The Physiological Anxiety of Influence
In his landmark text, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom argues that all poetry is beset by its precursors. The poet, he writes, ‘is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves’:
The poem is within him, yet he experiences the shame and splendor of being found by poems-great poems-outside him. To lose freedom in this center is never to forgive, and to learn the dread of threatened autonomy forever
As discussed in ‘Faust, Nietzsche and the Psychology of Inspiration’, influence is a form of possession. According to Bloom, the word “influence” — from the Latin, influentia, meaning ‘inflow’ — ‘received the sense of “having a power over another” as early as the Scholastic Latin of Aquinas’. It is a ‘power-exercised’ in defiance of all that seems voluntary in one. Thus, the poet discovers himself through previous poetry and then struggles to free himself from this influence. This results in what Timothy Melley calls ‘agency panic’: ‘the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been “constructed” by powerful external agents’.
Interestingly, in Robert Sapolsky’s book Behave, Sapolsky cites a study that demonstrates the anxiety of influence and situates it in the individualistic West (as opposed to the collectivist cultures of the East):
when asked in free recall, Americans are more likely than East Asians to remember times in which they influenced someone; conversely, East Asians are more likely to remember times when someone influenced them. Force Americans to talk at length about a time someone influenced them, or force East Asians to detail their influencing someone, and both secrete glucocorticoids from the stressfulness of having to recount this discomfiting event
