The Belatedness of Poetry and Mourning Hamlet: Harold Bloom’s and T. S. Eliot’s Antithetical Readings

This essay is a comparative study of Harold Bloom’s theory of anxiety of influence and T. S. Eliot’s concept of tradition with a focus on their antithetical readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in order to bring to the fore their views on how literary creation is initiated. In Bloom’s theory, the scene of literary creation is an epic agonism between poets, full of sound and fury, and at the same time an opportune moment for creative misreading. The belatedness of poetry is in effect the modern poet’s inevitable condition of not being able to avoid the tradition of their predecessors. Despite all theoretical innovations, Bloom’s main idea has many characteristics in common with Eliot’s description of tradition and the individual talent. While both look at literary creation as the apotheosis of the dialectic of absence and presence, Bloom emphasizes the anxiety-ridden and agonistic relations between poets. More than any other text, their readings of Hamlet show Bloom’s and Eliot’s antithetical stance. It could be argued that the Bloom-Eliot relation is fraught with anxiety of influence.