The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
Published 1973 · 32,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary Theory
How hard is The Anxiety of Influence to read?
The Anxiety of Influence scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 68 out of 100
- Bloom coins or repurposes a private vocabulary — clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades — borrowed from Lucretius, Greek rhetoric, Kabbalah, and Gnosticism, then redefined for his own system. The surrounding prose is literate but not archaic; the difficulty is almost entirely this invented terminological layer rather than rare English words.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Sentences run long and qualify themselves repeatedly, often doubling back with parenthetical correctives in the style of a lecture thinking aloud. It falls well short of Jamesian or Faulknerian nesting — the strain comes from conceptual density riding on fairly ordinary critical-prose syntax.
- Abstraction: 88 out of 100
- The book is pure theory: an argument about how poetic influence works psychologically and rhetorically, illustrated through close but brief readings of Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley rather than sustained textual analysis. Concrete poems are invoked as evidence for an abstract psychoanalytic-rhetorical model, never read for their own sake.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Each short chapter compresses a revisionary ratio, a Freudian defense mechanism, a rhetorical trope, and a cluster of Romantic poets into a few pages, assuming the reader can hold all three mappings at once. Bloom expects familiarity with the entire post-Miltonic English poetic tradition as background furniture.
How The Anxiety of Influence is regarded
The Anxiety of Influence holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.