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THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE

The Anatomy of Influence

Literature as a Way of Life

Harold Bloom

Copyright © 2011 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Emigre Filosofia type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bloom, Harold.

The anatomy of influence : literature as a way of life / Harold Bloom.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-16760-3 (alk. paper)

1. Literature—Appreciation. 2. Literature—Philosophy. 3. Authors

and readers. 4. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc. ). 5. Bloom, Harold.

I. Title.

PN81. B5449 2011

801′. 3—dc22 2010042456

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39. 48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For John Hollander

For art criticism we need people who would show the senselessness of looking for ideas in a work of art, but who instead would continually guide readers in that endless labyrinth of linkages that makes up the stuff of art, and bring them to the laws that serve as the foundation for those linkages.

LEV TOLSTOY, letter to Nikolai Strakhov

CONTENTS

Praeludium

THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS A CRITIC

Literary Love

Sublime Strangeness

The Influence of a Mind on Itself

SHAKESPEARE, THE FOUNDER

Shakespeare’s People

The Rival Poet: King Lear

Shakespeare’s Ellipsis: The Tempest

Possession in Many Modes: The Sonnets

Hamlet and the Art of Knowing

Milton’s Hamlet

Joyce . . . Dante . . . Shakespeare . . . Milton

Dr. Johnson and Critical Influence

THE SKEPTICAL SUBLIME

Anxieties of Epicurean Influence: Dryden, Pater, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman, Swinburne, Stevens

Leopardi’s Lucretian Swerve

Shelley’s Heirs: Browning and Yeats

Whose Condition of Fire? Merrill and Yeats

WHITMAN AND THE DEATH OF EUROPE IN THE EVENING LAND

Emerson and a Poetry Yet to Be Written

Whitman’s Tally

Death and the Poet: Whitmanian Ebbings

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction of the Romantic Self

Near the Quick: Lawrence and Whitman

Hand of Fire: Hart Crane’s Magnificence

Whitman’s Prodigals: Ashbery, Ammons, Merwin, Strand, Charles Wright

Coda

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index

PRAELUDIUM

When I began writing this book, in the summer of 2004, I intended an even more baroque work than it has become. My model was to be Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a thousand-page labyrinth that has dazzled me since I was young. My hero and mentor Dr. Samuel Johnson read Burton to pieces, as did my late friend Anthony Burgess and a living friend, Angus Fletcher, who is my critical guide and conscience.