The Anxiety of Influence

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom makes two main points in the opening pages. First, that "really strong poets can read only themselves (19)." And second that, "The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation (86)." This means that writers, poets, playwrights, what have you, cannot accept what has gone before and must obliterate it in refashioning their own vision. All well and good. But the argument can be applied to critics as well, and are we not hearing a bit of projection of Bloom onto his own work as a critic, a master critic, a strong critic, one who has, for all practical purposes, rejected the readings of others in his quest to express his own vision. Other critics be damned, to use a Miltonic allusion, Satan is speaking. In Bloom we hear some of Satan's voice.