The anxiety of influence is Bloom’s theory regarding the inevitable influence of prior works on later authors, specifically regarding poetry. Bloom developed his theory in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), in which he suggested that poets are inspired to write by other poets, which then creates an anxiety of competing with or needing to survive the eventual comparison between the new works and the old.

In The Western Canon, the anxiety of influence is both a criterion by which Bloom judges a new work by the metric of older works, and how Bloom determines the durability of the works in the canon. If a work successfully integrates the anxiety of influence caused by prior works, it shows both originality and confidence worthy of the canon. Likewise, if a work influences later works, it establishes itself as canonical.

Gnosis is a Greek term for “knowledge,” but Bloom uses it in conjunction with Gnosticism, a collection of spiritual systems that emphasize personal spirituality, or knowledge, as a gnosis that transcends dogmatic systems of authority and tradition. In Bloom’s writing, the significance of gnosis lies in his establishment of originality and individuality, or “strangeness,” in canonical works.

Often combined with the idea of “mythmaking,” Bloom sees the idiosyncratic worldviews of certain authors, like Goethe, Milton, or Whitman, as a form of gnosis that is secular, even when the author belongs to a specific religious group or denomination.

Often linked with the School of Resentment, multiculturalism, or the coexistence of multiple cultures, is one of the elements in contemporary literary studies Bloom opposes. With the advent of globalization, cultures mix with members of various cultures experiencing each other’s art, food, and values. As with the difficulties of determining what is meant by “Western,” multiculturalism is not a unified concept, and Bloom does not explain which “cultures” are specifically threatening “Western” culture. However, his basic argument against multiculturalism in literature is that elevating other culture’s literary works will inevitably involve devaluing “Western” works to accommodate multiple cultures. Instead, Bloom argues for separating canons to address different cultures without mixing cultures into a singular, overarching canon of literature, although he still insists on regarding Western writers as “universal” by default.

The Reality Principle is an element of Freudian psychoanalysis in which the ego, or self, compromises between the id, or instinct, and the super-ego, or unconscious adherence to social norms, to determine a balance between seeking pleasure and realism. Bloom, like Freud, contrasts the Reality Principle against fantasy, examining how characters and works can present the reality principle as a necessary compromise of the human experience.

Bloom frequently associates the Reality Principle with the idea of “making friends with the necessity of dying” (121), in which he analyzes pleasure and death as universal human experiences without explicitly endorsing Freud’s “Eros” and “Thanatos” drives.

The School of Resentment in The Western Canon is Bloom’s identification for Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, and Semioticians in literary studies, whom he views as antithetical to his preferred method of “experiential” reading. For each branch of literary studies that Bloom identifies, there are elements of ideology and text which influence reading, analysis, and canonization, such as Bloom’s note that Feminist critics push for the inclusion of more women in the canon of literature.

For Bloom, these schools of thought “resent” the aesthetic supremacy of writers like Shakespeare and Dante, whom they seek to displace because of their identities as white men. The result of this resentment, to Bloom, is the forced inclusion of writers of color and women in the canon through a lowering of standards regarding aesthetic value. Bloom does not consider how the predominance of white men in the canon impacts the conception of aesthetic value in the first place, and usually does not seriously engage with any of the theories he opposes.

The process of self-overhearing is first noted in Bloom’s discussion of Shakespeare, and Bloom credits Shakespeare as the first author to illustrate this process in literature. Self-overhearing is the development of a character through that character’s acknowledgement of their own speech. In hearing, or overhearing, themselves speaking, the character is prompted to identify their flaw or need for change, which then leads to a growth or development.

Bloom praises self-overhearing as an effective means of writing a dynamic character. He notes the process of self-overhearing in multiple authors after Shakespeare, including precursors to self-overhearing in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Pardoner.

“Strangeness” is the metric by which Bloom determines an author’s originality and artistic merit, making it one of the primary criteria for canonicity. However, as critics have noted, “strangeness” is subjective, since Bloom relies on his “experiential” readings of texts to determine their relative degree of strangeness. Critically, Bloom frames “strangeness” as an author’s ability to either shock the reader with their writing or assimilate the reader into the author’s way of thinking.