Map of Misreading : With a New Preface

By Harold Bloom

Book Overview

In print since 1975, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion to Bloom's other seminal volume, The Anxiety of Influence. This finely crafted work offers instruction in how to read a poem, using Bloom's theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against the influence of precursor poems. Influence, as Bloom conceives it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. He discusses British and American poets including Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Warren, Ammons, and Ashbery. A full-scale reading of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" represents this struggle between one poet and his precursors, the poem serving as a map for readers through the many versions of influence from Milton to modern poets. Bloom centers the new preface upon a close account of Milton's elegy, Lycidas, which he considers the best poem of moderate length in English. Bloom maps Lycidas as a superb creative misreading of the elegiac tradition, from Theocritus to Spenser, with some reference also to Shakespeare -- the inevitable source of influence-anxiety for Milton. This updated edition provides a new generation of readers with an essential work in the Bloom canon. Book jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195018745
• ISBN13: 9780195018745
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The great critic of our age

Harold Bloom is the great literary critic of our age. His passion for reading is felt in every line he writes. This does not mean that his lead- ideas as the 'anxiety of influence' and 'map of misreading' are to be taken uncritically, but rather that they ordinarily lead him to ' open up the texts' in new ways, making surprising and interesting connections.

To the Dark Tower

After shaking up the academic world with his "theoretical" "Anxiety of Influence", Bloom begins to settle into what would prove his proper mode--the discursive literary essay. "A Map of Misreading" centers upon Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (one of Bloom's touchstones for his theories) as the perfect example of the latecomer Romantic poet struggling against his precursors. It is Bloom's wonder and love of this poem that is on display here as much as "proof" of his theory.What is most evident in all of Bloom's books, and what is most important, is an obvious passion for reading (reading anything and everything). Bloom ranges across British and American Poets to discover how poems struggle against other poems. But, frankly, what I've always come away from a Bloom book with is a map of Bloom's misreadings that are worth a college education in and of themselves. We discover Emerson afresh and hear of Dutch Psychologist J. H. Van Den Berg, discover we must encounter Hans Jonas on Gnosticism and The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria(if we're to know anything of the roots of literary struggling against the precursor) and wish we'd memorized Paradise Lost. In short, for me, he encourages continued and life-long (mis)reading.