In the "Interchapter: A Manifesto," included in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom asserts that "True poetic history is the story of how poets as poets have suffered other poets, just as any true biography is the story of how anyone suffered his own family--or his own displacement of family into lovers and friends." In using the word "poets" Bloom does not confine himself to those writers of lyric poetry whom we now designate with the term but certainly includes writers or fiction and drama as well, all those writers who belong to what we now call collectively "literature," and thus by "poetic history" Bloom implicitly invokes literary history as a whole. This is probably the most direct explanation of what Bloom means by the "anxiety of influence" to be found in the book, and while it might even seem somewhat flippant, unpacking this statement could perhaps help clarify the insight into the nature of literary influence that is likely to remain Bloom's most lasting contribution to literary criticism, while also suggesting a view of literary history that perhaps cuts across the grain of most current notions of writing as a literary vocation that is itself embedded in what is called a literary "community."
The "other poets" that any individual poet "suffers" are what Bloom calls "precursor poets," those poets who are in fact most important in motivating the current poet to "overcome" the influence of the precursor poet. The attempt to do this does indeed produce "anxiety," not in the poet him/herself but manifest in the poems produced in the attempt. To say the younger poet (an "ephebe," in Bloom's parlance) suffers the precursor is to say both that the ephebe feels an intense rivalry (again, not so much a personal rivalry but one rooted in the latecomer poet's anxiety about the "originality" of his/her own work) but also that there is a kind of suffering involved in the "displacement" of the precursor, who in the poet's development is as important as family is for most people. Ultimately the poet recognizes the significance of the precursor's example (although elsewhere Bloom notes Wallace Stevens's reluctance to acknowledge the influence of Whitman), but also the imperative to break free.
Literary history--at least at the level of the time-tested and canonical--is thus the history of this struggle among "strong poets," the writers whose own achievement can't finally be separated from their simultaneous dependence on and resistance to the achievements of their eminent predecessors. In short, writers who want to be taken seriously can't ignore writing from the past because writing in the present inextricably emerges from the writing of the past, giving substance to the claim that the origin of a poem is always another poem. Writers find themselves within a "tradition" they can't finally evade, although in most cases they don't wish to evade it, but instead to transform it, at least to the extent that the tradition now can accommodate their own work. According to T. S. Eliot, the tradition itself is also thus transformed, but in Bloom's analysis this is not the orderly, "organic" process Eliot described, and "tradition" is certainly not the near-devotional object some of Eliot's followers want it to be. Instead it is fraught with conflict and unacknowledged envy.
It is also, of course, a conflict that arises from intense admiration. One attempts to "overcome" an influence only because the influence is real, because the poet and the work in question has had a profound effect on the would-be poet. But would-be poets are always going to be "anxious" in their admiration because the very qualities they admire pose the greatest threat to their own projects. How can those projects succeed if "other poets" have already made all the best moves and come upon the best subjects?
While Bloom is advancing a Freudian narrative in which quasi-psychological forces are manifested in the relationship between literary works, not a direct Freudian analysis of poets themselves, surely the notion of "rivalry" among writers is neither far-fetched nor confined to the use of images and tropes within writing itself. Certainly Bloom's focus on the anxiety of influence as a material textual feature is the more interesting application of psychoanalytic theory, providing as it does a concrete interpretive tool, but isn't it likely that writers view their own contemporaries not just as colleagues (perhaps not even colleagues) but as antagonists of a sort, potential threats to their artistic visions and literary reputations? How easy is it for a writer to rise above competitive impulses that to some extent seem only natural?
These questions for me are prompted in part by a current literary culture that seems devoted to creating an impression of great collegiality among writers. The most immediate and influential form of literary criticism--book reviewing--is dominated by novelists and poets, some of whom are also perceptive critics but many of whom have been assigned to write reviews under the apparent assumption that fiction writers are best situated to judge other fiction, poets other poetry. This assumption is dubious at best, but the primary effect of this practice is that most reviews dispense abundant praise, often long on superlatives and short on real analysis.
In addition, almost all books now come heavily "blurbed" by other writers, who often seem determined to outdo each other in the rhetorical excess with which they praise their fellow authors. The literary corners of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook liberally engage in various digital versions of handclapping for writers especially admired and frequently feature explicit appeals to "community" among writers, as if literature was a civic organization, or a team sport in which one pledges one's mutual support for teammates. Perhaps it is in this context that we can understand the controversy over "negative reviews": Some writers, and many critics, fail to fully join the team, venturing to question a team member's accomplishment and disrupting group camaraderie.
In surveying literary history, it is hard to identify another period in which serious writers expected to be, or indicated any desire to be, part of a literary community. Paris after World War I is often discussed as the setting for a gathering of like-minded modernists, but Hemingway's A Moveable Feast ought to be evidence enough that whatever friendships that might have formed at this time were laced with barely suppressed resentment and condescension, examples of writers suffering other writers. It seems to me that the push for "community" among writers is a direct function of the "program era" in American literature, the relocation of literary life to the academy, where it is administered in creative writing programs, where other writers are indeed colleagues, and where the wheels driving publication and recognition are greased by the spread of literary magazines sponsored by creative writing programs themselves and the substitution of tenure for commercial success. Under these circumstances, it becomes much easier to think of other writers as fellow members of a community (the community of creative writing teachers and students) rather than rivals, although also much easier as well to write safe but duly crafted, convention-approved fiction and poetry rather than challenge the hegemony of craft and convention by following inspiration where it leads.
Certainly at a time when literature occupies an ever-diminishing portion of public attention and offers an ever-diminishing prospect of providing a livelihood, the removal of writers to the security of academe and the rewards of community was and is understandable and perhaps inevitable. But ultimately this model makes no allowance for the more unruly impulses that kindle the imagination and that make the most profound kind of creativity possible. As Bloom says elsewhere in The Anxiety of Influence,
It does happen that one poet influences another, or more precisely, that one poet’s poems influence the poems of the other, through a generosity of the spirit, even a shared generosity. But our easy idealism is out of place here. Where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more generosity, and the more mutual it is, the poorer the poets involved.
Today's literary culture of community doesn't much account for "misprision," or creative misinterpretation, because it doesn't really have much room for interpretation and judgment at all. All writing is taken with the same congratulatory enthusiasm, allowed to interpret itself through reviews stuffed with plot summary or overwritten superlatives. Program-era fiction gave rise to the vacuous marketing term "literary fiction," which is mostly applied to the kind of proficiently-written but uninspiring stories and novels issued by the writers within creative writing departments needing tenure or first publication. To judge by the blurbs, the tweets, and the tumblr posts these writers use to promote this work, they are reasonably satisfied with the results, but we could wonder whether some of them, perhaps among the more ambitious, don't finally feel a crippling constraint in all such enforced "generosity of spirit."