I haven't looked very hard, but James Wood's piece in The New Yorker on Harold Bloom (after his death of several days ago) helpfully brings out the Freudian and, somewhat weirdly chest-beating masculine silliness of the whole “anxiety of influence” rhetoric and theory. I have no doubt of Bloom's challenges in making his way in the antisemitic Yale of the mid-twentieth century; but I'm no fan of his machismo-masochist theory of transmission and resistance.  Also, the piece expresses Wood's insight that Bloom was haunted by an argument he himself had with the ghost of TS Eliot, a figure he seems (in my limited reading) to have assiduously avoided engaging seriously all his days. 

In some ways, a rival near-contemporary critic, on the other side of the pond, is an interesting yardstick against which to measure bloom. That figure is Christopher Ricks. Risks never felt himself to need to ignore Elliot, and he never really took the popular turn that Bloom did, even though Ricks ended up enlisting some popular culture figures into his high literary theory, most notably Bob Dylan (I still think Ricks's Dylan's Visions of Sin is one of the most . . . intense books I have read, and almost as revelatory (for me, anyway) on Dylan as Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic.  Indeed, instead of Bloom's rather hieratic declamations about "greatness" and "strength," Ricks has always stood for showing rather than saying, and a Tacitean terseness in his approbations.  In that way he is a stylistic descendant of Bagehot (for more about him, see my blog post from the summer). The thing I like about Ricks is that his expressions of enthusiasm never occlude his audience's vision of the objects of his enthusiasm.  He never makes it about himself.  In contrast, Bloom's "anxiety of influence" approach was all-too-telling about who was being primarily called attention to, in Bloom's serial calling-attentions-to.

Furthermore, Bloom's account of the anxiety of influence takes up too much of the air in the room, but there are other accounts of how younger artists learn from older artists. One I find compelling is Jeredith Merrin's An Enabling Humility, a study of the relationship between the poets Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop; that book approaches the question of poetic relationship in a way not quite so much like a boy's fight club.  It actually seems wise, too.  Check it out, both for its intrinsic quality and for the chance to be around the poetry of Moore and Bishop, both of whom are gifts to the cosmos of which we have repeatedly proved unworthy.