On Harold Bloom's Poetic Sublimity

This paper is intended to probe into Harold Bloom's theory of poetry by focusing on the Sublime, the central concept of the theory.Starting from the doctrines of ancient Hebrew religion, man's conception of the Sublime has been evolved for a long time. Longinus, a rhetorician of ancient Greece, describes sublimity as a style of writing. Burke, an Enlightenment thinker, separates the Sublime from beauty and assumes it as an independent aesthetic category with external expression of"tension". Kant, a thinker of the same age, advances man's rationality by locating the Sublime in the field of morality. The outset of the twentieth century witnesses Freud's assumption of the psychic mechanism of the Sublime from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, and his assumption indicates man's inclination toward the Sublime in the development of civilization. Till the postmodern era, the propagation of Deconstruction impels people to doubt tradition; accordingly, people's conception of the Sublime undergoes some changes. The conception of the Sublime expounded in Bloom's theory of poetry is influential in the period. Bloom's poetic sublimity is the major concern of the present paper, which consists of five parts.The introduction of the paper begins by raising the subject (topic) and providing an explanation of it. Following the topic is a literature review to state the academic value of the paper. Harold Bloom's theoretical background is also brought in the introduction.In Chapter One, starting from a review of a brief history on man's conception of the Sublime, the author of the paper tries to explain Bloom as a historical figure by pointing out the divergence between him and other deconstructionists. The divergence reveals the significance of Bloom's poetic sublimity in the conceptualization of the Sublime in the new age.The third part discusses where Bloom's poetic sublimity comes from and compares his understanding of the Sublime with those theories in history. By introducing Bloom's influential theory of poetry—"anxiety of influence"and"creative misreading", the...