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PARTISAN REVIEW
influences he had first to absorb, must wrestle with his chosen prede–
cessors. In contrast to his former mentor, Northrop Frye, who imag–
ined new poets joining the republic of letters the way one joined a
church, Bloom describes the relation as a usurpation. The poet who
would make room for himself must displace or "misread" his prede–
cessors. And this creative necessity shows up in his poems as a
"repression" of the threatening influence.
The theory undoubtedly helps us to understand the process by
which poems come into being, the struggle of a poet with the voices of
earlier ones in order to find his own voice. But it is much less certain
that it helps us interpret the finished work. In weaker poems, one hears
unconscious allusions to other poems. But Bloom is emphatically only
interested in those which have achieved a highly original voice and
style. And in these, surely, the allusions to other poems are assimilated
and purposeful. Why should a creatively used allusion be called a
misreading since it doesn't pretend to be a reading at all? Bloom says
categorically that a strong poem's true subject "is its repression of the
precursor poem." But he must strain to discover his evidence, as when
(in
Poetry and Repression)
he positively identifies the image of the
blind man's eye in "Tintern Abbey," perfectly appropriate in context,
with the unacknowledged and threatening presence of John Milton.
The underpinning of Bloom's theory is an ingenious Freudian
revisionism similar to Derrida's. Bloom also accepts Lacan's equation
of the unconscious with the structure of language. Thus, every so–
called psychological process is really a rhetorical one (condensation
equals metaphor, displacement equals metonymy, and so forth).
It
is
true that Bloom starts from psyche rather than text and always
perceives poetry as a battle of wills (in his book on Wallace Stevens he
observes that the deconstructionist, in effect, says, "In the beginning
was the trope" whereas he would say, "In the beginning was the
troper"), but these wills and psyches exist entirely within an intertex–
tual universe.
It
is as if Frye's comparatively inoffensive overstate–
ment-poems are made out of other poems, novels out of other
novels-were absolutized by the addition of "onlys." Thus, like
Derrida, Bloom makes poetry into something both less and more than
what it is taken to mean. On the one hand, the poet as poet is strictly
distinguished from the poet as man, and Bloom presses into service a
number of psychoanalytic terms-anxiety, oedipal conflict, uncon–
scious, repression-to refer only to poetic relationships, not to human
ones. On the other hand, the poem is linked to all other poems and
indeed all other writing, for Bloom (like Blake and Shelley) insists that
