Untying a Knot

There is a questionable part of yesterday's post that I'd like to untangle for today:

He begins with Shakespeare, of course, to show that he has the greatest influence on Bloom's approach to literary criticism. From there, he argues, Milton's Satan has within him the best of Shakespeare's characters to form a distinct personage in response to Shakespeare's influence among other observations.

    For Bloom, human personality was invented by William Shakespeare, whose many characters have represented how men and women think and operate in our world. They are more than mere actor's roles, they're life's largeness to be found in the 38 plays that he had penned down and acted in.

    And Milton is just one example of a belated poet, who came to terms with his literary past. So fiction authors not only come to be influenced by past masters, but they represent those influences as well as bring something new to the table by misapplying their influences when they write their works.

    So canonical literature cannot be artificially considered apart from the authors who contended with their literary past. The example of Milton being influenced by Shakespeare or the other way around is a classic one that shows how literary influence works. And Harold Bloom's theory is that this happens anxiously, not benignly.