Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence — the "anxiety of influence," in which each new poet must struggle against the overwhelming presence of strong predecessors — has reshaped how we understand the philosophical relationship between tradition and innovation in poetry; T.S. Eliot's philosophical account of tradition in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" offers an alternative to Bloom's agonistic model — influence is not a burden but the very medium within which individual talent achieves its distinctive character; A poet writing about their literary predecessors might reflect philosophically on the concept of influence — is it a form of determination (one cannot escape the poets one has read) or of freedom (influence is chosen and transformed by the new poet's distinctive sensibility)?; Bloom's reading of Keats's anxiety about Milton, or Stevens's about Keats, produces a philosophical drama of influence in which the younger poet must "misread" the predecessor strongly enough to create space for a new vision; The philosophical question of causation is implicit in the concept of influence — to say that Pound influenced the Objectivists is to claim a causal relationship between literary works, but the nature of literary causation (how texts affect the writing of subsequent texts) is philosophically more complex than physical causation; Postcolonial critics have challenged the dominant account of literary influence — which typically runs from European centers to peripheral traditions — and argued for a model of mutual, entangled influence that acknowledges the impact of non-Western traditions on the supposedly self-originating European canon