ABSTRACT
In The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading Harold Bloom outlines a systematic procedure that attempts to account for the nature of influence in poetry. Any poetic Endeavour, therefore, is grounded in a tradition, and in a sense is reactionary rather than an original and autonomous creative impulse. For Bloom, poetry itself is the true subject matter of the poem. But this is not to say that Bloom forgets what poems are about; rather, any poem's external subject matter is mediated through other poems via an anxiety of influence. The juxtaposition of ancient and modern, sacred and secular may appear at first quite artificial, and indeed there are critics who have described the War Requiem as 'a paste job of past composers' creativity'. In terms of its formal design and the moment-by-moment surface incident of the material, the War Requiem works on a number of intertextual levels simultaneously.
