What emerges from A Map of Misreading , and the more forcefully because against all the author's explicit defenses, is the necessity of focusing not on the heroic poets but on poetry itself, on the historical and dialectical relations between texts, on literature as a tradition and institution with its own adventures. Bloom's survey of poetic tradition is systematically ahistorical because for him literature is, as Stephen Marcus once put it, somewhat sarcerdotal. His theory of influence requires a poetry which is wholly introverted and reflexive, an elevated and self-sufficing realm of discourse which itself provides all that is necessary for its interpretation. Poets are the elect, denizens of mysterium tremendum oblivious to everything but their own sacred history. Despite the erudition and the wealth of reference to other systems, Bloom's own system is proudly reductionist and self-enclosed.
Poets interact only with other poets.
Experience, personal discovery, private anguish or joy, life itself-these count as nothing compared to the towering presence of the precursor. None of this would matter very much were it not for the fact that Bloom's recent work is being hailed by his distinguished colleagues, friends, and disciples as if it were the critical achievement of the century. It seems impossible to arrest the text, to stem the flow of words, to grasp a single point that can be simply weighed and tested. Gradually one's eyes glaze over, the mind goes numb. Somewhere in the background Professor Bloom is misreading away, tireless and wonderfully pleased with himself.