In print since 1975, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion to Bloom's other seminal volume, The Anxiety of Influence. This finely crafted work offers instruction in how to read a poem, using Bloom's theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against the influence of precursor poems. Influence, as Bloom conceives it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. He discusses British and American poets including Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Warren, Ammons, and Ashbery. A full-scale reading of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" represents this struggle between one poet and his precursors, the poem serving as a map for readers through the many versions of influence from Milton to modern poets. Bloom centers the new preface upon a close account of Milton's elegy, Lycidas, which he considers the best poem of moderate length in English. Bloom maps Lycidas as a superb creative misreading of the elegiac tradition, from Theocritus to Spenser, with some reference also to Shakespeare -- the inevitable source of influence-anxiety for Milton. This updated edition provides a new generation of readers with an essential work in the Bloom canon. Book jacket.