A Map of Misreading continues Bloom's determined attempt to incarnate and prolong Romanticism, to convince us that literature is essentially a heroic daemonization, centered on "the fearsome process by which a person is reborn a poet." The poet, or at least the post-Miltonic poet, is an indomitable Spirit who feels the curse of belatedness and takes arms against his predecessors, slays them by misreading, so as to create a space in which his own poetry can take place, as an antithetical completion of his precursors' supposed qualities. The theory of poetic influence itself is extremely valuable, and if this book adds little to The Anxiety of Influence it is because it so blatantly fails to live up to its claims: "This book offers instruction in the practical criticism of poetry, in how to read a poem, on the basis of the theory of poetry set forth in my...