A Defense Of Poetry Or A Disenfranchisement Of Poetry?

The main object of this thesis is Harold Bloom's misreading theory put forth in his tetralogy of misreading. What Bloom does in his The Anxiety of Influence, in effect, is to rewrite literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow of a "strong" poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this "anxiety of influence" by its systematic remolding of a previous poem. All poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as 'misreadings' or 'misprisions' of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. The meaning of a poem is another poem. He insists that reading is a miswriting just as writing is a misreading. As literary history lengthens, all poetry necessarily becomes verse-criticism, just as all criticism becomes prose-poetry.Bloom is the prophetic spokesman for the creative imagination in the modern age, reading literary history as an heroic battle of giants or mighty psychic drama, trusting to the "will to expression" of the strong poet in his struggle for self-origination. Such doughty Romantic individualism is fiercely at odds with the skeptical, anti-humanist ethos of a deconstructive age, and indeed Bloom has defended the value of individual poetic 'voice' and genius against his Derridean colleagues (Hartman, de Man, Hillis Miller) at Yale. His hope is that he may snatch from the jaws of a deconstructive criticism he in some ways respects a Romantic humanism which will reinstate author, intention and the power of the imagination. What Bloom attacks most fiercely is the New Criticism, and he can't tolerate the Structuralism and the Deconstructive criticism because they banish the value of "self". The theory of Bloom is full of originality and provocativeness, this thesis will also concern and evaluate his practice of the theory.