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Title: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0-19-511221-0 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (7 reviews)
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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Poetomachia
Comment: It would be unfair to suggest that anyone who disagrees with Bloom is simply suffering from the escapist, repressive anxiety of which he claims to be a theorist. Likewise, it would be a circular argument to say that anyone who finds Bloom's stance self-defeating is merely an anxious ephebe trying to justify their own mediocrity, to dissemble their own belatedness, to obscure the deeper issues of poetic originality.
Or would it?
I've been ridiculed for saying this, but *The Anxiety of Influence* is a very harsh, very difficult little book. And yes, most writers *do* tend to shrug it off with defensive laughter and glib overconfidence. "Bloom's theories don't apply to me, after all. *I* don't feel the anxiety of which he speaks. I'm as young as Adam in the literary Garden of Eden, and my work is as important and worthwhile as I wish it to be." Thus tolls the death-knell of the M.F.A. student in Creative Writing.
Bloom's vision of the Canon has nothing to do with a required list of books, with the "carrion-eaters" of Tradition, paying uncritical knee-tribute to precedents and precursors. Bloom is simply reminding us that literature is not created in a vacuum of Edenic self-deception (the bland, cheeky optimism of the writing workshop), but rather in the poetomachia of the solitary apprentice testing himself against the creations of the past and present, a gladiatorial dialogue with the collective personae of Anteriority. In other words, the greatest literature is in competition with *itself*, an internalized version of the Canon that each strong poet carries within. The competition is both loving and malicious, and the "precursor" is always a composite of texts and artists, including contemporary authors fighting for imaginative and thematic territory, spurring each other on to higher achievements while stampeding the fallen.
For polemical purposes, Bloom simplifies the "composite precursor" in his reading of the English Romantics, testing themselves against the canonical strangeness of one John Milton. By casting the Miltonic Satan as the modern poet *in extremis*, Bloom creates a critical mythology as compelling as it is melodramatic, working through the byzantine evasions and torque-laden inversions the ephebe undertakes to carve out an imaginative space for himself. The "revisionary ratios" are derived from the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, conceptualizing poetic creation as a heroic self-purgation and regeneration, achieving originality with an apparent loss of power, then returning to the fold for fresh melee and assimilative combat. Bloom's conscious objective is TO MAKE THE POET'S JOB MORE DIFFICULT, the smash complacency where it lives, in the Eliotic idealizations of "Tradition and the Individual Talent", which argues (catastrophically, in Bloom's view) that poetry is the benign and empyreal handing-down of the Muse's wedding-band from precursor to ephebe. But as Bloom persuasively argues, Eliot's stuffy and pretentious election of Dante as his true poetic father desperately obscures his true debts to Tennyson and Whitman, and his poetry may be weaker as a result. The casualties of Eliot's "poetic pacifism" lie forgotten in the charnel-house of unknown soldiers who've mistaken academic careerism for the deeper mysteries of canonical anguish, who've taken the low road of insularity against the combative "wakening of the dead."
To suggest that this sort of gladiatorial perspectivizing is "self-defeating" is rather like calling Nietzsche a "nihilist" because he chose to philosophize with a hammer -- that is, dedicated himself to scraping away all the evasions, the happy-go-lucky subterfuge -- to provide a more truthful genealogy of art and creativity and, more importantly, an Ethics on precisely what is required of writers (born this late in history) pretending to canonical strength. *TAoI* is as Nietzschean a text as you will find, a polemical kick in the stomach, brutal in its necessities, staring deep into the horizon of literature and conceptualizing the intra-poetic psychic warfare of poets WHO WILL NOT DIE. It is a nail-bomb thrown into the seminar-room of creative writing workshops, exploding the glib complacency of young writers who've forgotten that Time is unforgiving in its choice of literary survivors.
To put it another way, Bloom never says that originality doesn't exist, only that our idealized, Eliotic perceptions of originality are immature and self-defeating, an excuse not only to *be* mediocre (as young as Adam at the dawn of Creation), but to revel in and celebrate that mediocrity. That said, those who are coddled by Academe will probably find Bloom's book vulgar, incomprehensible, melodramatic, even paranoid in its implications. While others, stoically self-critical, will find themselves reading a completely different book, and a glorious one at that.
As the previous reviewer suggested, there may be room enough in the academic industry for a communal fellowship of writers and teachers, but there is an important qualitative difference between the respectable productions of, say, a Mark Van Doren, and the monstrous achievements of canonical prowess Bloom examines here. Mediocrity needs to justify itself, to make excuses for its smug complacency, but just as 99.9% of our generation's literature is "written in water," so the canonical survivors of the future will be forced to take even more extreme measures to be remembered, to stand in the square where martyrs are made. Bloom's book, in essence, attempts to dramatize and account for these "extreme measures."
*The Anxiety of Influence*, for all its conceptual flummery and Rube Goldberg convolutions, stands today as a brilliant thought-experiment on the lengths genius will go to stamp itself in bronze, to carry on and flourish in a universe of Death (or its literary equivalent, Compromise). Even if you find his main argument pedantic and repulsive, Bloom provides dozens of pyrotechnic micro-arguments in each chapter, not to mention some brilliant and provocative readings of classic poetry. Bloom is a great talker and showman, and those who dismiss his theories as frivolous poppycock may still be charmed by his brash, Hazlittean personality. The important thing is to take the time to understand where Bloom is coming from, and not to project one's own anxieties onto this difficult and rewarding text.
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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 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: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322751X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0446527173 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.95 |
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Title: Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322233X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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