willow: "i really like this - your voice is really nice - i like that you kept in mishaps - im a huge sucker for reflective diary-posting - the anxiety of influence looms large!"

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willow @dreary.dev

i really like this - your voice is really nice - i like that you kept in mishaps - im a huge sucker for reflective diary-posting - the anxiety of influence looms large!

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, pg 23-24
Referencing Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 1973

But this does not mean simply that one fears that one's works will be lost or ignored. For that fear blends into the fear that, even if they are preserved and noticed, nobody will find anything distinctive in them. The words (or shapes, or theorems, or models of physical nature) marshaled to one's command may seem merely stock items, rearranged in routine ways. One will not have impressed one's mark on the language but, rather, will have spent one's life shoving about already coined pieces. So one will not really have had an I at all. One's creations, and one's self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom calls "the strong poet's anxiety of influence," his “horror of finding himself to be only a copy or a replica."

January 26, 2025 at 6:30 AM