The Anatomy of Influence

From the NYTimes book review of The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life by Harold Bloom:

“The critic’s role in all this was to map the secret genealogy, uncovering the true ancestor of the belated poet, difficult to do because strong poets ingeniously masked or concealed their actual influences.”

see also:

Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence
Genealogy of Influence
Jonathan Lethem’s Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism