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2 The Strong Poet Tradition versus Originality He did not want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be easy—but the Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” Aeschylus, who once was unfairly defeated, as Theophrastus said or Chamaelon in his work on pleasure, said that he had dedicated his tragedies to Time, knowing that it would bring him the appropriate honor. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 8.39 H arold Bloom has meditated throughout his distinguished career on the theme of the strong poet and the strong reader. Many poets may have a measure of greatness by his assessment , but few qualify as a strong poet.1 The poet who is destined to become strong is beset by two powerful but contradictory forces: by the anxiety of influence matched by an equally powerful solipsism. This poet must have the conviction, common no doubt in some degree to all people but acutely alive in the poetic temperament, that he is original, indeed, aboriginal, that with his birth the world was born. But, alas, this poet is not aboriginal. He is a latecomer. Other poets have come and gone. Among these forebears is one, or one more than 17 any other, whose genius was so aboriginal that it threatens to smother the ephebe’s genius even before it shows its first leaf. Bloom envisions the ephebe poet discovering his true calling via a primal scene, an oedipal confrontation between the ephebe and his powerful ancestor. The ephebe begins as a good son, but at some point solipsism will have its way and the ephebe must slay his father, the murder in this case taking the form of a misreading of the great predecessor’s poem. The ephebe must gather all his resources to shed the influence of his father and prove to himself that he is no latecomer but indeed the world’s first poet. The ephebe, if he is to become a strong poet, must know that he and he alone is stout Cortés, that before his arrival no other Cortés, stout or otherwise, ever stood silent on that peak in Darien to gaze upon the Pacific. He must be the first to witness the world. While Bloom may speak of the oedipal confrontation as the crisis necessary to determine forever the strong poet’s vocation, he fastidiously steers clear of any banal application of Freudian analysis in the critical reading of one poet’s influence on another. What writers might experience as anxiety is for Bloom usually the consequence rather than the cause. “The anxiety of influence,” Bloom argues, “comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call ‘poetic misprision.’”2 As he further explains this dynamic relation between the newer and the later poet, whether the later writer internalizes the anxiety hardly matters: “the strong poem is the achieved anxiety.”3 Bloom’s thesis, though he derived it from his readings of modern British and American poets, provides insight into the nature of the competition among the tragic poets of ancient Athens. Little attention has been given to this aspect of Athenian tragedy. It has been treated as if it were merely incidental to the process by which the plays were selected for public performance, but surely the competition among the tragic poets must have been as fierce as in any other arena of public service. The poets must surely have felt the anxiety of influence at least as strongly as William Wordsworth felt the influence of John Milton. Certainly Sophocles must be considered a strong poet if we apply the usual criteria. He achieved distinction at an early age, and his talent and his honors continued unbroken until he took his last breath in 406 BCE. As a youth, we are told, he danced naked and oiled around the victory trophy set up by the Athenians after the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE), accompanying himself on the lyre.4 Later, in his career, when he produced his Nausicaa, he himself acted the part of Nausicaa (the winsome maiden whom Odysseus courts in the Odyssey), and his 18 The Strong Poet [3.19.31.73] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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