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The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between precursors and the individual artist. His argument that all literary texts are a strong misreading of those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of criticism and post-structuralist literary theory. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature.
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.
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.
204 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
87 people are currently reading
4741 people want to read
About the author
Harold Bloom
1,695 books1,893 followersHarold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment" (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 149 reviews
April 22, 2015
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.
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.
March 3, 2025
Nobody can actually dispute the contribution Bloom made to critiquing literature. Prolific in his writings after a late start.
Published 1973 The Anxiety of Influence was his first book. Full of amazing insights and pathways to how was create literature that is original and create a strong poet.
Blooms downfall ( apart from personal ones) is his language usage and complex concepts alienate even the most learned of academics. I have had to read and re read The Anxiety of Influence. That says more than other critique I can give of this book. I came back to it and didn’t give in because its concepts and what we can learn from Bloom’s works are important especially as it takes effort to understand just like it does with art.
Published 1973 The Anxiety of Influence was his first book. Full of amazing insights and pathways to how was create literature that is original and create a strong poet.
Blooms downfall ( apart from personal ones) is his language usage and complex concepts alienate even the most learned of academics. I have had to read and re read The Anxiety of Influence. That says more than other critique I can give of this book. I came back to it and didn’t give in because its concepts and what we can learn from Bloom’s works are important especially as it takes effort to understand just like it does with art.
Read
January 19, 2018Every 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.
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.
December 19, 2022
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 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.
March 4, 2009
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.
Want to read
August 27, 2011"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.
Thus far I am not understanding it either. Will keep you posted.
January 6, 2010
''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.
And would it were with the cases of affective phallacy on this site.
December 2, 2024
I am not comfortable with the central thesis here nor its repercussions - that all modern poetry essentially stems from anxiety, and primarily from a father-son type anxiety. At some point Bloom states that poetry IS anxiety. This seems a vast overgeneralization, and if it is the principal way to understand a poem requires one to really dig into the author's personality and history as a principal method for understanding any poem. Which is a method I disagree with.
At the same time, I think the framework here for understanding the development of ideas and voice through the lens of Freudian psychology is fascinating, and the final step - when the poet overcomes their 'father' so well that you mistake the father as influenced by the son - as a really compelling and honestly true idea.
I would expect that this theory is tempered over time. Or perhaps Bloom was consumed by this anxiety, and his theory tells us more about the critic than the poets he is trying to understand. Either way, I plan to dive into some of his later works to see.
At the same time, I think the framework here for understanding the development of ideas and voice through the lens of Freudian psychology is fascinating, and the final step - when the poet overcomes their 'father' so well that you mistake the father as influenced by the son - as a really compelling and honestly true idea.
I would expect that this theory is tempered over time. Or perhaps Bloom was consumed by this anxiety, and his theory tells us more about the critic than the poets he is trying to understand. Either way, I plan to dive into some of his later works to see.
November 7, 2016
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.
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.
July 12, 2007
I hate this book.
Harold Bloom is an idiot.
Harold Bloom is an idiot.
November 6, 2018
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.
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.
April 4, 2013
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 .
وذلك على الرغم من استحالة أن يكتب أحد من المؤلفين كتابا إلا بعد أن يهضم الكثير من أعمال السابقين عليه .
December 3, 2007
Who does this guy think he is?
November 30, 2019
It makes me anxious to think how influential it is.
July 3, 2023
The thesis of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence was groundbreaking and immensely significant for the advancement of literary theory; however, the text's later portions get so lost in their digressions that reading them resembles wading through thick, gelatinous mud. Bloom is indisputably articulate and possesses an immense passion for literature, a passion that imparts itself onto the reader by how apparent his vigour and devotion are throughout the work. However, the structure Bloom decided upon for his argument, as a series of relationships, was odd, and certain sections were underdeveloped. Perhaps my expectations of the book's central concept were incongruent with Bloom's style and structure. Moreover, I typically don't mind psychoanalysis in literary theory; I often enjoy it, but Bloom's overreliance upon Freud was thinly opaque, adding little supplementation to his original thesis on dialectical 'misprision'. Nevertheless, The Anxiety of Influence expresses moving passages about poetic influence and anxiety; "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" and "The fear of godhood is pragmatically a fear of poetic strength" being two of my favourites. Consequently, The Anxiety of Influence merits reading despite its labyrinthine framework as (perhaps ironically), its influence on literary theory cannot be understated.
Side note - I immediately transcribed the following passage concerning the function of criticism onto a piece of paper and placed it above my desk after reading:
"Criticism is the discourse of the deep tautology - of the solipsist who knows what he means is right, and yet that what he says is wrong. Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem."
Side note - I immediately transcribed the following passage concerning the function of criticism onto a piece of paper and placed it above my desk after reading:
"Criticism is the discourse of the deep tautology - of the solipsist who knows what he means is right, and yet that what he says is wrong. Criticism is the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem."
July 6, 2023
This review is in two parts. The first is a brief overview of Bloom's hypothesis, and the second is a critique of his style.
THE SHORT OVERVIEW
We are born too late. We read too much and therefore plunge deep into the Hell of other people's writings. The cultural heritage into which we are born, weighing upon us and suppressing our creativity, Harold Bloom shall famously call the Covering Cherub; and the anxiety of losing our originality — the Anxiety of Influence. Of course, not everyone is inclined to share this anxiety; Bloom describes it as a malady of blasé ones, of obsessive reasoners with a morbid tendency to compare, and concludes that "Poetic Influence is thus a disease of self-consciousness".
However, the poetry is still being written, and, as Bloom argues, this is made possible by misinterpretation. The heirs of powerful precursors forge their way through various kinds of revisionism; they fiercely misinterpret their spiritual fathers (and indeed, "there are no interpretations but only misinterpretations") so as to spot a fallacy or incompleteness that needs to be remedied. Bloom distinguishes six revisionary ratios: clinamen ("swerve"), tessera ("completion"), kenosis ("defense mechanism... against repetition compulsions"), daemonization (desecrating a precursor), askesis (move to solipsism, "attainment of a state of solitude"), and apophrades ("the return of the dead").
At the outset of the book, Bloom names his main influences in his enterprise: Nietzsche and Freud. The latter is especially present throughout the book, as Bloom perceives the relationships between poets as a family romance. Thus, the spiritual father is treated as a biological; the heir is subject to the Oedipus complex. The son must overthrow the parent: "He who is willing to work gives birth to his own father" (Kierkegaard). The great poet is to be reborn as a perfect solipsist, an artist ready to act in defiance of the curse of his cultural heritage.
THE CRITIQUE
The view presented by Harold Bloom is truly fascinating, and many will find their feelings precisely diagnosed. Nevertheless, the entire book is heavily overwritten and at times feels like the snobbish public masturbation of a blasé intellectual. Names and books are dropped arbitrarily, along with psychoanalytic terms and concepts, — the uninitiated ones get thrown out. I was hoping for a smorgasbord of quotations of various poems, illustrating the evolution of themes and styles; instead, I got numerous statements about poets not backed by any sources. Bloom frivolously pontificates about what one (Milton, Goethe, Keats, etc.) thought and felt. I would go as far as to say that even the poets' diaries or letters, to which Bloom refers from time to time, are not reliable sources since the nature of human moods and of their writings in general is rather sporadic than static.
The deeper into the text, the less comprehensible Bloom's terms became: it was more or less clear what clinamen was, but at kenosis I already gave up and skipped large parts. It feels like instead of portraying reality in apt psychoanalytic terms, Bloom tried to fit the reality into Freud's language. Basically, most of the book is just a language juggling with occasional literary references.
Among the best features of The Anxiety of Influence were the wonderful citations of different writers, wherein they confessed uneasy feelings towards their precursors and contemporaries. It is quite ironic that the best parts of Bloom's book about literary influence are the ones where he quotes other writers. However, the narration is often built around those quotes instead of using them for illustration purposes. Bloom should really have just made a compilation of these quotes.
As for me, my (perhaps arrogant and "solipsistic") personality is no longer intimidated by precursors. Once one understands the dialectics of culture, one stops regarding art as a cul-de-sac. There's always room for invention. This fact, unfortunately, does not undermine the general truth: everything has already been said and everything has already been written; what humanity's doing is just paraphrasing.
THE SHORT OVERVIEW
We are born too late. We read too much and therefore plunge deep into the Hell of other people's writings. The cultural heritage into which we are born, weighing upon us and suppressing our creativity, Harold Bloom shall famously call the Covering Cherub; and the anxiety of losing our originality — the Anxiety of Influence. Of course, not everyone is inclined to share this anxiety; Bloom describes it as a malady of blasé ones, of obsessive reasoners with a morbid tendency to compare, and concludes that "Poetic Influence is thus a disease of self-consciousness".
However, the poetry is still being written, and, as Bloom argues, this is made possible by misinterpretation. The heirs of powerful precursors forge their way through various kinds of revisionism; they fiercely misinterpret their spiritual fathers (and indeed, "there are no interpretations but only misinterpretations") so as to spot a fallacy or incompleteness that needs to be remedied. Bloom distinguishes six revisionary ratios: clinamen ("swerve"), tessera ("completion"), kenosis ("defense mechanism... against repetition compulsions"), daemonization (desecrating a precursor), askesis (move to solipsism, "attainment of a state of solitude"), and apophrades ("the return of the dead").
At the outset of the book, Bloom names his main influences in his enterprise: Nietzsche and Freud. The latter is especially present throughout the book, as Bloom perceives the relationships between poets as a family romance. Thus, the spiritual father is treated as a biological; the heir is subject to the Oedipus complex. The son must overthrow the parent: "He who is willing to work gives birth to his own father" (Kierkegaard). The great poet is to be reborn as a perfect solipsist, an artist ready to act in defiance of the curse of his cultural heritage.
THE CRITIQUE
The view presented by Harold Bloom is truly fascinating, and many will find their feelings precisely diagnosed. Nevertheless, the entire book is heavily overwritten and at times feels like the snobbish public masturbation of a blasé intellectual. Names and books are dropped arbitrarily, along with psychoanalytic terms and concepts, — the uninitiated ones get thrown out. I was hoping for a smorgasbord of quotations of various poems, illustrating the evolution of themes and styles; instead, I got numerous statements about poets not backed by any sources. Bloom frivolously pontificates about what one (Milton, Goethe, Keats, etc.) thought and felt. I would go as far as to say that even the poets' diaries or letters, to which Bloom refers from time to time, are not reliable sources since the nature of human moods and of their writings in general is rather sporadic than static.
The deeper into the text, the less comprehensible Bloom's terms became: it was more or less clear what clinamen was, but at kenosis I already gave up and skipped large parts. It feels like instead of portraying reality in apt psychoanalytic terms, Bloom tried to fit the reality into Freud's language. Basically, most of the book is just a language juggling with occasional literary references.
Among the best features of The Anxiety of Influence were the wonderful citations of different writers, wherein they confessed uneasy feelings towards their precursors and contemporaries. It is quite ironic that the best parts of Bloom's book about literary influence are the ones where he quotes other writers. However, the narration is often built around those quotes instead of using them for illustration purposes. Bloom should really have just made a compilation of these quotes.
As for me, my (perhaps arrogant and "solipsistic") personality is no longer intimidated by precursors. Once one understands the dialectics of culture, one stops regarding art as a cul-de-sac. There's always room for invention. This fact, unfortunately, does not undermine the general truth: everything has already been said and everything has already been written; what humanity's doing is just paraphrasing.
Read
April 8, 2023## 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."
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."
October 28, 2015
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.
January 1, 2022
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:
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.
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.
April 9, 2024
It's easy to see why this book was such a sensation (in the small part of the world where literary theory could be a sensation, in the brief period of time when literary theory could be a sensation). And the core observation about how reactions against certain authors are often inspired by internal tension over the influence of those same writers is compelling, if not necessarily true. (And who cares if it's true.) But this book is really old fashioned, in its prose and its milieu and the critical world it engages. You would be forgiven for saying "of course it's old fashioned, it's Harold Bloom!" But I mean that it's old fashioned in ways that Bloom isn't in his pop lit stuff, which I mostly admire very much. It's very much a product of 1970s litcrit culture, even though Bloom was of course very keen not to be a product of his own times. Interesting at points but eminently skippable today.
September 29, 2022
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.
May 21, 2025
I could barely make it halfway through this. Sometimes he's eloquent, but I also fear he is a partisan, unlike his god Shakespeare, which is queer. He preaches one thing, then does another: reads only the classics but refuses to write his own poetry that could out-do them. He stays in the realm of criticism, merely pointing backwards and hurrumphing. I don’t get what’s he’s trying to achieve.
Ultimately, it’s hard for me to take bloom seriously; he seems so out of touch, not just with contemporary life, but with even the canon itself; the biggest problem I have is that he only cares to compare, and exclusively along a single axis of technical quality. Nothing else matters to him, not personal experience, not balance, nothing but the technical perfection he apparently sees in Shakespeare; to him, that is the center, and everything becomes worse in its distance from him, like an Augustinian theodicy.
This all obviously begs the question of WHY the best is all you should ingest; many paradoxes point to the opposite, that only ingesting the technical makes you an unbalanced, insufferable asshole (cough). The lesson of paradox is that it’s not just the straightforward which must be taken into account, but the roundabout, the indirect, the not immediately “perfect,” or whatever standard Bloom has for everything.
I feel as if he’s unable to state anything clearly or simply; this isn’t to say he’s intentionally obfuscating, but rather that he’s so helplessly derivative that he himself is almost intentionally lost in what he in his own bias thinks are the greats, the only ones worth studying or respecting or being influenced by. His abject refusal to acknowledge the impact of the author's time and place on their art is actually baffling, because it alienates everyone but the most pretentious, nerdy, autistically literate zealots like himself.
I look down on the average person because they refuse to even open their eyes and notice that they’re eating slop. I, however, am not an elitist saying that they must only eat the purest fruits and vegetables of the great artists and authors. I never would say such a thing. I myself enjoy ingesting a little slop now and again. A pure, strictly wholesome diet of any kind is not healthy, it's pathological. Furthermore, such a diet is simply boring. Ironically, we can know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare himself, Bloom’s god, was no elitist, and worked at all levels: from bawdy dick jokes to sublime introspection. Shakespeare, as both actor and writer/director, was hyper literate at all levels of society. He was in touch with the royals he had to write for, as well as the average pit-dwellers who watched from the floor level and only paid a penny to watch. I think we can safely assume Shakespeare went out drinking with friends some nights and other nights stayed up late writing while the muse struck him. He’s too well-rounded an author to have been as particular as Bloom seems to implicitly demand we all be.
But the problem with Bloom isn’t that he explicitly says all of this; you have to read between the lines to see it, because his hyper-referentiality is the main ruse he uses to prop of his lack of an argument. This very referentiality is the main thing which drives the average person away from literature, especially classical literature. If it was just an issue of complex language, I think people would probably be able to hang in there for a little, but because of all these difficult to pronounce names, people feel intimidated. Rather than having a vague feeling that they’re missing out on things (like you do with words you've heard but don't know), references concretize the discomfort the longer the litany of names grows they don’t recognize. Classic literature has built into it a shame that gnaws at the average modern person not raised on the classics. It can only be overcome through exposure and a lot of patience; Bloom seems completely incompetent in terms of conveying his ideas to all but the most insular compatriots.
The saddest part is that I don’t feel like Bloom is trying to be elitist here; I can tell he’s at least pretending to write for a wider audience, but it’s still so deep in the conversation that the average person who hasn’t read as much as I have would feel like they’re intruding on an intimate conversation already in motion. This is what keeps so many people silent, and thus shut out of the conversation as a whole. The only effort Bloom makes is that he talks nearer to us and dumbs down some of his diction, assuming that that will come across as welcoming, an invitation. Instead, it comes across as Bloom not being self-aware enough to notice that no one else has been talking.
He admitted in an interview once that, late in his teaching career, he wanted to work on actually asking questions to his students and waiting for an answer, instead of answering his own questions. His (lack of an) approach to teaching is really what I get from him as an author and thinker: namely, he lectures AT people, telling people his own interpretation and waxing poetic about the few writers he thinks worth his time, then he walks away. There’s no reciprocity there; the conversation is between the literary greats and him (somehow he’s worthy of approaching them?). We, no matter how well read, can never be as well-read as him, so we feel left out. He’s really almost the opposite of an educator, because instead of inviting students into the conversation like Mark Van Doren and others who empower their students, he performs for his students, as if he’s trying to convince them their pricey tuition at Yale is worth it.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Bloom himself is the one who most acutely feels an anxiety in the face of influence, mostly because he spends all this time with great authors but never has become a great poet himself. He loves these men, but he can never be them, not even be like them. They were all dead when he was alive, and he felt like he was born at the wrong time, being able to watch the steady decline in quality of writing (whatever that means) from Shakespeare’s time to the present.
And I say “whatever that means” seriously, yet also dismissively. Bloom doesn’t clarify what standards he’s using when he says that one writer is better than another. When he describes what makes an author better than another, it’s usually the same general lit crit adjectives that have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the average person, but which for him still retain an almost superstitious reverence. I think it was wise for him to exclude Shakespeare from his book (otherwise it would have bloated to twice the size without any increase in content except for repetitious superlatives).
Bloom’s refusal to interrogate his own starting assumptions is not only catastrophic to his argument, but it’s shocking given how he claims that Nietzsche and Freud were both central to his theory. If one gathers anything from either of those thinkers, it would be the detonation of mainstream starting assumptions about values and society, respectively. Magnifying this problem is the cyclical and thus non-concise nature of his prose, especially in the preface and introduction, which could both have been half as long. In short (unlike Bloom, haha), his arbitrary approach and self-conscious style both conspire to preclude him from addressing any of the interesting questions he could have addressed.
The question that this book begs is “why must we bow at the feet of great men?” Bloom resolutely refuses to even approach this very interesting, very nietzschean-yet-anti-nietzschean question. He dismisses the entire “school of resentment” with the very label he gives it, somehow without anticipating the precise reversal of his complaint back at him; in other words, they could just as easily dismiss him as the “school of elitism” or somesuch namecalling drivel. His label does nothing but show that he’s either too cowardly or too incompetent to refute their work, which is surprising given his self-righteous posturing. But I think he’s a rather shallow thinker overall, which shouldn’t be surprising given that he exhibits the worst misunderstanding of the scientific method: namely, deciding a hypothesis ahead of time, then conveniently finding information to support the hypothesis. He starts with the assumption that Shakespeare is the best writer in English (which he is), but then goes on to learn none of the lessons from Shakespeare that he extols in the preface, such as his absolute refusal to be a partisan or have any singular dogma that possesses him. Perhaps Bloom cynically absolves himself of being held to that sort of a standard because of his concomitant belief that there can only be one Shakespeare, that we all write/think/live in his shadow, etc. etc. etc.
One last insult I'd like to throw at Bloom's bloated corpse: the preface is insulting in its ignorance. Bloom makes the absurdly extreme claim that Shakespeare invented the human, that he single-handedly invented subtlety and self-consciousness and a whole slew of things. At several times early in the book Bloom insults the Bible as a text and says that Shakespeare was more profound (“we are fools of time bound for the undiscovered country, more than we are children of God returning to heaven. The issue is not belief but our human nature, so intensified by Shakespeare as to be his re-invention”), which is absurd, because without the Bible Shakespeare wouldn't exist. Once again, if Bloom actually read Nietzsche, he would have understood the depth of our indebtedness to Christianity (hint, it's the all-encompassing thing we cannot escape; even atheists in the west are still Christian in their progressive morality). All of this is not only obvious but it also completely undermines his starting assumption of Shakespeare being the greatest writer (he wasn't, the authors of the Bible were), and complicates his thesis that “great writing is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing.” As Zizek and many others have pointed out, the strength of great texts (like both Shakespeare's corpus and the Bible) is that they inspire a myriad of interpretations, not that they have one single interpretation which gets mistaken. Ptoey.
Ultimately, it’s hard for me to take bloom seriously; he seems so out of touch, not just with contemporary life, but with even the canon itself; the biggest problem I have is that he only cares to compare, and exclusively along a single axis of technical quality. Nothing else matters to him, not personal experience, not balance, nothing but the technical perfection he apparently sees in Shakespeare; to him, that is the center, and everything becomes worse in its distance from him, like an Augustinian theodicy.
This all obviously begs the question of WHY the best is all you should ingest; many paradoxes point to the opposite, that only ingesting the technical makes you an unbalanced, insufferable asshole (cough). The lesson of paradox is that it’s not just the straightforward which must be taken into account, but the roundabout, the indirect, the not immediately “perfect,” or whatever standard Bloom has for everything.
I feel as if he’s unable to state anything clearly or simply; this isn’t to say he’s intentionally obfuscating, but rather that he’s so helplessly derivative that he himself is almost intentionally lost in what he in his own bias thinks are the greats, the only ones worth studying or respecting or being influenced by. His abject refusal to acknowledge the impact of the author's time and place on their art is actually baffling, because it alienates everyone but the most pretentious, nerdy, autistically literate zealots like himself.
I look down on the average person because they refuse to even open their eyes and notice that they’re eating slop. I, however, am not an elitist saying that they must only eat the purest fruits and vegetables of the great artists and authors. I never would say such a thing. I myself enjoy ingesting a little slop now and again. A pure, strictly wholesome diet of any kind is not healthy, it's pathological. Furthermore, such a diet is simply boring. Ironically, we can know beyond a doubt that Shakespeare himself, Bloom’s god, was no elitist, and worked at all levels: from bawdy dick jokes to sublime introspection. Shakespeare, as both actor and writer/director, was hyper literate at all levels of society. He was in touch with the royals he had to write for, as well as the average pit-dwellers who watched from the floor level and only paid a penny to watch. I think we can safely assume Shakespeare went out drinking with friends some nights and other nights stayed up late writing while the muse struck him. He’s too well-rounded an author to have been as particular as Bloom seems to implicitly demand we all be.
But the problem with Bloom isn’t that he explicitly says all of this; you have to read between the lines to see it, because his hyper-referentiality is the main ruse he uses to prop of his lack of an argument. This very referentiality is the main thing which drives the average person away from literature, especially classical literature. If it was just an issue of complex language, I think people would probably be able to hang in there for a little, but because of all these difficult to pronounce names, people feel intimidated. Rather than having a vague feeling that they’re missing out on things (like you do with words you've heard but don't know), references concretize the discomfort the longer the litany of names grows they don’t recognize. Classic literature has built into it a shame that gnaws at the average modern person not raised on the classics. It can only be overcome through exposure and a lot of patience; Bloom seems completely incompetent in terms of conveying his ideas to all but the most insular compatriots.
The saddest part is that I don’t feel like Bloom is trying to be elitist here; I can tell he’s at least pretending to write for a wider audience, but it’s still so deep in the conversation that the average person who hasn’t read as much as I have would feel like they’re intruding on an intimate conversation already in motion. This is what keeps so many people silent, and thus shut out of the conversation as a whole. The only effort Bloom makes is that he talks nearer to us and dumbs down some of his diction, assuming that that will come across as welcoming, an invitation. Instead, it comes across as Bloom not being self-aware enough to notice that no one else has been talking.
He admitted in an interview once that, late in his teaching career, he wanted to work on actually asking questions to his students and waiting for an answer, instead of answering his own questions. His (lack of an) approach to teaching is really what I get from him as an author and thinker: namely, he lectures AT people, telling people his own interpretation and waxing poetic about the few writers he thinks worth his time, then he walks away. There’s no reciprocity there; the conversation is between the literary greats and him (somehow he’s worthy of approaching them?). We, no matter how well read, can never be as well-read as him, so we feel left out. He’s really almost the opposite of an educator, because instead of inviting students into the conversation like Mark Van Doren and others who empower their students, he performs for his students, as if he’s trying to convince them their pricey tuition at Yale is worth it.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Bloom himself is the one who most acutely feels an anxiety in the face of influence, mostly because he spends all this time with great authors but never has become a great poet himself. He loves these men, but he can never be them, not even be like them. They were all dead when he was alive, and he felt like he was born at the wrong time, being able to watch the steady decline in quality of writing (whatever that means) from Shakespeare’s time to the present.
And I say “whatever that means” seriously, yet also dismissively. Bloom doesn’t clarify what standards he’s using when he says that one writer is better than another. When he describes what makes an author better than another, it’s usually the same general lit crit adjectives that have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the average person, but which for him still retain an almost superstitious reverence. I think it was wise for him to exclude Shakespeare from his book (otherwise it would have bloated to twice the size without any increase in content except for repetitious superlatives).
Bloom’s refusal to interrogate his own starting assumptions is not only catastrophic to his argument, but it’s shocking given how he claims that Nietzsche and Freud were both central to his theory. If one gathers anything from either of those thinkers, it would be the detonation of mainstream starting assumptions about values and society, respectively. Magnifying this problem is the cyclical and thus non-concise nature of his prose, especially in the preface and introduction, which could both have been half as long. In short (unlike Bloom, haha), his arbitrary approach and self-conscious style both conspire to preclude him from addressing any of the interesting questions he could have addressed.
The question that this book begs is “why must we bow at the feet of great men?” Bloom resolutely refuses to even approach this very interesting, very nietzschean-yet-anti-nietzschean question. He dismisses the entire “school of resentment” with the very label he gives it, somehow without anticipating the precise reversal of his complaint back at him; in other words, they could just as easily dismiss him as the “school of elitism” or somesuch namecalling drivel. His label does nothing but show that he’s either too cowardly or too incompetent to refute their work, which is surprising given his self-righteous posturing. But I think he’s a rather shallow thinker overall, which shouldn’t be surprising given that he exhibits the worst misunderstanding of the scientific method: namely, deciding a hypothesis ahead of time, then conveniently finding information to support the hypothesis. He starts with the assumption that Shakespeare is the best writer in English (which he is), but then goes on to learn none of the lessons from Shakespeare that he extols in the preface, such as his absolute refusal to be a partisan or have any singular dogma that possesses him. Perhaps Bloom cynically absolves himself of being held to that sort of a standard because of his concomitant belief that there can only be one Shakespeare, that we all write/think/live in his shadow, etc. etc. etc.
One last insult I'd like to throw at Bloom's bloated corpse: the preface is insulting in its ignorance. Bloom makes the absurdly extreme claim that Shakespeare invented the human, that he single-handedly invented subtlety and self-consciousness and a whole slew of things. At several times early in the book Bloom insults the Bible as a text and says that Shakespeare was more profound (“we are fools of time bound for the undiscovered country, more than we are children of God returning to heaven. The issue is not belief but our human nature, so intensified by Shakespeare as to be his re-invention”), which is absurd, because without the Bible Shakespeare wouldn't exist. Once again, if Bloom actually read Nietzsche, he would have understood the depth of our indebtedness to Christianity (hint, it's the all-encompassing thing we cannot escape; even atheists in the west are still Christian in their progressive morality). All of this is not only obvious but it also completely undermines his starting assumption of Shakespeare being the greatest writer (he wasn't, the authors of the Bible were), and complicates his thesis that “great writing is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing.” As Zizek and many others have pointed out, the strength of great texts (like both Shakespeare's corpus and the Bible) is that they inspire a myriad of interpretations, not that they have one single interpretation which gets mistaken. Ptoey.
November 4, 2018
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.
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.
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April 9, 2025I was not expecting that much psychoanalysis...
March 30, 2022
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?
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?
February 11, 2015
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.
'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.
February 6, 2017
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.
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.
August 19, 2016
I don't think that anyone who writes books about how to read books should be taken seriously outside of academia. And even then it shows lack of conviction on the part of the reader. I find Mr. Bloom is pretty much writing "Cliff Notes" for would be intellectuals so they too can defend their snobbery. If you can point out one modern popular writer he has praised then I will rescind my words. I am just expressing my frustration at a person who takes no risks or has done anything original in their entire career coming off a some kind of genius because they praise what has is already accepted as beloved literary works by those before them.
Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale. George W. Bush graduated from Yale... nuff said.
Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale. George W. Bush graduated from Yale... nuff said.
May 10, 2008
There has always been a well of debt that can't be paid; an influence so undeniable, it can't be shaken. Debt follows us into the labyrinth of our dreams and creative explorations. Sometimes, it is the monster of our nightmares, as we go nightmaring into our work, as we seek fruition and autonomy from the past. However, there's no escaping influence. For better, or for worse, we are inextricably bound to each other. Usually, we work under the anxiety of one or more creative geniuses.
And it is for us (poor bastards) to deduce which genius is the mother, or the father of our despairing selves... and then, to work on.
February 24, 2016
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
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
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