Like most good books, Harold Bloom's latest essay is by no means what it pretends to be. [The Anxiety of Influence] calls itself, in subtitle, "a theory of poetry" and claims to be corrective in at least three ways: by debunking the humanistic view of literary influence as the productive integration of individual talent within tradition; by contributing, through a refinement of the techniques of reading, to a more rigorous practical criticism; and by enriching the taken-for-granted patterns on which academic literary history is based. Under the aegis of a general theory, this large order brings together ideological, textual, and historical criticism, in a combination that is no longer unusual in recent influential essays on literature. The "corrective" aspect is not new with Bloom, who has never been inhibited by the orthodoxies that dominate the field and has always shown himself willing to go his own way. He...