Jennifer Grotz: “An Anxiety of Influence” for Girls (January 2009)

In his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom argues that the young poet must assume poetic authority through willfully misreading, and then overthrowing, a precursor poet.  In this lecture, Jennifer Grotz meditates on what in Bloom’s theory is helpful and what is harmful for a young writer; she draws on prose by Bloom and Eliot, and on poems by Plath, Graham, Moore, Milton, Bishop, Milosz and Merwin, to offer a different understanding of what poetic authority is and how one can obtain it.