SOURCE: "More Wrestling With Forebears," in The New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1982, pp. 8, 14.

In the following review, Alter discusses Agon, "the latest installment in Harold Bloom's elaborate theory of poetic creation."

"As soon as a man begins to see everything," G.C. Lichtenberg observed in an aphorism Harold Bloom sets at the head of an essay on Emerson, "he generally expresses himself obscurely—begins to speak with the tongues of angels." The statement surely applies as aptly to Mr. Bloom as to Emerson, and, indeed, Mr. Bloom is so shrewdly self-conscious a writer that it seems altogether likely he intended to hint at the personal application.

Agon is the latest installment in Harold Bloom's elaborate theory of poetic creation as a desperate wrestling with forebears, inaugurated in 1973 by The Anxiety of Influence. The new volume, it would seem, is a collection of literary and cultural essays written...