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BOOK REVIEW (August 2016)
Harold Bloom (1975, 2003). A Map of Misreading (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press), ISBN 978-0-19-516221-9
INTRODUCTION
This book was written in 1974 and first published in 1975; it continues the themes
that Harold Bloom broached in his pioneering text on the ‘anxiety of influence’ in
1973. It is, as Bloom himself puts it, ‘an antithetical completion’ of the earlier text.1
This revised edition includes a new preface. The purpose of this preface is to
demonstrate how Bloom’s six revisionary ratios that are set out in the previous text
can be applied as a tool of practical criticism to read poems. Bloom dedicates this
book to Paul de Man. What Bloom and De Man share in common is a preoccupation
with the literary trope of irony; as Bloom puts it, for De Man, ‘irony…was not just a
trope, but was the condition of literary language itself.’ What is at stake, then, for a
theory of poetry is the scope of irony. The main contention in Bloomian poetics is that
irony is necessary but not sufficient to explain the structure and function of literary
language. In other words, the question that is being addressed is this: how is literary
meaning generated? Is it through ‘ironic repetition’ or through the creation of a
linguistic excess? This analytic distinction is not just an attempt to explain the
function of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ that Bloom interprets in the preface, but also a
constitutive feature of his approach to literary interpretation. The preface also
demonstrates how to read a poem in its entirety through the application of the six
revisionary ratios. The significance of this preface is related to the fact that critics
attempt to use one or two of the ratios to read poems but do not know how to
1 Harold Bloom (1973, 1997). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press). See also Harold Bloom (2011). The Anatomy of Influence:
Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

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explain a poem as a whole with these ratios. The fact that these ratios are not
commonly used by literary critics is not an indication of the fact that they are
inadequate to the task, but that critics cannot apply these ratios unless they are well-
versed in the history of poetry. Furthermore, it takes a lot of effort to internalize
Bloomian poetics given Bloom’s argument that a theory of poetry must itself
function like poetry; that is, it must resist easy appropriation and any attempt to
deploy it must be sensitive to the performative dimension of the theory. A literary
critic must also be able to differentiate, as Bloom does, in his practical criticism
between ‘literary meaning’ and ‘literary language.’ This is important because the
belated critic finds that ‘literary meaning tends to become more under-determined
even as literary language becomes more over-determined.’ The function of literary
criticism then is to decide on what constitutes literary meaning in any given case.
THE ONTOLOGY OF BLOOMIAN POETICS
Furthermore, the anxiety of influence is not reducible to the transmission of images,
metaphors, and tropes from one text to another, but is to be conceived as a relational
dynamic between texts. In Bloomian poetics, the ontology of literature is defined as
inter-textual; there are no discrete texts – only ‘relational events’ where the ephebe
struggles to clear space for his text by creatively misreading his precursors. The text
that results from this creative struggle then is a form of ‘achieved anxiety.’ The
ephebe can work-through his anxiety of influence but cannot wish it away; or escape
it altogether since there is already a pre-existing ‘tradition’ that his ‘individual talent’
must grapple with. There is an element of that in Bloomian poetics itself which seeks
to redefine tradition and work-through Bloom’s own anxiety of influence via-à-vis
T.S. Eliot. What Bloom seeks to do then is to de-familiarize Eliot’s definition of
tradition by invoking a text that predates Eliot – the ‘Kabbalah’ which literally
means ‘tradition’ or the ‘given.’ Bloom’s revisionary approach to literary criticism
then is a way of ‘reestimating’ the value of poets; and, by implication, the history of
poetry itself. The psychoanalytic preoccupation with belatedness in the oedipal
matrix is prefigured, Bloom argues, in the forms of interpretation that characterize
the Kabbalah. What this book does then is to identify the Kabbalah as the main
source for both revisionary interpretation and antithetical criticism. Bloom finds
both emanative and regressive theories of creation in the tradition of the Kabbalah.
The main scholars of Jewish mysticism that Bloom draws upon include Isaac Luria
and Gershom Scholem. The Lurianic model of creation, Bloom argues, can serve as a
paradigm of how poets relate to each other; it can accommodate both the
‘psychology of belatedness’ and the ‘quest for anteriority’ by the ephebe. The three
main stages in the Luranic model involve ‘creative withdrawal, the breaking of the
vessels, and restitution.’ These terms can be translated as forms of linguistic
‘limitation, substitution, and representation.’ The main interpretive categories in

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Bloomian poetics consist of the following: the dialectic of revisionism; the images in
the poem; the literary tropes in contention therein; the psychic defences that they
represent; and the revisionary ratios that they correspond to. The six revisionary
ratios are clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades; they
correspond to irony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor, and metalepsis;
the psychic defences in contention include reaction formation, reversal, regression,
repression, sublimation, and projection. I have not included all the psychic defences
but only a representative selection that corresponds to the six revisionary ratios and
the literary tropes that constitute the underlying psychic defences therein. These
three levels must be situated within the oedipal matrix of belatedness, rivalry, and
the quest for anteriority between the ephebe and the precursor text. It is not possible
to exhaust all the combinations of these oedipal dynamics in this review; but,
nonetheless, the reader should be able to get a feel for how the ephebe is ‘affected’ by
the precursor; and the forms of psychic defences that are invoked to work-through
the anxiety of influence. This model of poetic creation is referred to in Bloomian
poetics as ‘the map of misprision.’
THE MAP OF MISPRISION
The term ‘misprision’ simply means to creatively misread the precursor text. Bloomian
poetics usually invokes both the precursor text and the belated text in acts of
interpretation to demonstrate the wherein and wherefore of misprision. That is why it
takes a lot of literary scholarship to attempt to read poems using this model of
practical criticism. There are three parts in this book; the first comprises four
chapters which chart the territory of poetic influence. The main themes covered here
include the quest for poetic origins and final phases; understanding the dialectics of
poetic tradition; identifying the Freudian scene of primal instruction; and an account
of belatedness in the history of poetry. The second part has two chapters; it
introduces the map of misprision; this map is then tested in a reading of Robert
Browning’s poetry. The third part has five chapters; it explains how to use ‘the map
of misprision’ to make sense of how John Milton relates to his precursors like
William Shakespeare; and the anxiety of influence induced in belated poets in the
post-Miltonic tradition of English literature. The same approach is taken up in the
context of American literature as well. Here, Bloom differentiates between the
literary influences that Emerson had to work-through to liberate American scholars
from European literature; and, ironically, the anxiety induced by the Emersonian
intervention in the history of American letters. Bloom concludes with readings of
American poets like Stevens, Ashberry, and Ammons and their preoccupation with
the compositional mode of ‘transumptive allusion’ that Bloom traces back to
Emerson. Bloom argues that this mode of writing is significant because it evades the
model of ‘conspicuous allusion’ that characterizes dominant American poets like

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Pound and Eliot. This compositional difference has implications for a theory of
canon-formation in literature because what is at stake is not so much a choice of the
transumptive or conspicuous model of allusion, but the inherent strength of the poet
that will in turn engender the next generation of ‘vital poems.’ This process does not
necessarily have to proceed through literary imitation; it could also be the case that
the ephebe will struggle with his precursor ‘through resistance, resentment, and
misinterpretation.’
What really matters then is the amount of strength that is summoned by the ephebe
in this struggle for literary anteriority. To conclude, Bloomian poetics is basically a
theory of the strong poet and the strong poem since ‘out of the strong comes forth
strength, even if not sweetness, and when strength has imposed itself long enough,
then we learn to call it tradition, whether we like it or not.’
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN