.
(This is not, in itself, a bad thing. I didn't expect it to be easy. But I expected it to make sense).
The preface, though, and Bloom's thoughts on Shakespeare are brilliant and I wish it didn't stand out from the rest of the book so much - I'd have liked to benefit more from the whole thing.
Three stars from me, almost solely for the preface. -
goddamn reading it for the third time
theory of poetry seems to outline my interaction with 'strong' people
i.e. anxiety of influence
etc etc.
puts you onto good western poets and also philosophy like emerson, nietzsche, etc.
i appreciate bloom's perspective
"what has been lost is the solitude of the reader"
etc. etc.
"Shakespeare, who more than any other writer, or any other person that we know of, thought everything through again for himself"
feeling like taking some books to the mountains rn -
It works to woo the ladies.
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Love this informative, well written work that makes you bend your mind to get out of that box you don't know you're in.
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Only read the first chapter, "Clinamen or poetic misprision", for a course I'm taking.
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bloom is so in love with shakespeare i kid you not
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"Everything that makes up this book [...] intends to be part of a unified meditation on the melancholy of the creative mind's desperate insistence upon priority."
A challenging book in which the writer assumes one's familiarity with Milton, Freud, the Bible, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, the Greeks, and numerous other philosophers and poets. It takes a while to settle into the florid style, and it helps to note the meaning of uncommon words Bloom repeatedly uses, such as 'ephebe' and 'misprision'. Bloom's central argument is intriguing, though: because a select few have said nearly all there is to say (and put it best, and put it first) - so that their names and works hover over the present day - those called upon to be poets struggle to find new forms of expression. The catch is the living must engage with the works of the dead, but must not be overwhelmed by them into silence or defeat.
The precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.
The young poet's pursuit of originality is quixotic, however, and Bloom seems to imply (in 1973) that Poetry is weakening over time, that it can only ever refer back to the great texts of the past. And any overt effort the ephebe exerts to establish a truly unique tone risks embarrassment, a stilted self-consciousness [see: this sentence].
No one can bear to see his own inner struggle as being mere artifice, yet the poet, in writing his poem, is forced to see the assertion against influence as being a ritualized quest for identity.
So I guess I buy into some of Bloom's Freudian take on all this, but he lays it on pretty thick, and his ranking of the "strong poets" is confusing to follow throughout. That said, I benefited from reading a book this heady and dense, and I belatedly thank Bloom for compelling me to declare I'll read Paradise Lost. -
There are moments when you may find yourself setting aside this slim volume for a moment in order to ponder how such an exhilaratingly batshit work of antithetical literary criticism came to be published in the first place. A bit of context: It is 1973. America is in thrall to Quaaludes, Schoolhouse Rock!, the AMC Gremlin and Secretariat. Everything is molded of orange or brown polymers, the closest thing we have to the Internet is CB radio, and our collective lust for folly is insatiable.
All that said, Bloom keeps the blood supply flowing to his thesis until he reaches the fourth chapter, where a sort of vascular insufficiency attends his musings on daemonization (or the counter-sublime). This is the point at which Bloom goes full-on Jim Morrison—RIDE THE SNAKE … THE ANCIENT SNAKE—and he doesn't really recover until the final chapter, which may only make sense by virtue of the fact that the reader knows that this will all be over soon.
If his argument amounts to an embrace of parthenogenesis and a sort of astral fuckery, it must be said that Bloom presents an original and thought-provoking (if wildly indefensible) thesis here. In relation to the sort of splenetic rancor and magisterial scorn he'd spray from his glands when in his dotage, Bloom's early peevishness is almost benign*.
*in old age, Bloom's disdain for T.S. Eliot was so vociferous that a charitable reader could only take comfort in the thought that, well, at least ghosts can't read**
**that said, if there is an afterlife in which spirits cavort and gambol, I'd like to think that the spectral Bloom has watched the 2019 theatrical Cats at least once, and he's so pissed off that the protoplasmic version of Eliot, a la Casper the Friendly Ghost, finds him/itself having to hide behind the radiator or inside the walls of his "living place" whenever SpectreBloom comes around, lest he be drawn into an eternal dressing-down for his role in birthing the source material -
Ok this book is billed as the starting point for Literary Criticism in America.
Ok let me say that Harold Bloom has an idea about poetry as being written from a place that is not uh..."of ones-self." That's not his wording. His idea is that poetry should cover all of nature in a big cloak and see the threads that run through it. This is his approach to criticism as well. This book can be read as an introduction to poetry or as a philosophical essay. Ok Bloom see's the innocence of poetry and attempts to identify the essence of poetic figures and ideas based on what he sees as the thread that runs through everything.
His main argument is that poets look back at poets before them and want to do something different from those who went before. This leads to new work but also takes them away from innocence and the source of poetic inspiration.
I think that this is the case in dreaming. We rarely dream when we're living in the modern world because information passes through us in a dream-like state and there's no real reason to look back at things we intentionally overlook in the day. We also experience words as written in stone and are no longer confused or need to fill in blanks because of modern simulated reality. If we dream of objects like a cat with hands that turns into a man doing a handstand then we are doing active dreaming. Our unconscious is primed for creativity in such a way.
For Bloom, the unconscious is constantly under siege by The Anxiety of Influence. Poetic innocence implies that the Poet is doing precisely what he wants and doesn't think twice about the consequences. Anxiety implies he has a rigid structure that he needs to adhere to and overcome. These two ideals are in play and the paradox of his thought is the vital part of his theory.
For me, poetry has the quality of being different because it allows for new grammar, new rhythm, new imagery. It utilizes all the senses to produce something lesser spirits must catch up to. Isn't that the joy of reading it? That you would have to struggle to understand what it took to reach the level of the greats is the anxiety. That you battle against your ignorance to grasp the poet's method. But once you sit down to create it is probably enormously enjoyable. I think that The Anxiety of Influence is an idea Harold Bloom uses to supplement his vision of direct influence across the generations of poets. Innocence means, at it's heart, free of consequence, and Anxiety basically means the opposite. These contradictory ideas are posed but the paradox isn't resolved. It's posed as the bane of a poet's existence that he will be unable to be innocent again. In his ignorance the poet accepts the Anxiety of Influence rather than innocence and refuses the idea that his innocence can lead him to "the place."
If the poet accepts the Anxiety of Influence as his own becoming (Nietzschean book) then innocence must fit itself inside the being of the poet post-Anxiety in order for there to be poet. What is this other than the ability to be playful with the new tools he has earned from previous poets. Innocence can only rest in the fact that the old poets are dead and the poet is the one who can do what he wants because there are no consequences from a dead man nor any of his contemporaries. This new innocence takes poetry as a type of dream where everything gets re-arranged and the currency of vitality is once redeemed by the poem itself. It requires a looking back and directly appropriating old poems. This vision is different from Bloom's vision where the dead men haunt the poet yet he fails to understand his misguided ways.
