H Lewis Allways

Via LOL Manuscripts

More interesting is the reference to the book called, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, by Harold Bloom, published in 1973.

Bloom’s central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintained with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that “the poet in a poet” is inspired to write by reading another poet’s poetry and will tend to produce work that is derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because a poet must forge an original poetic vision in order to guarantee his survival into posterity (i.e., to guarantee that future readers will not allow him to be forgotten), the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets.

Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of ‘strong’ poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Such an agon, he asserts, depends on six revisionary ratios[2], which reflect Freudian defense mechanisms and the tropes of classical rhetoric. Later books, especially Kabbalah and Criticism and A Map of Misreading connect each ratio to the Kabbalah. wikipedia