From the Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom
- 1. S University of Hyderabad Contemporary Approaches to Literature School of humanities Dr. Sowmya Dechamma Centre for Comparative Literature
- 2. Harold Bloom S July 11,1930 – NY USA S Literary critic, writer, professor at Yale University S Contemporary and friend of Northrop Frye
- 3. Main terms: • Intra-poetic relationships. • Poetic history as poetic influence. • Poetic misinterpretation/misprision ( reason, result). • Imaginative space • Ephebe
- 4. Introduction A Meditation upon Priority and Synopsis Two corrective aims of the theory S To de-idealize our accepted accounts of how one poet helps to form another. S To try to provide a poetics that will foster a more adequate practical criticism
- 5. • Poetic history is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence. • “ My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imaginations appropriate for themselves” • Wilde , as an example, failed as a poet as he lacked strength to overcome his anxiety of influence. • Poetic influence scarcely exists except in furiously active pedants. • Stevens was a highly individual poet, as much an American original as Whiteman or Dickenson.
- 6. Freud & Nietzsche • Both are the prime influences upon the theory of influence presented in bloom’s book. • According to bloom, they both underestimated poets and poetry. • They too over-idealized imagination. Wordsworth • Wordsworth nature poems are shadowed by the anxiety of influence due to the greatness of the precursor-poem Lycidas by Milton, who had to struggle with a major precursor in Spenser. Shakespeare • Excluded from the argument of this book for several reasons: - He belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness. - Another has to do with the contrast between dramatic and lyric form. - The main cause is that Shakespeare’s precursor was
- 7. SIX REVISIONARY RATIOS These ratios are performed by a poet as means to “clear imaginative space for himself” . As the modern ( post enlightenment) writer seeks to achieve literary greatness, he becomes anxious over influence and, consequently, reacts to his literary precursor. 1. Clinamen or Poetic Misprison: a swerve , a turning away from a precursor poet in attempt to correct what he did wrong 2. Tessera or Completion and Antithesis: a completion of the precursor's work. It occurs when a poet retains a precursor poet’s terms but means them in a different way as the precursor has failed to go far enough. 3. Kenosis or Repetition and Discontinuity: the repetition into which a poet is thrown must be at once affirmed and undone. It is a breaking device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyche employ against repetition compulsions. 4. Daemonization or the Counter-Sublime: a yielding up of the poet's humanity to his precursor. Inspiration purely comes from imagination. The poet incorporates some elements of the earlier work and taking away some of its uniqueness . 5. Askesis or Purgation and Solipsism: a narrowing of the soul that produces the illusion that the center will hold more securely as a result. The poet adds a part of his own imagination to a poem to make it different from the rest. so, the parent-poem stands apart from the new one. 6. Apophrades or The Return of the Dead: a struggle with the dead that makes it look as if the living latecomer influenced his precursor.
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