Anatomy of influence literature as a way of life

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The point of view for my work as a critic. Literary love ; Sublime strangeness ; The influence of a mind on itself -- Shakespeare, the founder. Shakespeare's people ; The rival poet : King Lear ; Shakespeare's ellipsis : The tempest ; Possession in many modes : the sonnets ; Hamlet and the art of knowing ; Milton's Hamlet ; Joyce-- Dante-- Shakespeare-- Milton ; Dr. Johnson and critical influence -- The skeptical sublime. Anxieties of Epicurean influence : Dryden, Pater, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman, Swinburne, Stevens ; Leopardi's Lucretian swerve ; Shelley's heirs : Browning and Yeats ; Whose condition of fire? : Merrill and Yeats -- Whitman and the death of Europe in the evening land. Emerson and a poetry yet to be written ; Whitman's tally ; Death and the poet : Whitmanian ebbings ; Notes toward a supreme fiction of the romantic self ; Near the quick : Lawrence and Whitman ; Hand of fire : Hart Crane's magnificence ; Whitman's prodigals : Ashbery, Ammons, Merwin, Strand, Charles Wright.

Bloom leads readers through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years.