forty years Harold Bloom has been an original mind and provocative

presence on the international literary scene. Born in New York City in 1930
and educated at Cornell and Yale Universities, Bloom has taught at Yale
since 1955 and since 1988 at New York University as well. Over these
decades he has been a prolific writer, producing more than twenty major
books of literary and religious criticism, in addition to hundreds of articles,
reviews, and editorial introductions. In recent years Bloom has also been
the subject of numerous published interviews.
From the opening chapter of his first book, Shelley's Mythmaking(1959),
Bloom showed his signature freedom from cultural orthodoxy. Dissatisfied
with the styles of academic thinking prevalent then, Bloom began
developing his own vision of the nature and value of literature, one that
soon revealed itself to be both intellectually unique and socially daring.
Over the course of Bloom's career, that vision has evolved through three
phases, each separate but related and together forming a closely unified
whole.
Bloom first distinguished himself with a series of innovative studies of the
major English Romantic poets. His initial book on Shelley was followed in
rapid succession by The Visionary Company: A Reading of English
Romantic Poetry (1961) and Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic
Argument (1963). All three provoked strong reactions, polarizing the
scholarly community, and quickly making Bloom the field's most visible
critic. Though this earliest work concentrates on interpreting
individual writers through detailed readings of their poems, it also
advances Bloom's general ambition of installing Romanticism at the center
of post-Renaissance English literature. The boldness of Bloom's project
became clearer a few years later with the appearance of Yeats(1970)
and The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition(1971), which
argue the persistence of the Romantic imagination in major Victorian and
modernist poets.
Bloom's principal target in this first phase of his career was the
conservative formalism of T. S. Eliot, who had dismissed the Romantics as
undisciplined poets of nature. Eliot's position became an article of faith in
the New Criticism that dominated the American academy in the 1950s and
early 1960s. Bloom rejected this view, displacing the essence of Romantic
art from reconciliation with nature to a visionary imagination profoundly
antithetical to nature. In Bloom's reading, the Romantic poem does not
represent the artist's harmonious union with the world but instead enacts
his heroic refusal of time and matter.
By the early 1970s, when Bloom's revolutionary version of Romanticism
was itself becoming orthodox, he had already entered the second major
phase of his thought, which is centered in the remarkable tetralogy of The
Anxiety of Influence (1973), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and
Criticism, and Poetry and Repression (1976). These books extrapolate
Bloom's paradigm of the Romantic imagination into a general theory of
poetry and criticism. Drawing on sources as diverse as classical rhetoric
and modern therapy, Bloom proposes that post-Renaissance poetry is an
"achieved anxiety," the product of a new writer's violently repressing the
influence of precursors. The critic's task in this model is to trace this
repression as it operates through various techniques of "misreading."
Bloom's turn to literary theory occurred about the same time that several of
his prominent colleagues at Yale, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey
Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, were adopting Deconstruction. Because of this
coincidence in time and place, Bloom was often associated with them in the
late 1970s and early 80s as one the Yale Critics who were then remaking
the humanities in Deconstruction's image. But as Bloom's own theory
developed, it proved as opposed to the tenets of Deconstruction as his
earlier criticism had been to the doctrines of New Criticism. While Paul de
Man and other Deconstructionists emphasized the instability of linguistic
meaning and the contradictions of conceptual thought, Bloom continued to
champion the imagination's autonomy from language, both literary and
philosophic. To Bloom's thinking, literature is not the mind's play among
unstable signs but the spirit's struggle for originality. And this battle is
waged not against Deconstruction's atemporal linguistic structures but
against the limits of the human condition as they are enforced by the full
weight of past cultural achievements. For Bloom, then, poetry at its best
becomes the scene and trope for humankind's deepest longings for
transfiguration and immortality.
This religious element is active in Bloom's thought from the very beginning,
though it long remained subordinate to the aesthetic. With Agon: Toward a
Theory of Revisionism (1982), however, Bloom's intellectual engagement
with Gnosticism and his personal conversion to its principles raised
religious experience to the forefront of his project. And it is this new
emphasis on the spiritual that characterizes the third phase of Bloom's
career. Gnostic belief and visionary poetry now become interchangeable
modes of knowledge, sharply differentiated from other kinds of experience
by their antagonism to nature and their transcendence of history. Bloom's
critical elevation of Gnosticism had been anticipated a few years earlier by
his only novel, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1979), and it
prominently informs such later books as The American Religion (1992),
where the American religious and literary traditions emerge as more
Gnostic than Protestant, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels,
Dreams, and Resurrection(1996).
This fusion of Gnosis and poetry also animates Bloom's highly publicized
role in recent debates about the literary canon. In The Western Canon: The
Books and School of the Ages (1994) he openly berates feminists,
Marxists, and multi-culturalists for ranking books according to their social
agendas. Bloom's stance has distressed liberals and delighted
conservatives. But the reactions of left and right are equally
inconsequential to him, since greatness in literature arises exclusively from
spiritual sublimity and aesthetic intensity, qualities Bloom considers
fundamentally unrelated to politics or morality.
This has, in fact, been Bloom's premise from the start of his career.Indeed,
as early as A Map of Misreading (1975), he was already lamenting the
humanities' retreat from literature to politics. But the roots of Bloom's
position, both the visionary aesthetics and the ardent Gnosticism, lie
deeper in his past than any of his writings. Recalling childhood memories of
reading poetry, Bloom explains in an autobiographical moment of singular
candor and insight: "To fall in love with great poetry when you are young is
to be awakened to the self's potential, in a way that has little to do, initially,
with overt knowing. The self's potential as power involves the self's
immortality, not as duration but as the awakening to a knowledge of
something in the self that cannot die, because it was never born

Life-Cycle of the Poet-in-the Poet: Harold Bloom and the Writers
Struggle for Existence

In an age which treats literature as a pretext for studying other things like ideology, culture
and society, Harold Bloom (b.1930), one of the most original and fascinating literary
theorists of the later half of the twentieth century, provocatively places literature at the centre
of his theorizing. In many ways he reminds us of Northrop Fryes dictum that literature alone
is the primary context for literature. However, unlike Frye or Eliot, Bloom often collapses, in
Wildean manner, the distinction between critical writing and creative writing.

Bloom revives the Eliotian theme of the relationship between tradition and individual
talent in a dramatic manner, this time, using Nietzsche, Freud, Vico, Emerson and Oscar
Wilde. He aims to de-idealize this relationship on the one hand ( more than ever,
contemporary poets insist that they are telling the truth in their work, and more than ever they
tell continuous lies, particularly about their relations to one another, and most consistently
about their relations to their precursors )and propose an approach to practical criticism on
the other. In Blooms theory, tradition is not a benign and empowering presence but
something of a threat and a challenge to new writers in the west. For Bloom, one of the
functions of criticism is to make a good poets work even more difficult for him to
perform as all that a critic, as a critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that
never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is. A exceptionally prolific
writer, some of his most significant books are The Anxiety of Influence(1973), A Map of
Misreading (1976), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), The Western Canon: The Books and
Schools of the Ages (1994), How to Read and Why(2001), How to Read Poetry (2005) and
more recentlyThe Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life(2011).

In Poetic Origins and Final Phases which is the first chapter of A Map of
Misreading (1975), Bloom points out that the relationship between the poets ,or, in his
words the poets-in-the-poets, is that of rivalry and hostility, as they all are trying to
achieve immortality by securing a place in the canon. Bloom says, poetic strength
comes only from a triumphant wrestling with the dead, and from even more triumphant
solipsism.

What makes this rivalry very bitter is the fact that the new poet (ephebe) starts
writing poetry by reading his favorite poets only to discover that his poetry is not really
his own original work but only a response to the works of earlier masters. Thus he
suffers from the anxiety of influence. His love for poetry of the masters which
inspired him to write in the first place becomes an obstruction in achieving his own
place in the canon. The new writer suffers from the burden of belatedness. His love
turns into hatred. The struggle (agon) of the ephebe, and the precursor poet
according to Bloom, is analogous to the Freudian notion of oedipal conflict. Initial love
for the precursors poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without
which individuation is not possible, Bloom notes. The birth of the poet-in-the-poet or
the process by which a poet is reborn as a poet is what Bloom terms as poetic
incarnation. The poetic incarnation, in Blooms view, results from poetic influence.
Bloom sees influence as the giving that famishes the taker. This influence is
catastrophic and dualistic as it starts out as love and ends up as conflict. Bloom note
that this influence has almost nothing to do with verbal resemblance between two poets
or even stylistic resemblance. In strong poets, it works in the depths, as all love
antithetically works.

The link, the antithetical dependency, between the precursors work and ephebes own is
that of misprision. If he is a weak poet, then either he sacrifices his talent or he
sacrifices his originality, but if he is a strong poet he struggles against the
overwhelming influence of the precursor poet in order to give birth to his own voice.
The ephebe misreads his master to produce his own works. The ephebe deploys six
revisionary ratios or strategies to misread the precursors poetry. Taking a shot at
Wordsworthian notion of poetry, Bloom points out A poet is not so much a man
speaking to men as a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the
precursor) outrageously more alive than himself.

In Poetic Origins and Final Phases, Bloom allegorically and metaphorically notes that
the poets are born by the side of ocean- the ocean of already written poems which is the
feast that famishes the taker. Then, they move onwards to the land by a drying up of
the oceanic sense. True poets are born because of desiccation combined with unusually
strong oceanic sense and poetry like sexual love, is regressive a drive back to ocean.
In contrast to the mass of smaller and weaker poets, the strong poet has in his first
voice, what is most central in the precursors voices. Bloom notes that towards the end
of their careers as poets, the strongest poets become obsessed with origins and return to
the origins in the end. To make his point, Bloom analyzes the tropes of ocean and
desiccation in the strong poets like Shelley, Wordsworth, Swinburne, Beddoes, Auden,
Hardy and Wallace Stevens and demonstrates how older Hardy and Stevens returned to
Shelleyian vision, their poetic origin towards the end of their lives, and hence are the
strongest English poets of the twentieth century.

Bloom simplifies his argument by saying, poemsare neither about subjects nor
about themselves. They are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a
poem, as a poet is response to a poet, or a person to his parent. Trying to write a poem
takes the poet back to the origins of what a poem first was for him, and so takes the poet
back beyond the pleasure principle to the decisive initial encounter and response that
began him.Only a poet challenges a poet as a poet, and so only a poet makes a poet. To
the poet in-the-poet, a poem is always the other man, the precursor, and so a poem is
always a person, always the person of ones Second Birth. To live, the poet
must misinterpret the father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is re-writing of the
father. But who is the poetic father? The voice of the other, of the daimon, is always
speaking in one; the voice that cannot die because already it has survived death-the dead
poet lives in one. In the last phase of strong poets, they attempt to join the undying by
living in the dead poets who are already alive in them. This late Return of the Dead
recalls us, as readers, to a recognition of the original motive for the catastrophe of
poetic incarnation.Literary, poems are refusals of mortality. Even poem therefore
has two makers: the precursor and the ephebes rejected mortality.