>> The real inspiration comes from the internal development that comes
>when
>> artists start copying and then overthrowing their idols.
>
>This is pretty much Harold Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of
>influence." Bloom being, by the way, a conservative, reactionary
>canon-monger. When I studied poetry writing in college we were taught
>similarly--to be permeable to the collective effects of various poets'
>techniques, to assimilate their cadences, tonalities, etc, to find our
>own "voice." I've since come to recognize such a method as one of
>many, with its own ideological trappings.
Hey, Bloom was one of my heroes as an undergrad, along with Geoffrey Hartman, and reading the Anxiety of Influence in 1972 changed my life. Bloom isn't really a conservative in the political sense - he's certainly no fan of the Xtian right. He's just an old-fashioned elitist. He hated the 60s for all the usual high culture reasons; there's an essay in one of his pre-Anxiety collections complaining about the new decadence of the student rebellion.
But his version of influence (and when I saw him read in NYC a couple of years ago, he mentioned that the Romanian translation of the Anxiety of Influence was literally something like The Fear of Contamination) isn't something that happens consciously - it's an unconscious drama, something like an oedipal struggle.
Doug