A Map of Misreading

A companion volume to Bloom's work, "The Anxiety of Influence". Here, Bloom offers instruction in how to read a poem, using his theory that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. A reading of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", represents this struggle.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 poets including Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Warren, Ammons and Ashbery. A full-scale reading of one poem, Browning's