The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 1973 and is one of the most influential works of literary theory produced in the twentieth century. Bloom’s central thesis is that strong poets — poets of genuine originality — are formed not by passive reception of tradition but by active struggle against their predecessors. Every strong poem is a “misreading” of a prior strong poem: the later poet distorts, revises, and transforms the earlier poet’s achievement in order to create imaginative space in which his own work can exist.
Bloom identifies six “revisionary ratios” — mechanisms by which later poets defend themselves against the overwhelming authority of their precursors: clinamen (poetic swerving), tessera (completion and antithesis), kenosis (repetition that empties), daemonization (a counter-sublime), askesis (self-purgation), and apophrades (return of the dead). These categories, drawn from rhetoric, Kabbalah, and Gnosticism, describe the psychic defenses that allow creative originality to emerge from within a saturated tradition.
The theory’s implications are radical: originality is not the innocent expression of individual genius but the product of warfare — psychological, rhetorical, and spiritual — against one’s literary fathers. Poetry is not a collaborative tradition of grateful inheritance but a competitive struggle in which the strong survive by distorting their predecessors’ meanings. The book was attacked by critics who found it reductive, patriarchal, and elitist, but its influence proved impossible to avoid: after The Anxiety of Influence, no one could discuss literary tradition innocently.
Collecting The Anxiety of Influence
First edition (Oxford University Press, New York, 1973): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Signed copies: $200–$500