This reinterpretation of the full sweep of English and American romantic poetry offers close readings of poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Yeats, and Stevens. It also reviews the crucial ideas of Emerson, Nietzsche, and in particular Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory of repression and defense Bloom undertakes to revise for purposes of literary criticism. contemporary criticism, from Freudian literary criticism (which he insists is neither Freudian nor literary criticism) to the New Criticism and structuralist and archetypal approaches. It is an...