Scarriet

W. Jackson Bate: published a more cogent and comprehensive thesis with the term ‘anxiety of influence’ several years before Harold Bloom did.

Who remembers the specifics of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” argument?

Anyone remember the six types of influence which comprise the central chapters of Bloom’s original book, “The Anxiety of Influence,” published in 1973?

No?

Clinamen (swerving), Tessera (completing), Kenosis (breaking), Daemonization (transcending), Askesis (purging), Apophrades (reversing) don’t ring any bells?

Didn’t think so.

The idea of literary “influence” was certainly not original in 1973.

The actual writing of Bloom’s famous work, “The Anxiety of Influence,” no longer resonates, if it ever did.

Looking back at the last 100 years of American Letters:

Pound set off a series of anarchist bombs, working the little magazine circuit, and things were unsettled for about 20 years.

T.S. Eliot ruled over the ruins for aproximately 40 years.

The critical torch was passed to Harold Bloom about 40 years ago.

The transition to Bloom occured when the New Criticism, famous exactly when Eliot was famous, faded before the twin triumph of the Beats, who survive today in Slam poetry readings, and the ‘new’ poetry—whose post-modernism lives in various academic niches and on Silliman’s blog.

Bloom, difficult and dull, even more so than Eliot—who was at least a poet as well as a critic—is the survivor of the moment, and Bloom is an uncanny best-seller (perhaps because Bloom’s assigned in school a lot).

In a nutshell, then, the critical domain has been divided between Eliot (then) and Bloom (now).

What do Eliot and Bloom have in common, besides the fact they both published virulent attacks on Poe?

The late John Hollander, Bloom’s former colleague at Yale, in his favorable review of The Anxiety of Influence in the New York Times, March 4, 1973, places importance on Bloom, the Romantic, breaking with Eliot, the Modernist:

T.S. Eliot’s conjuror’s patter about the literary tradition that lay behind his–and all of truly modern–poetry invoked the Middle Ages, Dante, 17th-century English literature exclusive of Milton and French symbolism. It diverted his readers’ eyes from the confederate power of Tennyson’s ghost, unacknowledged, assisting him behind a screen. (Eliot’s contemporary, Ezra Pound, was more open about his own stage assistant, Browning’s spirit, as was Yeats about Shelley’s and Blake’s.) In his essay of 1919, Eliot declared that a poet must “develop or procure” a consciousness of the past, maintaining that if we moderns do indeed know more than dead writers, it is precisely they–the dead writers–who constitute what we know.

Harold Bloom of Yale, an interpretive scholar of English and American romanticism, has for years been propounding a view of literary history and its relation to creative originality quite antithetical to the allied formulations of Eliot and Pound. Along with his own teachers, Northrop Frye and Meyer H. Abrams, but in very different ways, Bloom has helped to make the study of Romantic poetry as intellectually and spiritually challenging a branch of literary studies as one may find. The recent study of the romantic tradition has corrected the modernist dogmas about romanticism–the very word evoked the imprecise, the vague, the rhetorical–and argued for the centrality of the major English poetic line which modernism rejected. Eliot hankered after the Christian orthodoxy, classicism and royalty; the tradition he turned away from, the line running from Spenser, to Milton through the romantic poets to Browning, Tennyson and Yeats, was protestant, visionary and, save at its terminus, revolutionary.

–John Hollander, NY Times, 1973

Harold Bloom, then, was a part of a revolt against Modernism and its “dogmas about romanticism,” according to Hollander.

Bloom has said he deeply resented the dominance in Letters of T.S. Eliot, so it makes sense that Bloom’s first major study was on Eliot’s nemesis, Shelley (it is often debated who Eliot reviled more: Poe or Shelley).

Bloom’s chief analogy in The Anxiety of Influence draws on the work of another writer Eliot swerved away from: Milton.

But how does it help a writer to think of himself as Milton’s Satan, and a precursor who may happen to haunt him, Milton’s God?

The entire “Anxiety” agon, as articulated by Bloom in his book, and elsewhere, is merely Bloom’s private vision, peopled with Bloom’s own abstract and scholarly connections.  Hollander hints as much, when he calls Bloom’s book, “maddening,” “dense,” “strange,” and “outrageous.”

Bloom’s idea of “misreading” as a major aspect of “influence” is a truism, for “influence” is never a straight line—if it were, it would be copying.  Bate also covered the exact same ground– in clearer prose.

So if Bloom’s most famous agon has no originality, what, we may ask, was ‘the torch’ that was passed from Eliot to Bloom, in the most general terms?

We already stated both Eliot and Bloom abused Poe, even though Eliot abused Shelley, and Bloom helped save Shelley and the Romantics from abuse by the Modernists.

Since Poe was a major figure abused by the Modernists, it is odd that Bloom would have such hatred for Poe (and we do mean hatred, writing-him-out-of-the-canon hatred) for never mind hating such a giant as Poe in the first place, but how could one have the sensibility to reach out a hand to Shelley, after the Romantic poet’s long abuse at the hands of the Moderns/New Critics, while at the same, joining the Moderns/New Critics in kicking Poe off the cliff?  It doesn’t make sense.

But then we remember Emerson.  Bloom glories in Emerson, a writer who perfectly fits Bloom’s aphorism: “all criticism is prose poetry.”  It is precisely because there is a writer like Emerson that Bloom can secretly believe that he (Bloom) can wear the poet’s crown. Like Bloom, Emerson didn’t like to write reviews, wrote no fiction, didn’t care for science, and is most remembered for lofty, secular, religiously-tinged sermons.

Emerson, in a nasty moment, called Poe’s mastery in all those areas which Emerson came up miserably short, a “jingle,” which, ironically, in the little “influence” game we are playing now, is the same word T.S. Eliot used to deride Shelley.

Another irony, no doubt lost on Bloom, is that Emerson’s New England roots are intertwined with Eliot’s, through Eliot’s highly influential Unitarian grandfather—who married the sister of a Transcendentalist, the group who Poe mocked in his war on the New England of Emerson.

None of this should matter to Bloom, who never brings biography or history into his Criticism, and is essentially like his mentor, Northrup Frye, another Emersonian of over-arching rhetoric.

How can you talk of “influence” without reviewing books and poems, and without talking about history and actual human beings and their actual lives and works?

You can’t.

So Bloom, with his cold-blooded, detached, academic, self-involved, dense, digressive, mythologizing and his Emerson-worship, is not a triumphant return of the Humanist Romantics, but simply the priestly return of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics in a clumsy disguise.  Bloom’s book on Shelley, (published in the 50s) was diversionary, a puff of anti-Eliot smoke.

As Hollander mentioned, Bloom’s other mentor, beside Frye, was M.H. Abrams, the Norton Anthology of Literature founder—that would be someone to know!  Abrams was a deep admirer of Pound and Eliot and a good friend of A.R. Ammons, of whom Bloom just happened to be a great champion, even in his work, The Anxiety of Influence.  If I’m going to fancy a contemporary, it might as well be Archie Ammons, a good friend of my profoundly influential teacher, Mike Abrams.  Influence, indeed!

Hollander’s scene of Bloom with flag of Romanticism waving is mere hyperbole.  Influence is wet-lipped and real, not merely abstract and mythopoeic.

Thirty years after The Anxiety of Influence, Foetry.com discovered that “influence” is much more local and current than many realize.

Scarriet has gone on to discover that if you study poetry going back a half-a-dozen generations, or further, you keep running into the same dozen or so names: Emerson, William James, I.A. Richards, etc.

The following was taken from an obituary of Pulitzer Prize winning Keats biographer, W. Jackson Bate:

Late in life he worried about increasing academic specialisations. “The humanities,” he remarked to John Paul Russo in a 1986 interview,

are always digressing and they can be used . . . for any purpose. But what is misused in the sciences is the result, whereas the approach in the humanities can be infinitely diverse, and wayward, perverse as well as diverse, foolish, trivial, as the result of airy opinion, impulse, caprice, and can be twisted by . . . envy, rivalry, prejudices of all kinds. [Samuel] Johnson says the first step in greatness is to be honest. If there can be simply a facing up to the essentials of common experience, the humanities can almost in a moment shake themselves into sanity.”

–James Engell, Bate obituary, 1999

It might be interesting to take a glance at Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet  (1970) which Hollander cannot help but mention early in his review of Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973).  Hollander must have known, with Bloom, the author, and everyone else involved in the writing and publishing of The Anxiety of Influence, that Bloom was merely following fast behind Bate, who, in turn, was repeating a very old thesis. To read both works (Bate and Bloom) is to be struck by how the work which came first (Bate’s) is far more readable, insightful, and much better researched.  The “influence of anxiety” is here: Bloom robbing from Bate. (Bate’s book even gives cursory thanks to Bloom.) Here is Bate from the first page of his prize-winning book—actually a collection of lectures delivered at the University of Toronto in 1969:

I have often wondered whether we could find any more comprehensive way of taking up the whole of English poetry during the last three centuries—or for that matter the modern history of the arts in general—than by exploring the effects of this accumulating anxiety and the question it so directly presents to the poet or artist: What is there left to do? To say this has always been a problem, and that the arts have still managed to survive, does not undercut the fact that it has become far more pressing in the modern world. Of course the situation is an old one. We need not even start with Rome or Alexandria, those examplars of what it can mean to the artist to stand in competition with an admired past. We could go back to an almost forgotten Egyptian scribe of 2000 B.C. (Khakheperresenb), who inherited in his literary legacy no Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, or Dickens—no formidable variety of literary genres available in thousands of libraries—yet who still left the poignant epigram: “Would I had phrases that were not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.” But a problem can more acute under some conditions than others. And, whatever other generalizations can be made about the arts since the Renaissance, a fact with which we can hardly quarrel—though we instinctively resist some of the implicaitons—is that the means of preserving and distributing the literature (and more recently the other arts) of the past have immeasurably increased, and to such a point that we now have confronting the artist—or have in potentia—a vast array of varied achievement, existing and constantly multiplying in an “eternal present.”

We could, in fact, argue that the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness, before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past, has become the greatest single problem that modern art (art, that is to say, since the later seventeenth century) has had to face, and that it will become increasingly so in the future.

–W. Jackson Bate

Compared to Bloom, Bate, the more comprehensive scholar, made the case for “anxiety of influence” before Bloom did, and in a far more clear, urgent, historical, and practical manner, without Bloom’s torturous, mytho-poeic rhetoric—but this is not the place to wonder why Bloom got all the attention.  The influence of Bloom’s mentor, M.H. Abrams, founder of the Norton Anthology, who in turn had been mentored by I.A. Richards, may have had something to do with it, or the fact that Bloom jumped on the Ashbery (and Ammons) bandwagon, which at that moment was where contemporary poetry was heading, but these considerations require more research, even if they are, in a sly way, relevant to the theme of “influence.”

The question is, should there be “anxiety” because of “influence,” and what sort of “influence” are we talking about, anyway?  All poets know that who you know helps you to become famous, and that not knowing the right people will much sooner deny you fame than having easy access to the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Harold Bloom.

As much as we respect W. Jackson Bate, and whether or not you laugh at the pomposity of Bloom, we believe the thesis (as articulated by the old Egyptian scribe, or Bate or Bloom) is bunk.

Literary influence should not cause anxiety, unless by influence you mean: plagiarism, theft, foetry, and other kinds of fakery.

The general question of “anxiety of influence” must have arisen as scholars in the middle of the last century grew uneasy as they noticed how easily and quickly the past had been cut off by the Modernist anarchists.

The crude, anxious, guppie-tank view was expressed by T.S. Eliot (quoted by Bate is his book):

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet, fulfills once for all some possibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

–T.S. Eliot

When Bloom anxiously took the Critical Crown from an anxious Eliot, it was not a break.

It was a continuation.