M.H. ABRAMS
585
autonomy and La his anxieties of th e influence exerted on him by his
critica l precursors. And in li eu of any possible criterion of righwess,
such readings can be valuable only to the degree that they are "creative
or imeres ting mi sreadings." By th eir strength , he says, such read ings
will provoke his criti ca l successors La react by their own defensive
mi sreadings, and so take their place within the unending accumula–
ti on o f mi sreadings of misreadings tha t constitute the hi sLary both of
poetry and of criti cism, at leas t since the Enlightenment.
Whil e acknow ledging that his theory " may as k La be judged, as
argument, " Bl oom also insi sts tha t "a theory
of
poetry must belong
to
poetry, must
be
poetry" and presem s hi s work as "one reader's criti cal
vision " bodi ed fo rth in "a severe poem. " Let me drop my role as Idiot
Ques tion er of Bloom's evidenti al procedures to read him in thi s
altern a tive way, as a prose-poet who expresses a founding vision of the
Scene of Literature. In the main, thi s has been traditionall y conceived
as a republi c of equals composed, in Wordsworth 's phrase, of " th e
mighty living and the mighty dead" whose poetry, as Shell ey said, " is
the record of the best and happies t moments of the happi es t and bes t
minds." In Bl oom 's bl eak re-vision , the Scene of Litera ture becomes
th e a rena of a savage war (or
L ebensraum
waged by the living poet
aga in st the
oppressi~e
and ever-present dead-a parri cidal war, in
which each newcomer, in hi s need La be self-begollen and self–
sufficient, undertakes with unconscious cunning to mutil a te, murder,
and devour hi s poeti c fath er. The poet's prime compul sions a re like
those of the Freudi an Id, which demands no less than everythin g a t
once and is incapabl e of recognizing any constraims on its sati sfacti ons
by mora l compun ction , logical incompa tibility, or empiri ca l imposs i–
bility. And th e poetic self remains forever fixed at the Oedipal stage of
development; for Bloom expli citl y deni es to the poet "as poet" the
Freudian mechani sm of sublima ti on , which allows for the substitu–
tion, in sa ti sfyin g o ur primordi al des ires, of hi gher for lower goals and
so makes possible the growth from the infantil e stage of total self–
conce rn to th e ma ture recogniti on of reciprocity with other selves. The
war of which each poem is a battl eground is ultimatel y futil e, no t onl y
because every poet is inescapa bl y fa thered by precursors but a lso
because, according to Bloom, his wi ll to priority over his precursors is,
in deep psychic fact, a defen se aga in st acknowl edging hi s own human
morta lit y. The confli ct, furth ermore, is doomed to termin ate in th e
dea th of poetry itself, for the popu la tion o f strong poets wi II soon
usurp so mu ch of the ava il able li ving-space tha t even the illusion of
crea tive or igin ality will no longer be possible.
In Bl oom's own idi om of rhetorical tropes, one can say of hi s
