One of the essential qualities of every Romantic aesthetic is revisionism. We say that Romanticism breaks certain rules, or alters them; or we say that it attacks or changes various traditional forms of thought and order. To do so, of course, implies a deep consciousness of the past, which in fact all Romantics have. Antiquarianism is a very Romantic activity. But a Romantic consciousness recovers only to transform.

Though Harold Bloom has his own unmistakable way of speaking of these matters, they represent the subject he has always been most concerned with, as The Ringers in the Tower illustrates very well. Romantics are obsessed with history, both past and future. Bloom concentrates upon their relation to the past in order to show how frequently the Romantic writer sees himself as a sick rose. All past greatness inclines to take the form of an invisible worm which so hunts...