A Question of Influence

In recent attempts to rescue the notion of poetic influence from critical disrepute and to move beyond the tedious and suspect search for sources that has characterized older studies, a series of paradigms have been introduced to suggest intra-poetic relationships at once more antagonistic and more troubled than previously perceived. The titles of the most influential monographs signal the new focus, among them: W. Jackson Bate's The Burden of the Past and the English Poet and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence and his later work Poetry and Repression.' In these studies Goethe has been repeatedly accorded special statusas one spared the problem of an intimidating literary legacy which Bate demonstrates has burdened English poets since Milton;2 as one untroubled by, even incapable of, creative anxiety, a poet of appalling selfconfidence in Bloom's grudgingly admiring judgment.' Goethe's pronouncements about his favored relationship to the literary past (taken most frequently, but not exclusively, from Eckermann) have been eagerly appropriated by these critics in their attempts to clarify and evaluate the self-conscious distress of the post-Enlightenment English poets in confrontation with their literary precursors. The contrasting portrait of Goethe is one of serene self-confidence. The young English poet, necessarily intimidated by writers of the stature of Shakespeare and Milton, struggled anxiously to establish his unique identity. Goethe effortlessly found his

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