Behind every poet's anxiety about his originality stands a Primal Scene of Instruction in which the Great Original sleeps with the Muse while the ephebe looks on belatedly, powerless except to repeat, revise, memorialize and recognize the circumstances of his secondariness. By this point we are at about a third level of internalization, and Bloom's prose has become all but impossible to disentangle. These moments are infrequent, however. For it is as a reader and practical critic that Bloom requires finally to be judged, and because of his entirely gripping theoretical passion his readings are almost unparalleled in skill and thematic nuance. Out of the strong comes forth strength, even if not sweetness, and when strength has imposed itself long enough, then we learn to call it tradition, whether we like it or not.
Bloom finds irresistible.
But he is right, I am convinced, and this makes him the original mind that he is. Only to treat literature realistically or appreciatively or melioristically is to miss the anti-natural and regressive features of esthetic creation. Bloom resolutely anatomizes those features and finds their essential power to reside not on one side of the tradition, but in it, in the middle of it and antithetical besides. Bloom's readers are likely to recognize that what he is doing is providing an inner plot for poetry. What Bloom's theory discovers are intense, even preciously elegaic, sensual repetitions throughout the history of poetry, and increasingly assimilative, regressive and prophetic patterns in the criticism of poetry.