At some point, during all his years in the wilderness, Bloom lost his faith. He decided that Blake—and, through Blake, he—had been deceiving himself. No longer did Bloom believe that real imaginative freedom was possible. It was still the duty of the poet to struggle for it, against the stifling force of his great poetic predecessors; if he avoided them, he would remain weak, a minor poet. The fight was a worthy one—a soul's crusade—but it was doomed to fail. "I really did use to believe that I could clear my optics, the inner and the outer eye," Bloom says. "I believed that the world could be remade. I thought that teaching Blake and Shelly could put people in touch with some kind of inner light. It sounds absurd now—a very beautiful delusion. But, when I was young, I did believe it."

As he was losing his faith in Blake, Bloom was undergoing a conversion, of sorts, to the ancient heretical creed of Gnosticisim. The Gnostic—whether of the Jewish, the Christian or the Sufi variety—believes that, as the result of a primal, catastrophic splitting, the universe is utterly alienated from God. All of nature—the world as we know it—was created by an evil demiurge, and is man's prison. Man himself—his body, his mind, what he calls his soul—is also wholly fallen. All that remains of God, on earth, is a spark, or pneuma—a fragment of the divine, that resides in humans, but to which they have no access without Gnostic revelation. Salvation can be achieved only by gaining "knowledge" of this spark and, thus, reuniting with the alien God. (Bloom even wrote a 'Gnostic novel', titled The Flight to Lucifer. It was a schematic, underfictionalized work, though, and he now wishes he had never published it.)

If Bloom had once, by embracing Blake's mythology, turned away from a Wordsworthian view of nature, his conversion to Gnosticism removed him infinitely further from it. Nature, he now believed, was not only not redemptive, nature was fallen and, if a man was to be saved, he was obliged to reject it completely. Gnosticism was, in many ways, ideally suited to Bloom's temperament, because it rejected all worldly authorities outside the self, and because it allowed him to hold an utterly bleak view of the universe while preserving a morsel of transcendent, visionary hopefulness.

In 1973, Bloom finally—painfully—finished the book that had begun with his nightmare. The book, The Anxiety of Influence, was dense and complicated; it employed so many obscure terms that it seemed to have been written by a kabbalistic Lewis Carroll. "We all remember the great night, at Ezra Stilis College, when Harold was going to unveil his new theory of poetry," says Perry Meisel, now a professor at New York University—then, Bloom's student. "It was very a very big event. We didn't understand a word of it"—A year after the book came out, Bloom read it, again, and was amused to discover that even he couldn't figure out what he was talking about—"but we all remembered one line: 'There are no poems, only relations between poems'."

What Bloom had done, in essence, was to distill his disappointed Romanticism through a kind of disembodied version of Freud. From Freud, he borrowed the notion that the human quest for imaginative autonomy takes the form of a son struggling to deny his origins—to be, in a sense, his own father. Thus, the poet's quest for originality takes the form of struggling against his poetic influences: struggling, that is, to appropriate and warp, or "misread", his precursor's work in such a way that, to a later reader, it would appear that the precursor had failed. It would seem that his poem was, in some way, asking to be corrected by the poem of the later poet; or as though the precursor were the weak successor to the later poet, and not the other way around. This struggle was motivated by a profound ambivalence toward the poetry's influence—"the giving that famishes the taker", as Bloom put it—and it was savage. Savage, but also tricky, underhanded. The strength of the strong poet, as Geoffrey Hartman said in an esay about Bloom, "is chiefly cunning: more Jacob's strength than Esau's, more Odyssean than Achillean. The revisionary ratios are a 'typology of evasions'."

The form of the theory was Freudian, but Freud much changed. For one thing, Bloom, unlike Freud, allowed no room for optimism; in Bloom's theory, there was no equivalent of sublimation—no acceptable substitute for the impossible goal of self-birth. A poem, Bloom wrote, was not "an overcoming of anxiety" but "an achieved anxiety". The struggle for meaning was the only meaning to be had. What's more, there was nothing sexual, or even psychological, about Bloom's theory. Bloom placed enormous emphasis on the difference between the poet-as-poet—what he called the "aboriginal poetic self"—and the human being who wrote poetry. "Anxiety" was not a psychological term. It was purely literary—having to do, only, with the relationship between one poem and another.

Bloom stressed this because he was committed to the idea that genius was a universal quality, separable from the arbitrary colorings of psychology or historical period. But, as he banished these impurities, his conception of the poet became so utterly leached of human qualities that it came to look, strangely, like the nonauthor he despised in deconstruction.