As we approach NaPoMo, I am pasting below my MFA essay on Harold Bloom’s seminal work The Anxiety of Influence not because I either agree or disagree strongly with the ideas it contains, but because I think he provides a classic example of how NOT to write about poetry if, like Dana Gioia, our purpose is to make poetry matter.
A Contrast to Gioia: The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
There appear to be two schools of practice in the writing of literary theory and criticism. One is Dana Gioia’s “Poets must…write in a public idiom.” Harold Bloom belongs to the other, which seems to espouse a convoluted, nested syntax and believes that polysyllabic words add a scholarly density to a text, with extra credit applied for the use of obscure, or even made up, words, preferably of Greek origin. I think we know to which school I would belong.
The trouble is, therefore, not necessarily with the ideas put forward in this oft-quoted book. We must all be grateful to Harold simply for his coinage of the title term, which puts a name to those despondent moods we poets enter occasionally on reading a great poem by one of our heroes and asking ourselves if we will ever write this well, or worse, what if everything worthwhile has already been written?
No, the problem with the book is that it is written in such elevated vocabulary and complex sentence structure that I suspect the ideas themselves have not been challenged as effectively as perhaps they could have been.
The opacity of the text also derives from Bloom’s numerous allusions, not to the poets—those are clear enough—but to the philosophers Nietszche and Schopenhauer, and of course to Freud. “Look how clever I am,” he seems to be saying. “Look how well-read.” Of course we should all aspire to be well-read, but the question is, are all these allusions necessary to make his points, or do they not, in fact, obscure his points, even for the literary audiences for whom he allegedly writes? Bloom would have done well to follow two of the basic axioms of Strunk & White: “Omit needless words” and “Be clear.”
Bloom suggests there are six main states poets can pass through as they negotiate this anxiety of influence; he gives them onerous Greek names which I’m sure he hoped would become part of the lingua franca of literary criticism. I have never come across them outside of this book, partly, I suspect, because the states are not as distinct as his examples make them appear, and perhaps because not all of them are common.
However, it is clear that we poets do write poems which kick at the traces of poems by those poets we have read and admired, and it is fascinating to look systematically at the ways in which this can be done. According to Bloom, British poets mostly swerve, where American poets complete (these are the first two states.) To swerve would be to consider that the precursor poem was perfect up to a point at which the predecessor poet made a wrong move. We write our new poem to correct this. To complete is to assume the predecessor poet stopped too early. The new poem finishes this. These are the two most easily understood states, and the ones for which many of us can come up with examples. It is even an exercise in contemporary undergraduate workshops to take the title or first line of a poem you admire and resist that poem in composing a new one.
From then on Bloom’s states become more esoteric. The third state, discontinuity, is putatively a poem wherein the poet’s stance in the new poem appears to be that of a predecessor, but the meaning of the stance is undone. In the fourth state, the counter-sublime, the new poem generates a vision counter to the predecessor’s poem, which thus weakens or humanizes the predecessor. In the rarely reached fifth state, purgation, the truly strong new poet matches himself to the death against his predecessor, and in the final state, the return of the dead, for the very strongest poets, one can believe for startled moments that it is they who are being imitated by their predecessors.
The final state is perhaps the most recognizable and aspirational, although also most rarely reached. There are two questions I would ask regarding the middle three states: do we really believe that these are sequential stages of development, rather than just different techniques, whether conscious or subconscious, that new poets use to come to terms with the legacy of their heroes? And, does any of this matter?
Bloom’s purpose in defining the states is to propose an antithetical criticism, whereby in order to criticize a great older poem, critics first examine the poem as if they were a newer poet whose work reflects an anxiety of his influence. Next, they read the work of one such newer poet as though they themselves wished to rewrite it under the anxiety of influence. Finally, they compare these two assessments, and apply that comparison to the first poem. Well, bloody good luck to them, I say!
The fact that antithetical criticism has not become more widespread is a testament to its intrinsic difficulty, and also because it turns one subjective process into three: what do I think of poem A becomes what do I think of poem A as if I could have written B; then of B (written ‘after’ A) as if I wished to write C (‘after’ B), and finally of the difference between the ‘what I think’s.
Another fault with Bloom’s book is that female poets are mostly ignored; only Dickinson is given a passing mention. I am tempted to come over all sexist and say that perhaps female poets often came from a broader sphere of influence than the male Romantic poets Bloom uses, and thus they didn’t fit as neatly into Bloom’s little strait-jackets. Bloom condescends that Roethke, whom he deprecates, had a composite precursor consisting of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens and Whitman. Clearly Bloom is more comfortable when he can relate poets to single, or at the most two, predecessors as he does with Wordsworth to Milton or Browning to Shelley.
In conclusion I’m glad I read this book, although I won’t be rushing to purchase any more of Harold Bloom’s prose, and nor will I be peppering my essays with obscure Greek terms. I will, however, continue to write poems that develop out of or resist the poems of my precursors, quite simply, because that’s what poets do.
