For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

2 Bloom's thesis in A Theory of Poetry (1973), succinctly put, is that "Poetic influence-when it involves two strong, authentic poets-always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation." He believes this phenomenon begins with the Renaissance, after which time "the major tradition of Western poetry ... is a history of anxiety, and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist" (30). Bloom characterizes the canonical line from Homer to Shakespeare as constituting "a great age before the Flood, when influence was generous (or poets thought it so).... At the heart of this matrix of generous influence is Dante and his relation to his precursor Virgil, who moved his ephebe only to love and emulation and not to anxiety" (122). Bloom goes on to quote a letter from John Freccero on the "skewed" nature of Virgilian citations in Purgatorio 30, but nonetheless speaks with uncharacteristic nostalgia about "this great sublimation" of Dante's relationship to Virgil, of this pre-modern "sharing-with-others" that subsequently gives way to a "being-within-oneself" (123). In The Western Canon (1994), Bloom's tone changes; he speaks of Dante's "abrogating" the "true Epicurean Virgil" (55) and says that Virgil departs the poem in Purgatorio 30 because "Dante's Comedy now wholly replaces Virgil's Aeneid" (94). he adds, "Virgil and Milton remain poets who provoke immense ambivalences in those who come after them, and those ambivalences define centrality in a canonical context" (526).

3 According to J. Hillis Miller, "Harold Bloom's way of putting this is to say that the New Testament in its relation to the Hebrew Bible is the most outrageous example of 'misprision' in the history of the West, that is, of 'mistakings' or takings amiss, translation as mistranslation" (332). It should be remembered, however, that outrageous "misprision" is also characteristic of the Hebrew Bible, as in the opening chapter of Genesis when the Priestly writer translates the Enuma elish into an Israelite creation story, or in Genesis 7-9 when the Mesopotamian Flood story is transformed first by the Yahwist and then by the Priestly writer.

4 For the traditional Christian typological exegesis of the Old Testament, see Danielou, de Lubac, and Charity. Reductive readings of the Hebrew Bible that made the old text obsolete with the advent of the new were not the only way to go for medieval readers of Scripture. see Smalley 112-95, on Andrew of St. Victor and his Jewish contacts and learning. see also Dawson, who argues that modern commentators have misread Paul by imposing on his thought a binary interpretive framework that he himself did not use. "Poststructuralist conceptions of meaning, according to which the Pauline distinction between the 'letter' and the 'spirit' is cast as an irreconcilable conflict between what is literal and what is iionliteral, obscures Paul's efforts to preserve his Jewish identity. By consistently restating Pauline accounts of divine performances in history as claims about meanings in texts, Paul's complex formulations of discontinuity within continuity are transformed into mutually canceling binary oppositions" (19-20). For a Jewish response to traditional Christian readings, see Boyarin; for the letter/spirit distinction elsewhere in Dante, see Freccero 119-35; for an historian's "neutral-belief" admiration for the New Testament's "re-invention of the species," see Akenson, esp. chaps. 8-9, pp. 212-69.