Anxiety of Influence

a slightly revised rant by M.H. Abrams

According to Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence theory, a poet
(especially since the time of Milton) is motivated to compose when
his [or her] imagination is seized upon by a poem or poems of a pre-
cursor.

The “belated” poet’s attitudes to his [or her] precursor, like those in
Freud’s analysis of the Oedipal relationship of son to father, are
ambivalent; that is, they are compounded not only of admiration but
(since any strong poet feels a compelling need to be autonomous and
original) of hate, envy, and fear of the precursor’s preemption of the
descendant’s imaginative space.

The belated poet safeguards his [or her] sense of of his [or her] own
freedom & priority by reading a parent poem “defensively,” in such a
way as to distort it beyond conscious recognition.

NONETHELESS, he [or she] cannot avoid embodying the distorted
parent poem into his [or her] own hopeless attempt to write an unpre-
cedentedly original poem…

…the most that even the best belated poet can achieve is to write a
poem so “strong” that it effects an illusion of “priority”–that is, a
double illusion that it has escaped the precursor poem’s precedence
in time, and that it exceeds it in greatness….

[...in other words...]