Marginalia

Apparently this week I'm breaking with my normally forbearing and gentle persona and turning unpleasant and abrasive; I can only apologise. Now, to be fair, I shouldn't be surprised at being annoyed by "The Anxiety of Influence", in which Harold Bloom describes all poets as engaged in Oedipal death-matches with each other (and Bloom is happy to tell you who wins each one: "[Tennyson's] clear superiority over Arnold, Hopkins, and Rossetti" is one typical statement) and allows his obsession with canon-making to completely obscure the idea of poems as poems rather than ammunition, because I got it out of the library in order to be annoyed. (I was hoping to be irritated into inspiration for my Poetry of Loss essay, and it's sort of working, too.)

I was surprised, though, to see that it's apparently driven everyone else who's read it into an enraged frenzy. The margins are full of sarcastic comments on the actual text, but even better are the comments on the comments: "no contradiction at all, shut up"; "idiot", "oh, ha ha" and "since he mentions it on page 8, I'd say so, [gender-based slur elided by editor]" (those three all in response to the seemingly innocuous comment "starting point for Bate's 'The Burden of the Past'; an influence?"); "finish the book before you open your mouth"; "I HATE YOU".

My favourite comment, though, is on the passage where Bloom describes "the Primal Scene, for a poet as poet": "is this sensible?"

It definitely isn't.