Anxieties of Influence: recursion and occlusion in Noel Pearson’s ‘Eulogy’ for Gough Whitlam

Abstract

Harold Bloom’s 1973 essay The Anxiety of Influence posits a poetics of ‘great poets’ who use and deny the prototype-poets and prototype-texts that influence them. Bloom’s understandings of poetic composition and reception offer a strikingly sympathetic account of much political discourse. This article focuses on the ‘Eulogy’ that Noel Pearson delivered at the funeral for Gough Whitlam in 2014, whose poetics were conspicuously informed by motives of emulation and of competitive distancing. That makes Pearson’s eulogy a particularly helpful case for testing the applicability of Bloom’s poetics in the political sphere. It also casts new light on the interrelationship between production and reception in the field of rhetoric – and, in so doing, on the importance of further research into rhetorical reception.