Introduction

Neil Corcoran

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511750694.001

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010

Neil Corcoran

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Neil Corcoran: Affiliation:
University of Liverpool

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INFLUENCE

The most influential modern critic to study poetic interrelationships is Harold Bloom in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and several of its successors. Bloom's theories of influence were developed while he was writing about one of the central figures in what follows here, W. B. Yeats. They were also almost certainly in part indebted to Richard Ellmann, a dedicatee of The Anxiety of Influence, who, in Eminent Domain (1967), a study of six modern writers including two given attention in what follows, Yeats and Auden, tacitly developed a well-known tenet of another, T. S. Eliot (that ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’) into this:

That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override.

Rewritten with energetic conviction and terminological brio, this is essentially the view of The Anxiety of Influence too, in which poetic interrelationships are read as a species of neo-Freudian, Oedipal melancholy, a version of the ‘family romance’. Poetry, as a consequence, is ‘misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misalliance’.

Type: Chapter
Information: Shakespeare and the Modern Poet , pp. 1 - 24

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511750694.001 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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References

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