Covering cherub

Covering cherub (in literary usage) is the obstructing presence for the artist of the inherited tradition, and cultural predecessors, with which they are faced.

## Origins

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Found originally in Ezekiel, the covering cherub was adapted for use by, among others, both Milton and William Blake. In the Blakean vision, the covering cherub was a composite but always negative figure of truth's guardian turned destructive,[1] of a cruel and hardened Selfhood;[2] and it was from Blake that in 1967 Harold Bloom derived his concept of the covering cherub as a literary/cultural barrier. Apparently, a waking nightmare he experienced gave rise first to his poem on the subject, "The Covering Cherub", and eventually to his book The Anxiety of Influence.[3]

## Thematics

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For Bloom, "the Covering Cherub then is a demon of continuity...cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more".[4] Bloom considered the artistic struggle in Freudian terms, as a filial contest with a father figure carrying cultural authority[5] – an Oedipal conflict with a superego either originally modelled on a cultural hero[6] or influenced subsequently by such an ideal model.[7]

Though initially referencing a patriarchal father/son interaction, the concept of the covering cherub has also been applied to works by women writers such as Angela Carter[8] and Virginia Woolf.[9]

## Criticism

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Some critics have seen Bloom's central image as too open-ended to serve as an analytical tool, a vague series of analogies only tenuously working as Bloom desired.[10]

## See also

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* Anxiety of Authorship
* Artaud
* High culture
* Northrop Frye
* Tharmas
* Wallace Stevens
* Western canon

## References

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1. ^ D. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (2008) p. 944 and p. 926
2. ^ N.Marsh, William Blake: The Poems (2012) p. 36
3. ^ Harold Bloom
4. ^ H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) p. 39 and p. 21
5. ^ J. Childers ed., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 14
6. ^ L. Hudson/B. Jarot, The Way Men Think (1993) p. 44
7. ^ S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (PFL 2) p. 96
8. ^ Bluebeard Gothic (2012)
9. ^ M. Keane, John Milton's Paradise Lost (2013) p. 75
10. ^ J. Doane, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference (2013) p. 90-1

## External links

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* Angelus novus

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