CONCEPT
Apophrades — The Return of the Dead
The highest and rarest of Bloom's revisionary ratios — the moment when the newcomer's work is so powerful that the predecessor appears, uncannily, to have written in imitation of the newcomer, the tradition itself reshaped by what came after.
Apophrades is the strangest and most powerful of Bloom's revisionary ratios — named for the ancient Athenian days of ill omen when the dead were believed to return to the houses they had inhabited in life. In Bloom's system, apophrades describes the achievement of the strongest poets: their mature work is so powerful, so commanding in its originality, that the predecessor's work begins to seem as if it were written in imitation of the newcomer. Reading Milton's Paradise Lost at its most Miltonic, one can return to Shakespeare and find, uncannily, passages that seem to anticipate Milton. The effect is illusory — Shakespeare did not anticipate Milton — but the illusion is itself the achievement. The strong poet has so thoroughly transformed the tradition that the tradition seems to have been preparing for the strong poet all along.
