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Title: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom, William Golding ISBN: 0-19-501896-6 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 1975 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Ignore the hysterical detractors
Comment: People such as Camper-Mann simply don't understand Bloom's ground-breaking book. It is not a typical academic piece of theorizing. Bloom begins with his own aesthetic responses, and discovers that writers who came later in a tradition have a real difficulty finding an original vision or creating original work. Bloom then tries to work out a theory to account for this.
At no point does Bloom suggest that a deterministic process is at work here. The great poets defy determinism and struggle against it. It was not pre-ordained that John Milton would appear in the 2nd generation after Shakespeare. Milton's own creative will carved out a place for him among the great poets. However, Milton appeared after the greatest poet in the language, and his attempt to stand up to the Shakespearean achievement had a massive impact on his poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth and Shelley wrote differently for having read and absorbed Milton. These are historical facts that Bloom tries to account for.
As for T.S. Eliot, he was profoundly influenced by Walt Whitman's poetry, but turned back to Christian ideas in a way that Whitman and other modern poets had refused to do. That is what's wrong with Eliot's work. Christianity is not a very profound source for poetic inspiration in the modern age.
Rating: 1
Summary: Intellectual Poison
Comment: Generally speaking, the books of Harold Bloom that are worth reading are those that limit their focus to one individual: Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, Shelley, Yeats (the latter two being pre-ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE works). The reason for this is because Bloom is a gargantuan intellect -- smarter and better-read than probably any five people you might happen to know put together -- and these books are chock full of provocative insights, regardless of the dubious theoretical scaffolding upon which they might be erected. In other words, though the foundations of most of Bloom's books written after AOI are infirm, Bloom is, at the end of the day, a compelling and highly enthusiastic critic, and also frequently aphoristic enough to keep you reading even after you begin to suspect that his more ludicrous and indefensible ex cathedra prounouncments, of which there are many thousands scattered throughout his oeuvre, are on the verge of causing you to tear out clumps of your hair.
When it comes, on the other hand, to Bloom's more purely theoretical works (THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE, AGON, etc.), all I can say is CAVEAT EMPTOR! In these works, and others like them, Bloom's perspective is neither that of a writer nor that of his constantly vaunted "common reader." Rather, Bloom's outlook here is that of a thoroughgoing academic, who as much as he has tended to decry the decline of academia in recent years owing to the combined effects of sundry "Schools of Resentment" (multiculturalists, neo-Marxists, Afro-Centrists, etc.) -- that is, those who value theory over literature -- in AOI Bloom can be seen as something of the Pope, High-Priest and Grand Poobah of this nauseating trend which seems, alas, destined to remain with us forever.
To my way of thinking, the reductio ad absurdum of Bloom's "revisionary ratios" (the multi-tiered, quasi-Oedipal struggle whereby "strong" poets, by reprocessing the work of other poets, supposedly become original) is that if the act of creation is indeed so paradigmatic that it can be diagrammed, then one day computers should be able to crank out verse as profound, witty and memorable as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, et al. Oh, but excuse me: T.S. Eliot, according to Bloom, isn't a particularly strong poet -- though if anyone can understand Bloom's reason for regarding him as such, then perhaps you will be able to decipher the Riddle of the Sphinx, too. Or, to quote the words of Lord Byron, "And he who understands him would be able/To add a story to the Tower of Babel."
Anyway, in interviews I've read given by Bloom, at least in recent years, he seems like a decent enough fellow. But this book, the first of a series of common sense-deprived, balderdash-laden tracts, is pure intellectual B.S. If this is the sort of thing that turns you on, then what else can I say except that there is probably no ground in the universe where you and I will ever be able to meet.
Rating: 5
Summary: Greater than, you know? a book for people who read poetry.
Comment: I have previously described myself in a review as the most spaced-out poet on the planet, without describing the awful legal context in which such a view of myself is absolutely necessary. This book makes the context clear, but a general reader still might not understand how concrete this difficulty is because THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE is overtly a book about poetry, and hardly at all about exercising judgment. The page of the book where I left it open the longest, and where the book subsequently opened most easily, and which I read most often in the five weeks in which I was interested in this book, was page 58, which describes a poet who "experiences anxiety necessarily towards any danger that might end him as a poet." Without dwelling on the personalities of the people involved, it seems to me that the anxiety which this book is about is clearest in the case of the presidential election of 2000, in which the ability of the Florida Supreme Court to act as the ultimate judges of that opportunity to count ballots was subject to the power of the United States Supreme Court to judge the election in some way which would produce a result which would be opposite to what a majority of the Florida Supreme Court desired. (...)and poets can be much more open about what they are doing than judges, so it isn't too surprising that this book is about poets.
Freud and Nietzsche form a nice frame of reference for what is happening in this book. I kept looking for mentions of Rilke, which wasn't fruitful until page 99, the first page on "Daemonization or The Counter-Sublime." There it says, "History, to Rilke, was the index of men born too soon, but as a strong poet Rilke would not let himself know that art is the index of men born too late. . . . the dialectic between art and art, or what Rank was to call the artist's struggle against art . . . governed even Rilke, who outlasted most of his blocking agents, for in him the revisionary ratio of daemonization was stronger than in any other poet of our century." There is a page just before page 99 which quotes Emerson on the highest truth about all things going well, "long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account." (p. 98). Emerson shows up again on page 138, with the idea, "Who seem to die live," to precede the final section of the book, "Apophrates or The Return of the Dead." This part doesn't relate well to law, particularly for a system which keeps thinking that a judgment like the death penalty might be considered final at some point.
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Title: A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0195162218 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Best Poems of the English Language : From Chaucer Through Frost by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0060540419 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 16 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom ISBN: 1573225142 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0684859076 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 25 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0446691291 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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