Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him. For, still asking himself what there is left for him to do, but unable to bring himself to leap off in full career from what has become a juggernaut-bandwagon, [in "Poetry and Repression" he] has nothing left to do but to say the same things about new contests and with more decibels. He is running out of prize-fights. Blake vs. Ezekiel; Wordsworth vs. Milton; Shelley vs. Milton; Keats vs. Milton (the Muhammad Ali of it all); Tennyson vs. Keats; Browning vs. Shelley; Yeats vs. A. N. Other … too many of these squarings are return-fights demanded by Bloom's promotion. And the decibels start to defeat their own purpose. Bloom's whole strenuous rhetoric of struggles and opponents comes to sound more and more like shadowboxing. Or fixed wrestling: Wordsworth "holds Milton off so triumphantly, without even always knowing that he is...