March 4, 1973

The Anxiety of Influence

By JOHN HOLLANDER

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

A Theory of Poetry.

By Harold Bloom.



oets and prophets, like magicians, learn their craft from predecessors. And just as magicians will invoke the real or supposed source of an illusion as part of the patter, or distraction from what his hands are doing, the most ambitious poets also take some stance about sources in the past, perhaps for an analogous purpose.

It is not by chance that an official statement for Modern Literature on the question of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as its author called it, should have been made a half-century ago by a critic who was also a poet. T.S. Eliot's conjuror's patter about the literary tradition that lay behind his--and all of truly modern--poetry invoked the Middle Ages, Dante, 17th-century English literature exclusive of Milton and French symbolism. It diverted his readers' eyes from the confederate power of Tennyson's ghost, unacknowledged, assisting him behind a screen. (Eliot's contemporary, Ezra Pound, was more open about his own stage assistant, Browning's spirit, as was Yeats about Shelley's and Blake's.) In his essay of 1919, Eliot declared that a poet must "develop or procure" a consciousness of the past, maintaining that if we moderns do indeed know more than dead writers, it is precisely they--the dead writers--who constitute what we know.

Harold Bloom of Yale, an interpretive scholar of English and American romanticism, has for years been propounding a view of literary history and its relation to creative originality quite antithetical to the allied formulations of Eliot and Pound. Along with his own teachers, Northrop Frye and Meyer H. Abrams, but in very different ways, 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 recent study of the romantic tradition has corrected the modernist dogmas about romanticism--the very word evoked the imprecise, the vague, the rhetorical--and argued for the centrality of the major English poetic line which modernism rejected. Eliot hankered after the Christian orthodoxy, classicism and royalty; the tradition he turned away from, the line running from Spenser, to Milton through the romantic poets to Browning, Tennyson and Yeats, was protestant, visionary and, save at its terminus, revolutionary.

Now in a remarkable, short, frequently difficult book, Bloom has gone beyond tracing the ways in which this tradition descended from one major poet to another (a question beautifully handled by W. J. Bate in his "The Burden of the Past and the English Poet"). He has extended it to a general theory of what he calls "poetic influence." "The Anxiety of Influence" may outrage and perplex many literary scholars, poets and psychologists; in any event, its first effect will be to astound, and only later may it become quite influential, though in a different mode from the one it studies.

Bloom's book is true to its subtitle, "A Theory of Poetry," primarily in its association of a theory of creativity (usually calling for something like a depth psychology), with a theory of the dynamic of poetic history. This is an area where will, personality and the presences of the dead in the legacy of their works are all engaged in a struggle. For Eliot, the dead, the last of these, banished the first two: in the proper development of a true poet's career, he said, "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

But here is one of Bloom's central principles: "Poetic Influence--when it involves two strong, authentic poets--always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main traditions of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist."

On the surface of it, this is most strange. To speak of one major poem resulting from a "reading" or "interpretation" of a prior one is not a usual concept of literary history; to go on to specify the relation between forebears and followers as "misreading" seems even stranger. In the course of the six central chapters of his book, Bloom expands and refines the concept of misreading--of what he calls at the outset "poetic misprisiÚn"--in powerful and sometimes maddeningly subtle ways. But for an elucidation of the central concept, a glance at some more traditional formulations of the influence relation may perhaps help.

There is ample evidence from literary history that the greater the poetic magic, the more the question of tradition seems to condense into the relation between a major poet and a major predecessor--a father, so to speak, rather than merely one of a line of teachers. For Virgil, taking it upon himself to provide Rome with a cultural heritage as rich as that of the Greece it had conquered and envied, Homer was there first. The Aeneid is "modeled," a historian would say, on both the Homeric epics. But what can this mean in the darker realm of intentions, hopes and fears? Was Homer a dead king in whose clothes a usurper paraded himself? Was his an unclaimed treasure, rather, which a Bold One seized and spent on building something new? Was Virgil the "true," rather than merely a biological, descendant of Homer, his heir across seven centuries?

The language of older notions of poetic tradition would have it so. Virgil begat Dante. Ezekiel begat the author of Revelation--indeed, the Old Testament as a scriptural whole begat the New, both as a son and an emanation. The relation of the romantic epic of the Renaissance to medieval heroic story is filial, as are, quite avowedly, those of Chaucer to Spenser, Spenser to Milton and on to Blake and Wordsworth. These genealogies reflect a heritage of central poetic conception and design, of vision of the world, of first and last things, and of the forms which the imagination may employ. Their legacy is not a mere matter of stylistic convention, formal borrowings and allusions, of course, although for poets themselves these matters are never "mere"-- Wordsworth's inevitable use, for example, of blank verse for his internal epic of consciousness, "The Prelude," depended upon Milton's shaping of it for narrative, lyric and dramatic purposes.

The relation of a major poet to his predecessor can be likened to that of God to the man he made in his image, although from Milton on, poetry in English has claimed that relation to hold between an artist and his work. It could also be seen as that of Jesus to the Old Law, which he came, he said, not to destroy but to fulfill.

But suppose that we were to see the filial relation as novelists and Freudian psychologists do. Freud described as "the family romance" that web of loves, jealousies and fantasies, which leads to a young man's conviction that the coarse, insensitive rival for his mother's love could not possibly be his "true" father, even if truly his biological one. The quest for a mythical and "true" father becomes central in modern fiction, for example. Bloom, whose book is quite profoundly but strangely Freudian (in its way of treating poetic forebears as parents, and mapping inside the psyche the effects of their exterior presence and authority), chooses a classic instance for English poetry of a son who denies his father's paternity. But his model for a poet struggling against the prior greatness of another is Milton's Satan. At his most magnificent (for the romantic reader) and most movingly deceived, in Books I to IV of "Paradise Lost," Satan declares himself to be self-created, and not formed, like all the angels, by God. He is an adversary to God, whose priority rankles. He misreads God's actions and motives, derides Him as a Hobbesian monarch who rules by convention rather than by right, and proposes an antithetical state of things: "Evil be thou my good."

But Satan is neither well nor happy, no matter how momentarily triumphant. And yet his other work--the Other Kingdom, the Undoing of Paradise--is an oeuvre, a poem. For Bloom, the anxiety (other critics call it his degeneration, idiocy, madness or badness) generated in Satan by his talent, imagination and resolve is central to his demonic creativity. The opening chapter of "The Anxiety of Influence," then, starts from Satan and God as a paradigm of poetic ancestor and scion. But the paradigm is really a dramatic image which first explores the problem of the creative psyche and its analysis. To avoid being reductive, he continually adumbrates myths, parables, examples and quotations from other writers.

There are many relations of a quasi-filial sort which can prevail between a poet and a precursor, and it is with some naughtiness that Bloom commences with the particular predicament of the Modernist poet as seen in Satan's moving but unconvincing denials. The six chapters of his book deal in turn with the kinds of relation--he calls them revisionary "ratios"--which can hold in various instances. The opening one is that of swerve: if Satan, in falling from Heaven, had not dropped straight down to the bottom of everything but had swerved slightly as he fell, he might have fallen to a new region, have created something Original instead of merely Opposite. Bloom locates this swerve in a misreading or misprision, the simplest of his relations.

The other ratios suggest some of the connections mentioned earlier--a poem that completes or fulfills the poem it follows (like the New Testament), a poem that purges itself of an influence, but whose very method of purgation thereby shows the particular influence at work, and so forth. The first and sixth chapters are the most startling and the most accessible to the non-specialist; the last of the relations Bloom studies holds in that particular situation into which a reader may blunder when he finds, say, Tennyson's "Maud" sounding like "The Waste Land," Shelley sounding like passages in Yeats derived from him, etc. It is also the chapter most replete with poetic examples, particularly from contemporary Americans such as A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery, whom Bloom believes to be of central importance.

But in general, this book does not quote texts in order to analyze or discuss them. Throughout Bloom's career, he has been more of an interpreter than an explainer. His first book was a study of "Shelley's Mythmaking" in 1958. Then came "The Visionary Company" (1961) on English romantic poetry in general, and books on Blake (1963), Yeats (1970) and a collection of essays called "The Ringers in the Tower" (1971). This last concerned later romantic tradition and explored such questions as Emerson's patriarchal position for American poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, but not, as did the late Yvor Winters, to denounce him and his heirs, Whitman, Stevens and Hart Crane.

Bloom's interest, however, has never been in the formalist study of poetic language and structure--what he designates as rhetorical criticism. In all the years I have known him, he has responded to and worked with what we might call the deep structure of poetry, with intentions, impulses, envisionings and desires, rather than with the linguistic surface, which for most of us-- poets and critics and readers alike--is all there is to talk about. Bloom alludes, adduces and evokes texts, but never explicates.

The early chapters of his book on Yeats sketched out a theory of influence. but there it was for purposes of literary history and of trying to correct what he felt to be the faulty accepted view of Yeats's career--a soft "romantic" poet who hardened up into a great modern one. "The Anxiety of Influence" is an inevitable fulfillment of Bloom's earlier work. In a group of aphorisms inserted between the third and fourth chapters, he can assert that "the meaning of a poem can only be another one" and that "all criticism is prose poetry." Readers who have followed him through the earlier chapters will understand--as at first we can only feel startled by--his treatment of creative anxiety. It is not a condition surrounding or preceding or following the creative act, as a doctor would conceive and perhaps treat it. Bloomian anxiety is an analogue of the psychiatric concept in the symbiotic life of the poet's imagination, and so it is not nonsense for him to declare that (italics mine) "A poem is a poet's melancholy at his lack of priority" (not, as we would ordinarily say, "tinged with it" or achieved in spite of it).

This book is aphoristic, dense, allusive and more than a little outrageous. It is far from being a handbook of criticism, and remains theoretical in that it makes demands of a critical method without specifying how they are to be met. After being debated and mulled over, it may turn out to embody what is after all a theory of American poetry. The American imagination in its anxiety about the precursor, Europe, suggests itself as an exemplary image throughout. The problems of what Henry James called the "complex fate" of having to struggle against a tendency to overvalue Europe, and of Emerson's role as a kind of Milton to his followers--even the strange reversal of American anxiety which has beset British poets of the past few decades, struggling for independence against what has become the Old Country of American poetry--all of these can be seen as part of a general history of the imagination, rather than a special case.

It is possible that Bloom will eventually produce a major study of American poetry, perhaps analogous in importance to the work of Perry Miller and F. O. Mattheissen. In any event, this remarkable book has raised profound questions about where in the mind the creative process is to be located, and about how the prior visions of other poems are, for a true poet, as powerful as his own dreams and as formative as his domestic childhood. From now on, only obtuseness or naivete, in critic or psychologist, will be able to ignore them.

John Hollander's most recent books of poetry are "Town & Country Matters" and "Night Mirror."