Such an agon (a vain attempt by a writer to resolve the conflict between his ideas and those of a much more influential predecessor), Bloom argues, depends on six revisionary ratios,[2] which reflect Freudian and quasi-Freudian defense mechanisms, as well as the tropes of classical rhetoric.

Before writing this book, Bloom spent a decade studying the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century.

This is reflected in the emphasis given to those poets and their struggle with the influence of John Milton, Robert Burns, and Edmund Spenser.

Other poets analyzed range from Lucretius and Dante to Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery.

Bloom introduces his six revisionary ratios in the following manner, which he consistently applies in this book as well as his successor volume titled A Map of Misreading.