Bloom is here an American Nietzschean ventriloquist speaking through the dummy of William Blake's corpse, a rhetorician almost as eloquent and just as evil as Milton's Satan.

## from second reading ##Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGLpH....## from first reading ##Bloom's first book is a phenomenon. He covers his 6 stages of revisionary ratios, through which poets may pass: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades; and the symbol of the Covering Cherub (Genesis, Ezekiel, Blake), which casts the longest shadow over every ephebe poet and conceals the way to self-birth."[S]trong poets make [poetic] history by misreading one another, s...

So this book came highly recommended, I'm interested in criticism, and generally I expected something challenging to read but at the same time illuminating. The point is, I'm not feeling illuminated at all. This may be because I misunderstood the central idea. This may be also because I find it to be utter bullshit. It is, to be fair, very interesting, and it may well shed some light on the creative process; but while I find it obvious that yes, poets do influence one another, I can't really agr...

It's hard to critique a book of criticism as its usefulness to one seems, to me, rather more subjective than even the overall value of a work of fiction. Also, as a writer, I will probably tend to be more critical of critics, resenting their critiques of what I do more than the attempts, either successful or failed, of fellow writers of fiction and poetry in their efforts at self-expression. So, that said...Having heard capsulized versions of Bloom's argument here for years in Graduate school (p...

Who does this guy think he is?

It works to woo the ladies.

Every time I reread this, I become more dissatisfied with Bloom's central thesis about the poet's necessary "misprision" in order to clear the way for creative expression. "Misreading," to me assumes a correct reading, and I've had it up to here with professorially mandated "correct" readings decades ago in college. Age and experience has convinced me that every reader's engagement with a text is "correct" for that reader, the question is the ability to convey our ideas of the text.I also believ...

Harold Bloom cast a long shadow on the state of English literature with his publications, the boldest (in name at least) being The Western Canon, published in 1994. He championed writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, setting them as exemplars of what literature was, and denigrated other forms of literary criticism which he saw as politically motivated, such as feminist or Marxist schools of thought. Bloom envisioned literature as a battle for attention and priority, with boo...

''All modern schools believe that metaphor, or figurative language of any kind, is founded upon a pattern of error, whether you ascribe an element of will or intentionality to it, as I do in my belief that writers creatively misunderstand one another, or whether you ascribe it, as deconstructionists do, to the nature of language. But when fallacy is universal, it doesn't seem to make much sense any more to talk about specific fallacies - affective, pathetic, intentional, or whatever. They have v...

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Lzb...Amazingly dicky on several different levels, there is much to admire in the scope and amibitions underlying this theory of poetry. It might look old-school to the point of outdatedness, but it can still make any dedicated reader feel like they know way less then they should about the subject of their passion, which all things considered is always a great thing.

It makes me anxious to think how influential it is.

Harold Bloom is an easy guy to dislike, and even easier to make fun of. Watching his interviews has become somewhat of a hobby of mine, and in them he often seems sullen and dismissive. He’s a portly bloke with bushy eyebrows and a weird accent from teaching himself English at the age of six. He also has a tendency to say that your favorite author or favorite book is utter garbage, and that really seems to piss people off, as if no one should ever have their taste challenged or have to formulate...

My doctoral thesis on Marvell,"This Critical Age," grew from this book, Bate's "Burden of the Past" and others. However, I downgrade Bloom's dependence on Freud's son-father conflict, and his frank focus on "strong poets, major figures"--again, a masculine metaphor.* (In my notes I ask if Bloom's selections here suggest "a survey-course mind.") I recall he abandons Ben Jonson (and by corollary, Marvell) as long prior to the Romantic anxiety of influence. I agree there, since Marvell's poems are

no. i thought i could read this, not thinking of the course in which this reading is assigned, but no. bloom comes off as attempting to be sensational via basically throwing shit at your every single favorite author and literary work but no; doing so does not make the critic groundbreaking. his book is like twitter accounts of famous newspapers where they make a shocking headline so that they'll get more link click hits. And oh, guess what in the link its all horseshit. i had to toss this book a...

I don't think that anyone who writes books about how to read books should be taken seriously outside of academia. And even then it shows lack of conviction on the part of the reader. I find Mr. Bloom is pretty much writing "Cliff Notes" for would be intellectuals so they too can defend their snobbery. If you can point out one modern popular writer he has praised then I will rescind my words. I am just expressing my frustration at a person who takes no risks or has done anything original in their...

‎‫‏‬‬I got introduced to Prof. Harold Bloom while watching Yale’s course on Literature and Critical Theory. I didn’t know how to feel about him and his theory of influence, but now that I’ve read his entire book in which he presented his theory in detail, I can say that It explained many things for me, and it changed the way I look to novels and poems that I find similar, some way or another, to another novel or poem.The most important lesson that I’ve learnt is, influence is not a bad thing. It...

While Harold Bloom's seminal work 'The Anxiety of Influence' is considered to be a confusing book for the majority of its readers and students, I believe that it offers a valid argument and contribution to literary criticism. 'The Anxiety of Influence' does not simply propose another manifesto for antithetical criticism, but posits an alternative way of regarding the astronomical force that is poetic influence: "We reduce-if at all-to another poem. The meaning of a poem can only be another poem....

"When he was 35, Harold Bloom fell into a deep depression, and in the midst of that depression he had a terrible nightmare that a giant winged creature was pressing down on his chest. He woke up gasping for breath, and the next day he began writing a book that would become The Anxiety of Influence, in which he argues that all great writers are obsessed with breaking away from the great writers of the past. The book made him famous, even though few people could understand it. A year after it was

I hate this book.Harold Bloom is an idiot.

goddamn reading it for the third time theory of poetry seems to outline my interaction with 'strong' people i.e. anxiety of influence etc etc. puts you onto good western poets and also philosophy like emerson, nietzsche, etc. i appreciate bloom's perspective "what has been lost is the solitude of the reader" etc. etc. "Shakespeare, who more than any other writer, or any other person that we know of, thought everything through again for himself" feeling like taking some books to the mountains rn