A Map of Misreading

In print for twenty-seven years, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion volume to Bloom's other seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence. In this finely crafted text, Bloom offers instruction in how to read a poem, using his theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against the influence of precursor poems. Influence, as Bloom conceives it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. Bloom discusses British and American poe...