Harold Bloom of Yale, an interpretive scholar of English and American romanticism, has for years been propounding a view of literary history and its relation to creative originality quite antithetical to the allied formulations of Eliot and Pound. Along with his own teachers, Northrop Frye and Meyer H. Abrams, but in very different ways, Bloom has helped to make the study of Romantic poetry as intellectually and spiritually challenging a branch of literary studies as one may find. The recent study of the romantic tradition has corrected the modernist dogmas about romanticism--the very word evoked the imprecise, the vague, the rhetorical--and argued for the centrality of the major English poetic line which modernism rejected. Eliot hankered after the Christian orthodoxy, classicism and royalty; the tradition he turned away from, the line running from Spenser, to Milton through the romantic poets to Browning, Tennyson and Yeats, was protestant, visionary and, save at its terminus, revolutionary.
Now in a remarkable, short, frequently difficult book, Bloom has gone beyond tracing the ways in which this tradition descended from one major poet to another (a question beautifully handled by W. J. Bate in his "The Burden of the Past and the English Poet"). He has extended it to a general theory of what he calls "poetic influence." "The Anxiety of Influence" may outrage and perplex many literary scholars, poets and psychologists; in any event, its first effect will be to astound, and only later may it become quite influential, though in a different mode from the one it studies.
Bloom's book is true to its subtitle, "A Theory of Poetry," primarily in its association of a theory of creativity (usually calling for something like a depth psychology), with a theory of the dynamic of poetic history. This is an area where will, personality and the presences of the dead in the legacy of their works are all engaged in a struggle. For Eliot, the dead, the last of these, banished the first two: in the proper development of a true poet's career, he said, "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
But here is one of Bloom's central principles: "Poetic Influence--when it involves two strong, authentic poets--always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main traditions of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist."
Q1. The author mentions 'modernism' primarily in order to :
a) invoke the literary tradition of the middle ages
b) trace the formative role of those in literary history in creating poetic craft
c) restore the romantic tradition to its former glory
d) determine the contribution of romantic precursors to modernist poetry
Q2. The author of the passage suggests which of the following about Eliot?
a) He advocated the theory that the burden of the past extinguished the creative genius of the poet
b) he turned away from classical literature and emulated the tradition of romantic poets
c) he argued that the poet had to sacrifice his/her self to conform to the standards set by his/her predecessors
d) He maintained that the work of a poet is merely a reflection of his/her consciousness of the poetic tradition
Plz answer with explanations, able to narrow down to 2, not able to choose1 !
I have faith in the end of the story :)
