ABSTRACT

This chapter examines Harold Bloom's notions of influence, which is first and foremost a poetic category. While it may on occasion look as if this is what Bloom himself is doing, we would miss the point rather significantly if we were to leave an appreciation of his work here. At first glance it looks as if Bloom's position here in regard to the critical activity is close to Geoffrey Hartman's notion that the work of criticism is equivalent to that of poetry; while we would be wrong to make the two positions identical, there are similarities. Here we note that in psychic-terms metaphor is mapped next to sublimation and to the revisionary ratio askesis. On account of this Bloom seems to have felt it necessary to repeat on a number of occasions the distinction he is attempting to make between influence at the level of style or vocabulary, the material of 'source studies', and influence as a rhetorical spacing.