"Lęk przed wpływem" Wobec "Wielkiej Improwizacji"

The article interprets Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence from the perspective of Adam Mickiewicz’s The Great Improvisation, an instance of Polish Romantic literature. Su-perficially, this part of Mickiewicz’s Romantic drama seems to be an ideal object for reading from Bloom’s perspective. Yet, as I claim, that is because it is the Romantic writer, who makes a literary conceptualization of the anxiety of influence. The Great Improvisation is a picture of a poetic agon. My conclusion is as follows: Bloom’s theory of poetry being itself a way of reading any literary work, results from Romantic imagination and Romantic concept of originality. Thus Harold Bloom just reformulates Romantic ideas about creation and crea-tive achievements.