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The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 2nd Edition

by Harold Bloom (Author)

4.6 98 ratings

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Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own 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 tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the leader of any critical "camp," his argument that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory in this country. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature and has sold over 17,000 copies in paperback since 1984. Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorably quotable, Bloom's book maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded--neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics.
This second edition contains a new Introduction, which explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past twenty years.criticism of the past twenty years. Here, Bloom asserts that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation he calls "poetic misprision." The influence-anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay. In other words, without Keats's reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, we could not have Keats's odes and sonnets and his two Hyperions.
Given the enormous attention generated by Bloom's controversial The Western Canon, this new edition is certain to find a readymade audience among the new generation of scholars, students, and layreaders interested in the Bloom cannon.

ISBN-10

0195112210
ISBN-13

978-0195112214
Edition

2nd
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

April 10, 1997
Language

English
Dimensions

8.03 x 5.33 x 0.43 inches
Print length

208 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

From reviews of the first edition:
"Bloom has helped to make the study of Romantic poetry as intellectually and spiritually challenging a branch of literary studies as one may find."--The New York Times Book Review

"This book will assuredly come to be valued as a major twentieth-century statement on the subject of tradition and individual talent."--David J. Gordon, The Yale Review

Book Description

"The most significant work that the gifted scholar-critic, Harold Bloom, has yet written."--Commonweal

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 2nd edition (April 10, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195112210
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195112214
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.03 x 5.33 x 0.43 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #192,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #14 in Literary Theory
- #117 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
- #470 in Literary Criticism & Theory

Customer Reviews:
4.6 98 ratings

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William Golding
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Born in Cornwall, England, William Golding started writing at the age of seven. Though he studied natural sciences at Oxford to please his parents, he also studied English and published his first book, a collection of poems, before finishing college. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, participating in the Normandy invasion. Golding's other novels include Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, The Free Fall, Pincher Martin, The Double Tongue, and Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize.
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Harold Bloom
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Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than thirty books include The Best Poems of the English Language, The Art of Reading Poetry, and The Book of J. He is a MacArthur Prize Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the International Prize of Catalonia, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico.
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4.6 out of 5

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A reviewer

Like poetry, religion

Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2017

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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.

10 people found this helpful

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Matthew A. Pagan

"The meaning of a poem is always another poem"

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2023

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Fascinating examination of the motivation for writing poetry. Bloom was one of the most well-read literary critics ever. It certainly shows in the connections he draws from some of the most influential works of Romantic poetry to the successor poems they subsequently inspired.

3 people found this helpful

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Rafe Cruz Smith

Ground breaking

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2021

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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.

3 people found this helpful

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Tim Jewell

Surprisingly Fun

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2010

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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.

14 people found this helpful

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Lonnie Rotondo

Gift.

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2022

Friend loves it.

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2020

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It is needed for school and was on time.

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Stephen Sotnick

A must Read Unlocking the Artistic Tradition

Reviewed in the United States on April 6, 2017

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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.

3 people found this helpful

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Hart Crane

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 23, 2016

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

4 people found this helpful

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JD Salinger

Bloom

Reviewed in France on January 25, 2014

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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...

One person found this helpful

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Jack Wonder

The Emperor has no clothes!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2012

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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.

7 people found this helpful

Paul ODonnell

Not for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 14, 2014

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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.

Dave Taylor

Complex Theory

Reviewed in Canada on January 13, 2022

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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.

Guardian of the Scales

Undeservedly well-known

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 21, 2012

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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.

11 people found this helpful

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