ABSTRACT
Harold Bloom has always had a concern for nineteenth-century and particularly for Romantic poetry. Employing a vocabulary taken from Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex, in which sons wish to marry or sexually possess their mothers and so wish to supplant or even kill their fathers, Bloom writes of the ‘poetic father’ as a scandalous figure, scandalous because he cannot die or be murdered. The ideas contained in that last sentence are crucial and lead us on to Bloom's conflictual vision of the intertextual process. Bloom refers to ‘source study’ in order to distance his use of the word ‘influence’ from traditional uses of that word. The map of misreading is in six stages, each stage concerning what Bloom calls a ‘revisionary ratio’, a specific technique of misreading. Bloom, however, admits that if reading is the study of intertextual relations, then there is an inevitably ‘arbitrary’ element in all reading.
