ABSTRACT
Some years ago, critic Harold Bloom (1973) wrote a short book in which he described a theory of poetic influence. His argument was that intra-poetic relationships are indistinguishable from the history of poetry and that “strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (p. 5). Poetic influence, Bloom reasoned, does not render poets any less original, although it is feared that it does, and this is the anxiety of which he writes: the anxiety of influence, the title of his book.
