The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

There is no doubt that Bloom's self-proclaimed "Nietzschean" theory of poetry suffers from a certain kind of myopia, as other reviewers have noted. By the same exact token, there can be no doubt that the truthfulness and nuance it has is extraordinarily powerful, extending far beyond the realm of mere literary theory into something of a robust psychology or literary philosophical anthropology. As human beings, we are constantly in the business of attempting to "say it new," pace Pound. Like poetry, religion, and every other production of the human imagination, each of which strives, like human life, to shed itself of its afterbirth on the way to elevating itself asymptotically into the impossible ideal of pure Reason, there are only certain conditions on which Bloom's theory becomes a disappointment. The most major of these has its analogy in human relationships, and particularly romance: if we take it too literally and seriously, it becomes useless, stupid, trivial, and a disappointment, for then it loses the full breadth of both the mystery it evokes and its truthfulness. Think of it this way: a "smart-idiot" challenge to Bloom might be that the first poets were cave-painters. Who were they trying to one up? The theory retains a wondrousness and truth when we realize that (mother) Nature was the first of men's rivals, challenging him at each remove to forge a happier existence for himself with the very unique tools of spirit with which she armed him. And he did this by painting images of what he hoped most fondly for in moments of starvation and fear and scarcity: images of the beasts whose flesh he longed for, and whose representations gave him the courage he needed, in an almost magical operation wherein the spirit overcame the recalcitrance of his starving flesh, and spurred him on to another hunt, in spite of the fact that he was hungered and in pain. It is in this way that man first spoke his poetry in an effort to beat nature at her own game -- he stole the images she gave him, and reappropriated them to encourage his own soul, like every poet since those times has.

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.

A strong primer for students wanting to know the embryonic beginnings of Yale critic Harold Bloom as intimately as possible different from his boisterous pompous persona. This small book goes to the core of his thinking.

Friend loves it.

It is needed for school and was on time.

Artist or poet here is a description of the artistic tradition a must read if you want to understand the evolution of art. Brillant book. Ilive it. Reminds me of Shelly'a in defense of poetry.

The book to read, if you are a student of poetry.

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.

I like reading about what Bloom has to stay about literature and various writers but on this theory I think he has gone overboard. Writers will influence other ones but the degree which Bloom maintains is over the hill as far as I am concerned. I had to stop reading about half way through and will take anything he further says about writing with two grains of salt.

An example of over-engineering. Take a poem, chuck out the essence and chew on what's left. Not my idea of a good time.

This is certainly not a book for the general reader, as it goes out of its way to use specialist terms which it makes no effort to define in an accessible way. The basic idea is that every poet is competing with a predecessor and that in modern western poetry, there's so little room left for insight that the poet can only "misread" - it's all been said (mostly by Shakespeare) and the modern poet is fighting against the death of the western poetic tradition by a "strong misreading". This is, perhaps, an interesting premise, but Bloom's style is the ultimate in pretentiousness and obscurantism - the sort of writing that gives criticism a bad name. Though the title of this book is often used as a nice catchphrase, the book itself has had less influence than its fame would suggest, basically because the theory, where it is intelligible, is unworkable. In fact, the ideas are childishly simplistic, and that may be why Bloom felt the need of using a sophisticated and often impenetrable jargon.In fairness to Bloom, in his later work he has toned down his defensive jargonism, and his recent  The Anatomy of Influence  (2011) takes the same theme as this book but doesn't bother pretending it has a unifying theory behind it, and is much the better for it. That book is a decent read, and plays to Bloom's strength, which is basically his genuine enthusiasm for the subject of poetry. Anxiety of Influence, though, is a book with no substance and no system, but written so that it takes several readings to actually realize this. The Anatomy of Influence

Behind the impenetrable language lies ignorance. On page 115 Bloom writes: "Hence Nietzsche, lovingly recognizing in Socrates the first master of sublimation, found in Socrates also a destroyer of tragedy. Had he lived to read Freud, Nietzsche might somewhat admiringly have seen in him another Socrates..." Where did Nietzsche "lovingly recognise in Socrates the first master of sublimation"? The answer -- nowhere. It has become fashionable to attribute to the philosopher any provocative or unusual opinion, or to use him as a back-up for the author's poorly conceived idea. Nietzsche had an agonistic relationship with Socrates whom he accused of the `tyranny of reason' (in Twilight of the Idols, among others) and charged with the death of tragedy. His attitude to other one-time idols (e.g. Schopenhauer, Wagner) was similar: combative reverence. Nietzsche was gravely preoccupied with `self-birthing' and the `right of priority'; that meant, figuratively speaking, killing anyone whom he had deeply loved and worshipped in order to assert the 'independence of the soul'. Hardly surprising, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was his most revered play (read his own account in The Gay Science, II: 98). Indeed, as Kaufmann aptly observed, Nietzsche had a sort of `Brutus complex'. Here was an opportunity to label it all as `the anxiety of influence', the opportunity Bloom sorely missed! For one of the most insightful treatments of Nietzsche-Socrates ambivalent dynamics I suggest reading Bertram's `Nietzsche'.Would Nietzsche have admired Freud as `another Socrates'? Certainly not! Even with all his passion for agon, he wouldn't insult Socrates by making such comparison. Asserting that toddlers plot to kill their fathers in order to bed their mothers(as Freud did with his 'Oedipus complex') is closer to a delusion than to any psychological insight. `Passing by in silence' would have been Nietzsche's likely treatment of him. Bloom's uncritical admiration for Freud's pseudoscience says more about Bloom than it does about Freud. Not to mention the fact that Freud plagiarised so many of Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's concepts, while publically denying that he had ever read their works. Of this, I imagine, Bloom is also ignorant.

Le produit a été délivré parfaitement, mais le problème c'est l'approche de Bloom. C'est nécessaire le connaître, mais il dit des choses...