Fame, Borges once wrote, is a form of incomprehension, and perhaps the worst. Harold Bloom's theory of poetry has a sort of fame, at least by hearsay, and is largely uncomprehended. This is partly Bloom's fault. If some of the more militant phrases from The Anxiety of Influence are often heard flying among the martinis, it is because he wrote them intending to provoke us…. Bloom constantly writes as if he were simultaneously inventing gunpowder and telling us a particularly bloodcurdling bedtime story. The story concerns what Bloom says is "the saddest truth" he knows about poets and poetry, the truth that no poet is as original as he thinks he is, that the very notion of originality is more often than not a defensive myth, designed to shelter poets from the awesome power of their predecessors…. [In] Bloom's view poetry results from a battle to the death...