the anatomy of influence new haven and london Harold Bloom The Anatomy of Influence Literature as a Way of Life 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. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educa- tional, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). 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 ix the point of view for my work as a critic Literary Love 3 Sublime Strangeness 16 The Influence of a Mind on Itself 25 shakespeare, the founder Shakespeare’s People 35 The Rival Poet: King Lear 48 Shakespeare’s Ellipsis: The Tempest 62 Possession in Many Modes: The Sonnets 78 Hamlet and the Art of Knowing 87 Milton’s Hamlet 94 Joyce . . . Dante . . . Shakespeare . . . Milton 109 Dr. Johnson and Critical Influence 126 viii contents the skeptical sublime Anxieties of Epicurean Influence: Dryden, Pater, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman, Swinburne, Stevens 133 Leopardi’s Lucretian Swerve 162 Shelley’s Heirs: Browning and Yeats 172 Whose Condition of Fire? Merrill and Yeats 194 whitman and the death of europe in the evening land Emerson and a Poetry Yet to Be Written 209 Whitman’s Tally 218 Death and the Poet: Whitmanian Ebbings 235 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction of the Romantic Self 248 Near the Quick: Lawrence and Whitman 255 Hand of Fire: Hart Crane’s Magnificence 266 Whitman’s Prodigals: Ashbery, Ammons, Merwin, Strand, Charles Wright 294 Coda 334 Acknowledgments 337 Credits 338 Index 341 praeludium W hen 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. But Burton was my undoing. Even before a debilitating series of mishaps and illnesses, I could not sustain the challenge. Traces of Burton’s marvelous madness abide in this book, and yet it may be that all I share with Burton is an obsessiveness somewhat parallel to his own. Burton’s melancholy emanated from his fantastic learning: he wrote to cure his own learnedness. My book isolates literary melancholy as the agon of influence, and perhaps I write to cure my own sense of having been overinfluenced since childhood by the greatest Western authors. In this, my final reflection upon the influence process, I offer commentary on some thirty writers, half of them British, more than a third American, and a few continental. They do not seem to me arbitrary choices: I have written about all of them before, in widely scattered books and essays, but I strive here to render my appreciations fresh and not reliant upon earlier formulations. Five of these chapters are centered on Shakespeare, and since he is a pres- ence throughout, probably a third of the book is given to him. There are three ix