Upon reading The Anxiety of Influence

I finished reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence yesterday, and am not quite sure what to make of it. Partly, this is because most of my reading sessions were begun at two in the morning and ended at two fifteen, and so I couldn’t absorb anything other than the most striking of points. But quite apart from that, even if I had read it all while fully awake, I’m quite certain that much of it would have passed me by. This is partly Bloom’s fault and partly mine. It is Bloom’s fault in that he seems to insist, in his writing, on making bold assertions of fact without the kind of backing up that would be accepted anywhere other than in the world of literary criticism. And it is my fault in that I find this style of writing hard to just accept and get on with.

But then, why should one just accept it? After all, this is not merely a book of observations or stray essays meant for enjoyment and the refinement of judgement and little more. It is also meant to be a full-fledged theory, and generally it is accepted that a theory requires some strong proof. The major thesis here is that throughout the history of post-Enlightenment poetry, every major poet has suffered an “anxiety of influence” in relation to their major precursors, who are the literary equivalents of fathers. Already, this thesis is hard to take. Taken in the broad sense, we might say that all artists suffer from the aforementioned anxiety, but Bloom’s placing of this specific kind of anxiety in the post-Enlightenment age only begs the question. Why didn’t it exist before? He mentions at one point that before the anxiety of influence it was anxiety of style that predominated, but can the two not be seen as essentially the same thing? The reason any poet suffers from anxiety of style is that they feel the weight of their precursors’ highly individual styles weighing down upon them, and so in this sense they are very much anxious about influence. But the other reason to take the post-Enlightenment part a little less seriously is that, in Bloom’s preface to the second edition, he corrects himself and says that anxiety of influence did indeed exist before Milton, and indeed Marlowe imposed it on the greatest of all English poets. This surely means that my initial suspicion was right: if anxiety of influence exists at all, it always existed.

However, we might nevertheless question how anxiety of influence might change with time and with the literary age. Bloom posits that since Wordsworth virtually invented modern poetry in placing its emphasis more on the internal world of the poet than his surroundings, it has been harder to shake off the influence of the precursor. But was poetry ever less than highly personal, at least in the modern (post-Renaissance) age? Perhaps we can’t say of Shakespeare’s sonnets that they are as personal as Wordsworth’s Prelude, but at the least they are more obviously personal than the plays. Indeed, if Milton is to be counted as being part of the period in which anxiety of influence dominated, how can we square the apparent circle of Milton’s grand and epic poetry with this idea that it really is highly internalised? Undoubtedly, Milton’s poetry does not have to be read as distant and impersonal, but then we can hardly read Shakespeare that way, either.

So there are a few niggles here and there. Despite these, the book as a whole is a joy to read—even if the reader isn’t fully awake—and is characterised with Bloom’s highly individual style of writing throughout. And despite the highly unscientific approach to what we are meant to regard as a theory, there are numerous insights that are undoubtedly fascinating in their own right. Foremost of these for me is the last of the six “revisionary ratios” which poetic ephebes employ to overthrow the influence of their literary fathers. Called apophrades, it is in essence a kind of turning around of the forebear’s style, a reclaiming of it, such that what is produced is the strange and uncanny sense that it is the precursor who is influenced by the ephebe, and not the other way around.

It is exactly this kind of fascinating insight that would really have deserved a more systematic treatment, however much that may be against Mr Bloom’s nature. And it is exactly the fact that it is unlikely to get such a treatment any time soon (certainly not by Bloom himself, but probably not by anyone else either) that makes me seriously question, as I have done before, what the use of literary theory actually is. These are all fascinating insights, but they may be little more than lucky guesses if we have no inkling whatsoever as to their real truth-value, or indeed their predictive power. As fun as it is to read this sort of book, a serious scholar should really come along one day and attempt a proper analysis of literary influence. It is questionable, however, whether this task can be tackled by literary critics alone: it seems likely to require psychologists and anthropologists, too.