![]() This titanic literary contention between fathers and sons (seldom between mothers and daughters) represented the anxious struggle of the poet before the “cloud of presences” in the very language of poetry itself. In two powerfully influential books, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), Bloom argued that literary texts were born under the shadow of predecessors. In the 1970s he turned from the study of the Romantic imagination to the subject of originality itself, and its impossibility. ![]() In his early 40s, Bloom had become the dominant figure in the academic study of Romanticism and its heritage. I must have read it a hundred times between 19, probably intuitively memorised it, and will never escape the effect of it.”īlake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (1963) was followed by a study of Yeats in 1970, and a year later The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, in which he tried to show, in the face of modernist orthodoxies, that the Romantic imagination was the formative presence in the greatest Victorian and modern poets. I thought it was the best book I ever read about anything. ![]() In the work of Frye, Bloom discovered his “authentic precursor”: “It ravished my heart away. ![]()
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