In print for twenty-seven years, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion volum
e to Bloom's other seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence. In this finely crafte
d text, Bloom offers instruction in how to read a poem, using his theory that pa
tterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against th
e influence of precursor poems. Influence, as Bloom conceives it, means that the
re are no texts, but only relationships between texts.
Bloom discusses Britis
h and American poets including Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Bro
wning, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Warren, Ammons and Ashbery. A full-scale rea
ding of one poem, Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," represents
this struggle between one poet and his precursors, the poem serving as a map for
readers through the many versions of influence from Milton to modern poets. For
the first time, in a new preface, Bloom will consider the map of misreading dra
wn by contemporary poets such as Ann Carson and Henri Cole.
