page_title: Harold Bloom
section_title: Influence theory
hierarchical_section_title: Harold Bloom / Writing career / Influence theory
caption_attribution_description: English: A lion-faced deity found on a Gnostic gem in Bernard de Montfaucon's L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures.Español: Gema con deidad Abraxas con cabeza de león; probablemente uno de los 36 decanos del Zodiaco en la religión gnóstica del antiguo Egipto (La Antigüedad explicada y representada en imágenes original en francés, de Bernard de Montfaucon.
context_page_description: Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is often cited as the most influential critic of the late 20th century. Following the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime, he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
  Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literary departments were focusing on what he derided as the "school of resentment". He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
context_section_description: After a personal crisis during the late 1960s, Bloom became deeply interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and the ancient mystic traditions of Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism. In a 2003 interview with Bloom, Michael Pakenham, the book editor for The Baltimore Sun, posited that Bloom has long referred to himself as a "Jewish Gnostic". Bloom explained: "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can't understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia." Influenced by his reading, he began a series of books that focused on the way in which poets struggled to create their own individual poetic visions without being overcome by the influence of the previous poets who inspired them to write.
  The first of these books, Yeats, a magisterial examination of the poet, challenged the conventional critical view of his poetic career. In the introduction to this volume, Bloom set out the basic principles of his new approach to criticism: "Poetic influence, as I conceive it, is a variety of melancholy or the anxiety-principle." New poets become inspired to write because they have read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poets discover that these poets whom they idolized have already said everything they wish to say. The poets become disappointed because they "cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything."
  In order to evade this psychological obstacle, according to Bloom, new poets must be convinced that previous poets have gone wrong somewhere and failed in their vision, thus leaving open the possibility that they may have something to add to the tradition after all. The new poets' love for their heroes turns into antagonism towards them: "Initial love for the precursor's poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible." The book that followed Yeats, The Anxiety of Influence, which Bloom had started writing in 1967, drew upon the example of Walter Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and The English Poet and recast in systematic psychoanalytic form Bate's historicized account of the despair felt by 17th and 18th-century poets about their ability to match the achievements of their predecessors. Bloom attempted to trace the psychological process by which poets broke free from their precursors to achieve their own poetic vision. He drew a sharp distinction between "strong poets" who perform "strong misreadings" of their precursors, and "weak poets" who simply repeat the ideas of their precursors as though following a kind of doctrine. He described this process in terms of a sequence of "revisionary ratios", through which each strong poet passes in the course of their career.
caption: A lion-faced deity associated with Gnosticism. Bloom frequently referred to Gnosticism when speaking about general and personal religious matters.
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