With an audacity and pathos hard to parallel in modern scholarship, [in The Anxiety of Influence] Bloom apprehends English literary history from Milton to the present as a single movement, calls it Romanticism, and even while making it exemplary of the burdens of Freudian or psychological man, dooms it to a precession which looks toward the death of poetry more firmly than Hegel does. For there is, in his augury, no compensation arising from the side of Science, Religion or Criticism. "The strong imagination comes to its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation. The only humane virtue we can hope to teach through a more advanced study of literature than we have now is the social virtue of detachment from one's own imagination, recognizing always that such detachment made absolute destroys any individual imagination."… Bloom's embrace of Western poetry since the Renaissance is a final, desperate hug in...