The critical fortunes of Victorian poetryof other poems, only have meaning in relation to other poems, Bloomian
influence theory sees poets after Milton anxiously misreading and rewriting
their predecessors to clear a space for themselves. This struggle proves,
according to Bloom, increasingly difficult for the emergent poet since there
are more and more poems against which to assert one's self. From Bloom's
viewpoint, "The Lady of Shalott" only makes sense when we interpret it as
a misreading of and contention with what he calls the "strong" poems that
precede it, particularly poems by Romantics like Shelley and Keats. Bloom
claims: "Tennyson's transformation of Keats was the largest single factor in
British and American Poetry from 1830 until about 1915." 18
The idea that all poems are made up of other poems and only have
meaning in relation to other poems both draws upon and reinforces the idea
of "literature" as a recognizable category of writing, a category different
from other kinds of writing, requiring certain special skills for its decipher-
ment. As the Victorians made literature, and as twentieth-century intellec-
tuals professionalized the study of literature, concepts such as tradition,
source, and influence were key terms for expressing the special value of
literary writings. As literary study in the 1980s readdressed links between
poetry and society, a more critical approach to the idea of tradition and of
influence prevailed. Intertextuality - when viewed as the relations between
a much broader range of texts than those that have been labeled literature -
seemed more suited to historicist study than theories dedicated purely to
poetic influence. Critics began to explore how the idea of literature was
implicated in the development of nationalist and imperialist projects, how it
might be used as a tool for domination, and how the very notion of
literature could act to mystify or obscure the connections between poetry
and society. Yet "poetry," "literature," and "the aesthetic" are, as categories,
real historical entities; Victorian poems do allude to other poems and put
energy into setting themselves in relation to these poems; and it seems
rather simplistic to reduce all this activity to a species of bad faith.
One of the most powerful and convincing arguments for the importance
of continuing to think about poetic influence is made by Andrew Elfenbein
in Byron and the Victorians (1995). Drawing upon sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital - power that takes the form of
status and prestige rather than money - Elfenbein sees struggles between
poets and their predecessors as part of the way in which cultural producers
assert themselves in the field of cultural production. 19 These struggles are
not only a matter of relations between texts but also signally shaped by the
apparatuses of cultural production and consumption in place at any given
time - the material production of print texts, the education system, the
structures of publishing, selling, reviewing, and so on. "Whereas Bloom
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