Violence, Love, and Influence in Bloom and Senghor

Discussion of Harold Bloom's 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, with attention to the limits of the book and also how a perversion or transformation of revisionary ratios might provide insight into anti- and even post-colonial literature and cultural production. In particular, we discuss how Bloom's work presupposes and needs antagonism and violence between poet and precursor, and then how Barbara Christian's evocation of poetry as world- and self-making via love and generosity offers a different model. That shift helps relocate the question of influence and violence in Léopold Senghor's work, where he argues that even in a colonial context there is a possibility of influence without fear of contamination. Does Bloom's book operate under a fear of contamination? Is there anything left of the revisionary ratios without that fear? What is influence without fear of contamination, without the violent impulse toward the precursor? How does love offer another kind of revisionary ratio, or perhaps embellish and transform the six outlined in The Anxiety of Influence?