ABSTRACT
The history of the poetic tradition is the history of a diachronic rhetoric which has as its particular tropes a series of metalepsis or transumptions. This chapter demonstrates Harold Bloom's attempts to persuade a real difference in these two kinds of rhetorical order, the synchronic and the diachronic. The development of a diachronic rhetoric is almost prefigured in the reading of the trope of metalepsis. Bloom goes on to disagree with Quintilian's restricted understanding of the trope, preferring Puttenham's description of it as the far-fetcher, or 'farrefet'. The chapter then examine Bloom's definition of the trope, before taking measure of the later essay 'Transumption: towards a diachronic rhetoric', which closes The breaking of the vessels. Bloom has been describing the movement between introjection and projection in order to clarify the differences between images of limitation and images of representation in the crisis poem.
