Harold Bloom and Poetic Influence

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. Bloom, employing Freudian concepts, describes a poet's relation to his influences as the struggle between father and son. He breaks down this struggle into six different possible dynamics: swerving, completing, purging, daemonizing, curtailing, and flooding. (Of course he gives suitably arcane names to these processes, which I have a hard time remembering, so I utilize some of his secondary terminology). In all of these processes, the later poet reacts to the power and authority of the earlier poet(s).

I suppose this theory of poetry is useful in keeping the critic focused on literary history rather than approaching a poet with a naive sense of that poet's originality, but I find in Bloom a more interesting underlying argument. Foundational to the primary notion of the oedipal struggle is the argument that poetry "takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death" (34). He values the poet's struggle not just against his poetic forebears, but also the struggle for individuation, the attempt to establish the subject apart from nature's laws. So, for example, he praises William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" because it "awakens into failure, and into the creative mind's protest against time's tyranny" (9). I find this a persuasive argument not just because it's emotional implications can be discovered in so many poetic texts, but because it characterizes the process of individuation that compels a tentative and endangered subjectivity that remains open to the anxieties Bloom describes.