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Having introduced his ideas and methods in The Anxiety of Influence and in A Map of Misreading, Harold Bloom develops and applies them in Poetry and Repression to selected British and American poets, some of whom have been
traditionally called Romantic: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats; others Victorian: Tennyson and Browning; and others Modernist: Yeats and Wallace Stevens. The Americans he includes within his newly constructed canon, which he calls High Romantic, are Emerson and Whitman. The basis for Bloom's selection of these poets is the criterion he established in his earlier works: these are “strong” poets, those who have overcome, by a system of rhetorical methods, the anxiety of the influence of their predecessors. According to Bloom, each poet feels himself in competition with a strong predecessor and must overcome him in order to survive. He does this by a series of tropes or turns, which are “figures of willed falsification”. Bloom selects certain passages to demonstrate how each of the poets transcends his predecessor and achieves the “Sublime Mode.”
The Laius of this oedipal pattern for Bloom's canon of the modern Sublime is Milton. And just as Oedipus redeems himself at Colonus from his belatedness as a son to become the spiritual father of future generations, so every strong poet proves himself at the moment when he produces “the illusion of his own priority—the illusion of having fathered [his] own fathers.” This illusion is, according to Bloom, “the greatest of illusions, which we call immortality.”
Perhaps the best example of this process of reversal is our view of America, expressed in all “strong” American poetry, but best recognised in Whitman: rather than seeing America as coming “after the event” of European history, we see all previous cultural history as only a deferred action that prepared for our new stage of development. This kind of revisionism is also apparent in the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament which transforms its h