A Study Of Harold Bloom’s Poetics-making And The Gnosticism

In Harold Bloom’s theory of poetics,his arguments about the three central category——influence,misreading and revision——are developed gradually and consistently,and eventually forms a self-contained system,in which he consciously and clearly absorbs the religious ideas of Gnosticism he has converted to.First of all,as a starting point of his poetics,and also as the main framework of his poetics,the poetics of influence mainly derives the concept of Gnostic cosmology,and so reaches his own unique concept of "influence",and in the same time he is seperately inspired by the Gnostic mythology of exile of soul,the cosmic mode of "disaster-creation",and the anti-cosmologic theory of eschatologic salvation,and get his points of the facticity and productivity of influence and the reconstruction of poetic history of influence.Secondly,according to his idea that influence means misreading,Bloom realizes the necessity of misreading,which is regards as the base of his new inference,and he deeply takes in two sorts of interpretating paradigms in Gnostic hermeneutics——"protest-exegesis" or reverse interpretation,as well as the hermeneutics of appropriation,and expounds the strong misreading and the creative misreading.Finally,he focuses on the ultimate proposition of his petics which is the creation of poetry,firmly grasps the antithetical relationship of preexistence and belatedness that poets have to insist in order to create his poetry,and so he conceives the mode of antithetical criticism mainly through the perspective of Gnostic dualism,and comes up with six ratios of revision,by which he builds up a set of revisionist theory of poetry creation.By way of integating Gnosticism into each link of his poetic theory,Bloom achieves his original and indeed unique creation of poetics.