The Anxiety of Influence

The Anxiety of Influence
source
Name	The Anxiety of Influence
Author	Harold Bloom
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Literary criticism
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Pub date	1973
Media type	Print
Pages	224

The Anxiety of Influence is a 1973 book of literary criticism by Harold Bloom that proposes a theory of poetic creativity based on misprision, rivalry, and poetic influence. Bloom argues that strong poets wrestle with the influence of predecessors such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, generating revisionary acts that produce original work. The book reframes debates about canonicity and authorship engaging with figures like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Dante Alighieri.

Background and Origin

Bloom developed his theory amid conversations within Ivy League departments and publishing circles centered on Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and Oxford University Press. His work responded to contemporaneous movements including New Criticism, represented by critics such as Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, and the rising influence of Structuralism and Jacques Derrida in literary theory. Bloom engaged with romantic and modernist traditions tracing lines from John Keats and William Blake through Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. Intellectual contexts included debates involving scholars like Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis, and institutions such as the Modern Language Association.

Key Concepts and Theoretical Framework

Central to Bloom's argument is "misprision", his term for a strong poet's creative misreading of an influential precursor, a tactic likened to revisionary ratios that include overcoming, clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, and apophrades. Bloom illustrates these strategies through comparative readings of poets including John Donne, Geoffrey Chaucer, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Hardy. He situates his theory against models proposed by critics like Roland Barthes and Mikhail Bakhtin, and connects to psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in exploring symbolic inheritance. The framework reorients discussions of influence away from simple historical causation toward agonistic, intersubjective processes among figures like Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov.

Major Works and Essays

Bloom applies his theory across essays on canonical figures and major texts, including analyses of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. He engages with later modernist and postwar poets such as W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and Seamus Heaney. Bloom also writes about novelists and playwrights including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Toni Morrison. His essays frequently intersect with discussions of critical texts like The Waste Land and epics like The Divine Comedy.

Critical Reception and Influence

Upon publication, the book provoked responses from critics and scholars across universities such as Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and King's College London. Supporters praised Bloom's erudition and close reading, drawing comparisons with exegetical work by Cleanth Brooks and interpretive histories by Lionel Trilling. Detractors from interlocutors including proponents of Structuralism, Post-structuralism, and Marxist criticism—figures associated with Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Terry Eagleton—argued that Bloom underplayed social and ideological determinants. The book influenced literary curricula and spawned symposia at venues like the British Academy and conferences of the Modern Language Association.

Applications and Interdisciplinary Impact

Bloom's model has been mobilized beyond poetry studies into analyses of drama, novelistic form, and intellectual history, affecting scholarship on writers like Friedrich Nietzsche (through his impact on aesthetics), Sigmund Freud (in psychoanalytic literary approaches), and Walter Benjamin (in reception theory). The theory entered debates within departments at Yale School of Drama, Juilliard School, and comparative programs involving Columbia University School of the Arts and influenced curricula in departments dedicated to figures such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and Gustave Flaubert. Bloom's emphasis on agonistic influence informed studies in reception history, biographical criticism, and creative writing seminars connected to institutions like Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Controversies and Critiques

Critics have challenged Bloom for his perceived anti-theoretical stance and what some call a canon-centric, masculine lineup privileging figures such as Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley, and Yeats while underrepresenting writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Nadine Gordimer, and Simone de Beauvoir. Feminist and postcolonial critics referencing scholars like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and bell hooks argued that Bloom's model minimizes power relations evident in literary transmission among subjects such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Aimé Césaire, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Jamaica Kincaid. Others disputed Bloom's psychologizing of influence against more sociohistoric approaches employed by thinkers in New Historicism and critics associated with Stephen Greenblatt. Despite contestation, the book remains a touchstone in debates over authorship, influence, and canon formation.

Category:Literary criticism books