Harold Bloom and T.S Eliot free essay sample

Support your arguments with apposite literary examples. Literary critics have always recognized the ‘tension between the uniqueness of artistic creation and the awareness of tradition, and the tension between the acknowledgment of literary influence and its rejection’. Nowadays, writers are judged according to their originality and uniqueness. However, as T.S Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence suggest, a writer should not be evaluated in these terms, but rather, on how he produces art by acknowledging his predecessors. Nevertheless, they declare that the poet must not imitate blindly previous poets. Henceforth, this essay will aim to portray further the ideas put forth my Bloom and T. S. Eliot, showing comparisons and contrasts in their arguments. Both critics, in their essays, try to define the great poet. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom states that his ‘concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death’. We will write a custom essay sample on Harold Bloom and T.S Eliot or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Furthermore, he exhorts the idea that the strong poet must not repeat his predecessors but look to them to be original. He claims that ‘poetic influence†¦ often makes [the poetry] more original’. Thus, he employs the idea that the poet must misinterpret previous works to create something personal; the poet must deny influence by intentionally ‘misreading’. A poem must purge itself from any influence but through this purgation should display the particular influence at work. Hence, the ideas of ‘misinterpretation’ and ‘poetic misprision’, advocates the idea that past poets always have an effect on their descendants. Bloom goes so far as to add that ‘the meaning of a poem can only be another poem’. In addition, Bloom introduces six revisionary ratios that represent the poet’s cycle to achieve greatness. Firstly, he discusses ‘Clinamen’ or ‘Poetic misprision’: a type of corrective movement in present poetry. This implies that the precursor poem was accurate to a certain extent, but it should have swerved further, precisely in the direction of the present poem. The second ratio, ‘Tessera’, is the way the poet completes his precursor’s work by reading the ‘parent-poem’ as to keep its terms but to mean something else ‘as though the precursor had failed to go far enough’. Thirdly, Bloom deals with ‘Kenosis’, which refers to the defence mechanism the poet’s mind employs in order to avoid repetition. He moves on to explore ‘Daemonization’ which is the ‘movement towards a personalized counter-sublime’ meaning that the present poet believes that there is a power in the parent poem that does not belong solely to the predecessor. He moves on further to introduce the term ‘Askesis’ which is the poet’s progression to reach a state of solitude. This mode of being allows the poet to ‘yield up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including his precursor’. Finally, ‘Apophrades’ is the stage in which the poet ‘holds his poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios’. Significantly, many of the ideas put forth by Bloom are clearly seen in many literary works, including Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Epic conventions are predominant in Pope’s poem as he uses such conventions to enforce his argument against his society. In this respect, Pope ‘misreads’ epic writers such as Homer and John Milton and uses their works to evoke something of more urgency to him. In his poem, he evokes what his predecessors failed to display through the epic style; he uses epic conventions not to present the reader with a grandeurs story but to strengthen his satirical tone when portraying trivial things, such as the cutting of a lock, as being of great importance to his contemporary society. This can be seen in the way battle scenes and armours are bestowed throughout. In The Iliad, Homer describes in considerable detail the armour of the great Achilles, as well as the battlefield trappings of other heroes. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope describes Belinda preparing herself with combs and  pins noting that ‘Now awful beauty puts on all its arms’. Likewise, in Canto three, the rendering of the card game as a battle constitutes an amusing narrative: Four Knaves in garbs succinct, a trusty band, Caps on their heads, and halberts in their hand; And particolored troops, a shining train, Draw forth to combat on the velvet pain. By parodying the battle scenes of the great epic poems, Pope is suggesting that the energy and passion once exhausted on brave and serious matters is now expended on such insignificant trials as games and gambling. The structure of the three attempts, by which the lock is cut, is a convention of heroic challenges, particularly in the romance genre. The romance is further invoked in the image of Clarissa arming the Baron, ‘So Ladies in Romance assist their Knight, Present the Spear, and arm him for the Fight. However, instead of an actual weapon, it is the scissors that Clarissa gives to the Baron which Pope grandiosely describes as ‘the glittring  Forfex’. Furthermore, as in The Iliad, The Odyssey, Aeneid and Paradise Lost, supernatural beings take part in the action. However, whereas in In  The Iliad  and  Aeneid these were the Greek gods and in Paradise Lost they were God and Satan,  in The Rape of the Lock  the supernatural creatures are the sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders that are rather fairy-like incarnations of coquettish, prudish women, respectively. The sylphs serve in place of the gods who watch over the heroes of epics and guide their fortune. Moreover, like supernatural beings in classical epics, there is a journey by the gnome to the Underworld. Umbriel’s journey to the Cave of Spleen mimics the journeys to the underworld made by both  Odysseus  and  Aeneas. However, whereas in Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is able to enter Hades because he carries the golden bough, Pope parodies this passage, changing the golden bough to a plant that was delivered to cure the spleen; The plant symbolising ‘wild female emotions’. Furthermore, Pope can be viewed as taking the works of his predecessors and creating the genre of the mock-heroic epic through the ‘misreading’ and revisionary ratios introduced by Bloom. Moreover, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot proposes that one should not praise the writer in isolation from his ancestors, if the poet is a great one than there will be signs of previous poets in his work. Eliot claims that ‘the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously’. Moreover, he goes on to describe the ‘great labour’ one has to go through to obtain such tradition. First, the poet must have a historical sense, meaning that one has to know about his predecessors and view them and himself as a writer in simultaneous order. This sense of ‘the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional’. Similar to Bloom’s ideas about the writer becoming more original when he has knowledge about his successor, Eliot suggests that the more the writer is exposed to past writers the more conscious of ‘his contemporaneity’ he becomes. However, Eliot goes one step further than Bloom when it comes to his ideas about the poet himself. He believes that the ‘progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’. In order to strengthen this idea of ‘depersonalization’ or ‘impersonal theory of poetry’, he creates an analogy of a catalyst. He explains that ‘when the two gases†¦ are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢. Thereby, the poet is the platinum and it may function on the experience of the man himself. However, the more perfect the artist is, the more separate the man who suffers and the man who creates are. Hence, the elements which are present in the transformation of catalyst are the feelings and emotions of the writer. Furthermore, he concludes his argument by affirming his idea that ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, Of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things’. Relatively, Eliot’s ideas on the importance of tradition in descendants’ work are depicted in many literary works, such as Percy Shelley’s ‘Adonais’. The poem was composed in accordance to the tradition of the pastoral elegy, particularly structured on John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. Firstly, Shelley states ‘I weep for Adonais-he is dead! l O, weep for Adonais! ’. This declaration of the dead and the invitation to grieve for his death is commonly found in other pastoral elegies such as Milton’s ‘Lycidas’: ‘Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, l Compels me to disturb your season due: l For  Lycidas  is dead, dead ere his prime’. Similarly, Shelley also refers to ‘the mountain shepherds [who] came l their garlands sere’ which are common images in the tradition of the pastoral elegy. Significantly, Shelley uses the name Adonais to refer to John Keats. Adonis was known, in Greek Mythology, as the handsome youth whom the goddess Venus loved and who was killed tragically by boars. Shelley parallels this legend to his contemporary Keats claiming, in his preface to the poem, that the ‘savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the ruture of a blood-vessel in the lungs†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢. Thus, Shelley uses Greek Mythology to portray Keats as sharing a spiritual identity with a mortal god and to compare the critics, who he claimed were the cause of his death, to the wild boars. Moreover, the poet pitifully urges the fallen Adonais’ mother, Urania. In her, Shelley combines both the Venus of the Adonis myth and the muse of astronomy. Moreover, the reference to such a figure abides by the conventions of the pastoral elegy. In addition, he abides by the pastoral as he draws on the ‘most musical of mourners, [who] weep anew! ’. Subsequently, Shelley’s elegy possesses what Eliot refers to as the ‘historical sense’ as he uses figures of Greek mythology and places them within the conventions of the Virgilian elegy as he brings them together with his present situation. There seems to be a range of traditions all leading up to the present moment. Moreover, both Eliot and Bloom create a clear distinction between the great poet and the weak poet. In both essays, the weak poet is presented as the individual who ignores the tradition or predecessors of literature. However, they assert that the poet should not simply imitate dead writers. In Eliot’s views the writer should be aware of the past traditions and eliminate his personality when writing literature. Accordingly, one may suggest that Eliot proposes that a weak writer is the individual who writes in isolation from other poets and is somewhat original and different. On the other hand, Bloom suggests that the weak writer is the person who imitates his precursors without any new and personal ideas. Significantly, both poets agree, to a certain extent, what constitutes a good writer but contrast in the way they view the effects of the personality and innovation of the writer as an individual on the literary work. Furthermore, the canon plays a dominant role in literary influence. It is the canon which consists of past writers and it is the quintessential state many writers long to be in. However, although the canon has a substantial role when discussing literary influence, not all critics agree on what happens to it when new writers enter the field. Bloom suggests that although a writer can achieve excellence when ‘misreading’ writers in the canon, they can never equal them in greatness because the poet’s ‘quest’ to write poetry ‘encompasses necessarily the diminishment of poetry [which] seems inevitable’. In an interview, Bloom had enforced his ideas by saying that ‘Seamus Heaney is a very good poet [but] he is not William Butler Yeats. Geoffrey Hill is a very good poet [but] he is not Thomas Hardy’. In fact, his idea insists that as poetry evolves it weakens and this will eventually lead to ‘the death of poetry’. On the other hand, Eliot has completely different ideas regarding what happens to the canon as other writers develop. He exhorts that as writers enter the area of literature, previous writers of the canon are replaced. In this sense, ‘the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’. One might have expected Eliot to convey such an idea being that he was writing poetry himself at the time. In conclusion, ‘In literature, as in other arts, the most visible references are represented in the literary canon’. Eliot and Bloom appear to be in agreement about such ideas of literary influence and although they contrast on certain issues their main argument remains the same: literary works must be aware of previous works in order to flourish. However, living in an age in which marketing is highly influential on who the public can refer to as a ‘writer’, it is important to note that ‘success in the market and success in reputational hierarchies do not necessarily overlap’. Gerhards and Anheier suggest that ‘the authors of†¦ mass culture may enjoy relatively high incomes but low prestige, whereas others may find critical acclaim but receive relatively low income’. Furthermore, although Bloom and Eliot’s ideas about what defines a great poet are sound, their ideas do not necessarily transmit to contemporary society.