How did Harold Bloom explain the influence of earlier poets on later writers?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

In the context of literature, the American critic Harold Bloom proposed that the relationship between poets is defined by a psychological struggle he termed the "anxiety of influence."

Rather than viewing influence as a simple process of inspiration or imitation, Bloom argued that poetry results from later poets deliberately "misreading" the works of their predecessors. This theory, most notably systematized in his seminal work The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and further explored in A Map of Misreading (1975), suggests that new writers must creatively distort or reinterpret the achievements of those who came before them to clear space for their own original contributions. By engaging in this act of defensive misreading, later poets attempt to overcome the overwhelming shadow cast by their literary ancestors, thereby establishing their own unique voice within the Western Canon.1