PARTISAN REVIEW
499
pressing rather than exhilarating.
The Anxiety of Influence
is allover
gray, although Bloom clearly meant it to illuminate our minds with
flashes of the outrageous half-truths that are on the undersides of re–
ceived ideas.
In judging the
how
of this "severe poem" rather than its
what,
its
form rather than its content, I am merely acting upon one of Bloom's
solicitations. He encourages a criticism, even a criticism of criticism, that
is personal and aesthetic rather than impersonal and conceptual. And in
any case, a judgment of the book's
what
is contained in a judgment of
its
how.
Yes, poets and critics misread, misinterpret, distort, revise, and
usurp. And they probably do so more or less through the six processes
to which Bloom gives those fancy names, although that is not all they
do, even (in Bloom's weaseling phrase)
" as poets."
But something else
Nietzsche might have taught his ephebe is that all "reading," all per–
ceiving and conceiving of everything, is misprision, is a reenactment of
the primal wrongdoing of Oedipus. All descriptions of the world do
violence to it. All understandings are misunderstanding in behalf of
survival. But if Nietzsche had had his way, Oedipus would have re–
mained Lord of Thebes, seeing there what he needed to see in order
to live as he needed to live, rather than slinking off self-blinded into exile.
The strength of Bloom's "strong" poets lies precisely in the fact that
above all they hung on to their visions; above all they refused to budge
from the worlds they had won with imaginative violence.
Bloom emphasizes the cost rather than the accomplishment, the
aspect of the poetry of defense mechanism rather than that of ac–
complished sublimation. And he does so in part, at least, because he
cannot believe that poets have accomplished much since the death of
Shelley. He has no imaginative sympathy whatsoever for literary mod–
ernism, the great examples of which did not suffer from a romantic
anxiety of influence. The modernist writers who established themselves
during the teens and twenties felt that an historical chasm separated
them from their immediate precursors. The line leading up to them
had a break in it. The past to them was a museum, and tradition a chest
of souvenirs, rather than swells on whose crests they rode struggling to
keep their heads above precursors. So they chose their influences where
it suited them. The English novelists looked to Russia, France, and the
United States. Pound made up a tradition flowing from the Chinese
through the Greek Anthology through the troubadours through the sym–
bolists to himself. Eliot made up a tradition flowing from Dante through
the metaphysicals through the symbolists to himself. No important poet
