Friday afternoon I dropped by McNally Jackson to find Anatomy of Influence on the shelf at last, a book I’ve been looking forward to for over a year. As Bloom’s student and friend, I’ve often wondered at the shift from his early gnomic studies of poetic influence through to large popular bestsellers like Shakespeare and The Western Canon. Recently turned eighty, he says this latest will be his final major critical study. As a synthesis of two sides of his work, a focused return to his most characteristic subject, and in many ways his ultimate critical statement, Anatomy of Influence will be of strong interest to readers of literary criticism.
I’ve pretty much finished the book this weekend, and there is a lot to process and to explore—some of the most interesting observations are almost asides—such as the impact of Yeats’s Byzantium poems on Stevens' late “Of Mere Being.” Fully a third of the book is dedicated to Shakespeare, with the other towering figure being Walt Whitman, the American Bard. (Most recently I saw Bloom speak on late Shakespeare at the Classic Stage Company, where the interviewer plunged into uncommon regions of awkwardness by knowingly forcing his guest to state that the production they were about to stage, Double Falsehood, is a Shakespeare forgery—Bloom handled this with humor and grace, quipping, “A very accurate title, in fact.”)
This is not to say that Anatomy of Influence is not in some ways a strange book. Readers primarily familiar with Bloom’s popular works may be confused by the idiosyncratic Gnostic elements of his criticism; though this strain doesn’t fully resonate with this reader, this doesn’t impede my appreciation. Other difficult sections include the emphasis on Lucretius and the dense, fascinating chapter on Yeats’s bizarre theories and deep struggle with Shelley. (Following this is a chapter on James Merrill’s subsequent agon with the Irish poet, which Bloom convincingly argues Merrill wasn’t fully able to overcome.) This is also one of his most personal books, reflecting on why this subject has meant so much to him. Other highlights include a chapter on his literary hero Hart Crane (subject of a forthcoming James Franco film—sources tell me this prompted Bloom to call Franco a quote "madman").
Some thirty-eight years after Anxiety of Influence, Bloom continues to see influence operating between poets (often on an unconscious level) through “misreading” or the reinterpretation of earlier poems. This is pared down from the complex vocabulary of the earlier work to two main concepts—the swerve of reinterpretation and the rare aprophrades, “the return of the dead”—an overcoming of influence through direct confrontation, creating the uncanny illusion that the later writer preceeded the earlier.
The final chapter covers four other contemporary poets: Ashbery, Ammons, Merwin, and Charles Wright. Having studied Ashbery in an independent project with Bloom, this is especially fascinating as a new statement. I also encourage readers to see the fascinating essay in 1976’s Figures of Capable Imagination. In both books Bloom reveals the shockingly deep connection between Ashbery and Whitman, with whole sections of text essentially indistinguishable between the two writers. In the new book, he quotes a successful aprophrades of a certain strand of Whitman in Song of Myself section 4, as well as quoting from Ashbery’s “Finnish Rhapsody" and the double sestina on the sunflower in Flow Chart.
From Song of Myself section 4:
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or argument, I witness and wait.
From “Finnish Rhapsody”:
And it will be but half-strange, really be only semi-bizarre
When the tall poems of the world, the towering earthbound poetic utterances
Invade the street of our dialect, penetrate the avenue of our patois,
Bringing fresh power and new knowledge, transporting virgin might and up-to date enlightenment
To this place of honest thirst, to this satisfyingly parched here and now
—
Rob Crawford is the author of Brilliant Families, forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. An editor at Overlook Press, he attended Phillips Academy Andover and Yale University. His writing has appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review and Publishers Weekly, and he lives in Brooklyn. @rcrawford7