Abstract
How right was T. S. Eliot when he claimed to be able to truly venerate “tradition” in a largely disillusioned and traumatized Europe after the Great War? This paper opens the investigation by a comparison and apparent similarities between Harold Bloom’s conceptualization of poetic influence and those of T. S. Eliot dispersed among the body of his literary criticism. On one hand, Bloom maintains his idea of poets being out of necessity on the defensive mode when it comes to the influence, whereas T. S. Eliot tried to at the same time “embrace” the chaos of Modernism and his idea of a venerated, abstract and unchangeable “tradition”. For T. S. Eliot, the figure of Dante looms large on the European poetic horizon as a link between the present and the past. In order of illustration, the author of the paper emphasizes Eliot’s use of epigraphs or direct borrowings from Dante at the beginning of his poems as a means of the insertion of the great poet’s imagined “missing” link into the poetry of his day. Thus, Eliot’s legacy effortlessly engrafted itself onto that of his beloved poet master, Dante.
 
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Highlights
In his notable book, The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom developed his highly influential analysis of poetic influence and the “intra-poetic” relationship between poets and the work of earlier writers
Bloom argues that all poetry is intertextual and that modern poetry needs to be understood in terms of its relationship to past work
Bloom maintains that it is necessary for poets to clear imaginative space if their own work is not to be overwhelmed by earlier poetry, and that “strong” poets arrive at their vocation and original voice by strongly iCorrespondence: email bozica.jovic@ff.ues.rs.ba
Summary
The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom developed his highly influential analysis of poetic influence and the “intra-poetic” relationship between poets and the work of earlier writers. This idea of the anxiety of influence is, to a great extent, based on Eliot's essay Tradition and Individual Talent.
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