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The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

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It would be unfair to suggest that anyone who disagrees with Bloom is simply suffering from the escapist, repressive anxiety of which he claims to be a theorist. Likewise, it would be a circular argument to say that anyone who finds Bloom's stance self-defeating is merely an anxious ephebe trying to justify their own mediocrity, to dissemble their own belatedness, to obscure the deeper issues of poetic originality.

Or would it?

I've been ridiculed for saying this, but *The Anxiety of Influence* is a very harsh, very difficult little book. And yes, most writers *do* tend to shrug it off with defensive laughter and glib overconfidence. "Bloom's theories don't apply to me, after all. *I* don't feel the anxiety of which he speaks. I'm as young as Adam in the literary Garden of Eden, and my work is as important and worthwhile as I wish it to be." Thus tolls the death-knell of the M.F.A. student in Creative Writing.

Bloom's vision of the Canon has nothing to do with a required list of books, with the "carrion-eaters" of Tradition, paying uncritical knee-tribute to precedents and precursors. Bloom is simply reminding us that literature is not created in a vacuum of Edenic self-deception (the bland, cheeky optimism of the writing workshop), but rather in the poetomachia of the solitary apprentice testing himself against the creations of the past and present, a gladiatorial dialogue with the collective personae of Anteriority. In other words, the greatest literature is in competition with *itself*, an internalized version of the Canon that each strong poet carries within. The competition is both loving and malicious, and the "precursor" is always a composite of texts and artists, including contemporary authors fighting for imaginative and thematic territory, spurring each other on to higher achievements while stampeding the fallen.

For polemical purposes, Bloom simplifies the "composite precursor" in his reading of the English Romantics, testing themselves against the canonical strangeness of one John Milton. By casting the Miltonic Satan as the modern poet *in extremis*, Bloom creates a critical mythology as compelling as it is melodramatic, working through the byzantine evasions and torque-laden inversions the ephebe undertakes to carve out an imaginative space for himself. The "revisionary ratios" are derived from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, conceptualizing poetic creation as a heroic self-purgation and regeneration, achieving originality with an apparent loss of power, then returning to the fold for fresh melee and assimilative combat. Bloom's conscious objective is TO MAKE THE POET'S JOB MORE DIFFICULT, the smash complacency where it lives, in the Eliotic idealizations of "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which argues (catastrophically, in Bloom's view) that poetry is the benign and empyreal handing-down of the Muse's wedding-band from precursor to ephebe. But as Bloom persuasively argues, Eliot's stuffy and pretentious election of Dante as his true poetic father desperately obscures his true debts to Tennyson and Whitman, and his poetry may be weaker as a result. The casualties of Eliot's "poetic pacifism" lie forgotten in the charnel-house of unknown soldiers who've mistaken academic careerism for the deeper mysteries of canonical anguish, who've taken the low road of insularity against the combative "wakening of the dead."

To suggest that this sort of gladiatorial perspectivizing is "self-defeating" is rather like calling Nietzsche a "nihilist" because he chose to philosophize with a hammer -- that is, dedicated himself to scraping away all the evasions, the happy-go-lucky subterfuge -- to provide a more truthful genealogy of art and creativity and, more importantly, an Ethics on precisely what is required of writers (born this late in history) pretending to canonical strength. *TAoI* is as Nietzschean a text as you will find, a polemical kick in the stomach, brutal in its necessities, staring deep into the horizon of literature and conceptualizing the intra-poetic psychic warfare of poets WHO WILL NOT DIE. It is a nail-bomb thrown into the seminar-room of creative writing workshops, exploding the glib complacency of young writers who've forgotten that Time is unforgiving in its choice of literary survivors.

To put it another way, Bloom never says that originality doesn't exist, only that our idealized, Eliotic perceptions of originality are immature and self-defeating, an excuse not only to *be* mediocre (as young as Adam at the dawn of Creation), but to revel in and celebrate that mediocrity. That said, those who are coddled by Academe will probably find Bloom's book vulgar, incomprehensible, melodramatic, even paranoid in its implications. While others, stoically self-critical, will find themselves reading a completely different book, and a glorious one at that.

As the previous reviewer suggested, there may be room enough in the academic industry for a communal fellowship of writers and teachers, but there is an important qualitative difference between the respectable productions of, say, a Mark Van Doren, and the monstrous achievements of canonical prowess Bloom examines here. Mediocrity needs to justify itself, to make excuses for its smug complacency, but just as 99.9% of our generation's literature is "written in water," so the canonical survivors of the future will be forced to take even more extreme measures to be remembered, to stand in the square where martyrs are made. Bloom's book, in essence, attempts to dramatize and account for these "extreme measures."

*The Anxiety of Influence*, for all its conceptual flummery and Rube Goldberg convolutions, stands today as a brilliant thought-experiment on the lengths genius will go to stamp itself in bronze, to carry on and flourish in a universe of Death (or its literary equivalent, Compromise). Even if you find his main argument pedantic and repulsive, Bloom provides dozens of pyrotechnic micro-arguments in each chapter, not to mention some brilliant and provocative readings of classic poetry. Bloom is a great talker and showman, and those who dismiss his theories as frivolous poppycock may still be charmed by his brash, Hazlittean personality. The important thing is to take the time to understand where Bloom is coming from, and not to project one's own anxieties onto this difficult and rewarding text.

Yes Bloom is a great and inspiring critic, a great creator himself. Yes, Bloom's work is filled with tremendously interesting insights into Literature,remarkable unexpected connections between creators who seemed so distant from each other.
No, Literature does not follow the simple law of progression, or the simple Law of a creator's strong reaction to the strong creators before. There are figures in Literature who in some way seem to be reacting to no one( Hopkins is one good example) and figures whose whole discourse is in absorbing the creation of others not to transcend them but to celebrate them.( Borges) There are also creators who however they may be influenced by others, as Kafka was influenced by Dickens and perhaps Kierkegaard, have such a unique way of seeing the world that they seem to be born of themselves. In Literature it is not necessary always to stand on the shoulders of Giants much less knock the Giant down if one is to move forward.
The laws of literary creation are as mysterious and individual as the next new voice which comes to the world. Quixote may over- ride the romantic chivalrous literature Cervantes parodies but he does this in a comically humane way that no one before or since has or could surpass.

There are some books which are difficult to grasp and understand fully because of their complex content and others because they are poorly written. For me, this falls into the former category. I think this is an important book far beyond the study of literature and poetry. I was first alerted to it in a book by Richard Rorty who drew on it for broader philosophical and cultural insights and that is where I see its value. I have no idea if it works as a "theory" of poetry but it certainly captures one important aspect of the challenge of cultural and individual change and growth, namely that sometimes both societies and individuals feel the weight of their precursors as inhibiting. Bloom puts this challenge very vividly: it is "the horror of finding oneself to be only a replica, a copy; or becoming only a reader, i.e. drowning in the precursors." Is this perhaps why we readers feel we must write these reviews?

No, Bloom's book is not fun in the traditional sense of the word; rather, it is a fun way to peer into the psychological tropes that govern poetic composition and an enjoyable method to use when analyzing poetic texts. I used the book as a foundation for writing a paper about John Milton's influence on 18th-century English poet Thomas Gray, and each stage of poetic growth that Bloom discusses provides endless possibilities for explicating the meta-textual meanings of any poem when placed in context to its predecessors. Bloom's writing style is highly erudite and may seem dauntingly academic at first, but his ideas are often very clear and proceed in a highly logical manner (despite various tangents about the origins of Bloom's chosen terms).

The book may require more than one close reading to fully understand Bloom's dense and complex theory, but in each read, one finds more passages fulfill the book's overarching thesis. The book may not be of much use to someone who is not interested in poetry or literary studies, but worth a read if you're into studying poetry or literary critical theory of any type. Bloom is also one of our century's most important (if debated) critics, and should be required reading for all interested in English literature and theory.

And what pretty ruins they are.

If you can grasp anything by Harold Bloom, you will be better for it. For me, Harold Bloom can do no wrong. I love this book. Whether you read, write, or just want to drink deep and understand literature from an Olympian high, or from any other perspective than the drivel-laden and stoned one you have wearily born so long, try this. But be prepared--this isn't fast food, it's highly charged and fibrous nutrition--it may lead to literary obsession and an overfed intellect.

When I start a Bloom book, I always say, "Cheers."

I have previously described myself in a review as the most spaced-out poet on the planet, without describing the awful legal context in which such a view of myself is absolutely necessary. This book makes the context clear, but a general reader still might not understand how concrete this difficulty is because THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE is overtly a book about poetry, and hardly at all about exercising judgment. The page of the book where I left it open the longest, and where the book subsequently opened most easily, and which I read most often in the five weeks in which I was interested in this book, was page 58, which describes a poet who "experiences anxiety necessarily towards any danger that might end him as a poet." Without dwelling on the personalities of the people involved, it seems to me that the anxiety which this book is about is clearest in the case of the presidential election of 2000, in which the ability of the Florida Supreme Court to act as the ultimate judges of that opportunity to count ballots was subject to the power of the United States Supreme Court to judge the election in some way which would produce a result which would be opposite to what a majority of the Florida Supreme Court desired. (...)and poets can be much more open about what they are doing than judges, so it isn't too surprising that this book is about poets.

Freud and Nietzsche form a nice frame of reference for what is happening in this book. I kept looking for mentions of Rilke, which wasn't fruitful until page 99, the first page on "Daemonization or The Counter-Sublime." There it says, "History, to Rilke, was the index of men born too soon, but as a strong poet Rilke would not let himself know that art is the index of men born too late. . . . the dialectic between art and art, or what Rank was to call the artist's struggle against art . . . governed even Rilke, who outlasted most of his blocking agents, for in him the revisionary ratio of daemonization was stronger than in any other poet of our century." There is a page just before page 99 which quotes Emerson on the highest truth about all things going well, "long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account." (p. 98). Emerson shows up again on page 138, with the idea, "Who seem to die live," to precede the final section of the book, "Apophrates or The Return of the Dead." This part doesn't relate well to law, particularly for a system which keeps thinking that a judgment like the death penalty might be considered final at some point.

Harold Bloom is an erudite and scholar writer and professor and his critic of literature, the formation of a writer, a strong writer in his own words, is contained in this "box of Pandora" that is the name i choose for The Anxiety of Influence, the most important book i've read concerning this theme: what is an author, the formation of an author, the agon with the older writers, specially Shakespeare and the anxiety, the enormous anxiety and suffering for becoming a strong author, an agon, the internal struggle of the writer. This book is more than a book, is a vital inspiration for those that can really read it in despite of the anxiety of reading it or because of it. I admire very much the personality of Harold Bloom, a treasure of the american culture.

Prof. Bloom writes in a very difficult style and his conceptual leaps are sometimes difficult to follow. But if you love great poetry, it is certainly worth struggling against his erudition to find what lies beneath, a true love of language.

Harold Bloom, borrowing the metaphors and terminology of psychoanalysis, interprets the poet's relation to tradition in terms of an agonistic Oedipal struggle, arguing that the ("belated") poet's literary productions result from a conflict with a "strong" father figure with whom he must compete through a number of rhetorical phases representative of the "repression" of his own poetic self and the strong misreading (or "misprision", as Bloom calls it) of the work of a predecessor. Bloom's conception of the "canon" is a hierarchical, continuous and genealogical model of direct succession, as the young apprentice to the craft of literature subjects himself to self-imposed austerities, ridding himself of prematurely smug complacency, opening his text to the strong aura of the canon, and testing his productions against it. However, Bloom's argument is undercut by his own acknowledgement that many great writers can afford to nevertheless produce great literature by debunking the whole issue of influence, belatedness and originality, and allowing their works to flow forth from them spontaneously. This admission risks making the importance of the canon altogether trivial. Another difficulty is the understanding of many writers that the ideas of "influence" and "tradition" can entirely do away with the idea of belatedness, for the poet cannot be belated in a world of which he or she can still have an impact through writing and teaching. Bloom's defeatist reliance on canonical precedents, and his implicit regard that new writers have arrived too late in history to produce truly original works, reflects the postmodern "fin-de-millennium" langour that all sources of inspiration have been exhausted, and that we must abandon all hope of creating new works, but merely repeat the past. Not only are his conclusions totally untenable, but his whole treatise, on its insistence on returning to canonical precedents, fails to provide for a more dynamic, more forward-moving (as opposed to reversing, revising and troping) theory of poetry, a theory capable of affirming life and history more fully. It would be interesting to discover what Bloom would make of Henry Adams's remark: "Everything is respectable and nothing amusing. There are no outlaws."

People such as Camper-Mann simply don't understand Bloom's ground-breaking book. It is not a typical academic piece of theorizing. Bloom begins with his own aesthetic responses, and discovers that writers who came later in a tradition have a real difficulty finding an original vision or creating original work. Bloom then tries to work out a theory to account for this.

At no point does Bloom suggest that a deterministic process is at work here. The great poets defy determinism and struggle against it. It was not pre-ordained that John Milton would appear in the 2nd generation after Shakespeare. Milton's own creative will carved out a place for him among the great poets. However, Milton appeared after the greatest poet in the language, and his attempt to stand up to the Shakespearean achievement had a massive impact on his poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth and Shelley wrote differently for having read and absorbed Milton. These are historical facts that Bloom tries to account for.

As for T.S. Eliot, he was profoundly influenced by Walt Whitman's poetry, but turned back to Christian ideas in a way that Whitman and other modern poets had refused to do. That is what's wrong with Eliot's work. Christianity is not a very profound source for poetic inspiration in the modern age.