Covering cherub (in literary usage) is the obstructing presence for the artist of the inherited tradition, and cultural predecessors, with which they are faced.
Origins Found originally in Ezekiel, the covering cherub was adapted for use by, among others, both Milton and William Blake. In the Blakean vision, the covering cherub was a composite but always negative figure of truth's guardian turned destructive,D. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (2008) p. 944 and p. 926 of a cruel and hardened Selfhood;N.Marsh, William Blake: The Poems (2012) p. 36 and it was from Blake that in 1967 Harold Bloom derived his concept of the covering cherub as a literary/cultural barrier. Apparently, a waking nightmare he experienced gave rise first to his poem on the subject, "The Covering Cherub", and eventually to his book The Anxiety of Influence.Harold Bloom
Thematics For Bloom, "the Covering Cherub then is a demon of continuity...cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more".H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) p. 39 and p. 21 Bloom considered the artistic struggle in Freudian terms, as a filial contest with a father figure carrying cultural authorityJ. Childers ed., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 14 – an Oedipal conflict with a superego either originally modelled on a cultural heroL. Hudson/B. Jarot, The Way Men Think (1993) p. 44 or influenced subsequently by such an ideal model.S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (PFL 2) p. 96
Though initially referencing a patriarchal father/son interaction, the concept of the covering cherub has also been applied to works by women writers such as Angela CarterBluebeard Gothic (2012) and Virginia Woolf.M. Keane, John Milton's Paradise Lost (2013) p. 75
Criticism Some critics have seen Bloom's central image as too open-ended to serve as an analytical tool, a vague series of analogies only tenuously working as Bloom desired.J. Doane, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference (2013) p. 90-1
See also
References
External links Angelus novus