Covering cherub (in literary usage) is the obstructing presence for the artist of the inherited tradition, and cultural predecessors, with which they are faced.
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.
[3] 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".
[4] Bloom considered the artistic struggle in Freudian terms, as a filial contest with a father figure carrying cultural authority[5] – an Oedipal conflict with a superego either originally modelled on a cultural hero[6] or influenced subsequently by such an ideal model.
[7] 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 Carter[8] and Virginia Woolf.