Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry is one of the most cited and debated texts to have emerged in the field of Anglo-American literary theory. The object of a huge amount of debate and comment since its first publication in 1973, The Anxiety of Influence has changed for good the manner in which critics working on literary influence think about that subject. Students of Romantic poetry, or indeed of modern literature in general, will find it hard to proceed through their studies without coming across references to Bloom's seminal text.

Newcomers to the text will most probably experience it in its second Oxford University Press edition, published in 1997, which includes a lengthy preface writ