In a letter to his friend Joshua Reynolds dated 21 September 1819, John Keats revealed that he had ceased work upon his would-be epic poem Hyperion on the basis that there ‘were too many Miltonic inversions in it’. By discontinuing his poem, Keats illustrated the pernicious nature of what Harold Bloom terms ‘the anxiety of influence’. Bloom explains his theory of poetic production as follows:

Yet Bloom clearly demarcates the chronological boundaries within which his theory of poetry will operate; crucially, it will begin with the post-Shakespearean. This is not to negate the poetic output of the premodern; rather it is argued that

This conception of antediluvian poetic generosity has been questioned in recent years, not least by A. C. Spearing's conception of Father Chaucer and the Oedipal complex that he produced in his successors. Spearing argues that poets such as Hoccleve and Lydgate had to struggle in order to assert their poetic identities in the shadow of a father figure who effectively constituted the English poetic tradition. Yet I would suggest that the demarcation may be pushed further back, to the point where the Italian trecento encounters fourteenth-century England, and specifically to the poetic triumvirate of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer. Indeed, John Freccero has argued that ‘Petrarch's rivalry with Dante is possibly the first example in the West of what Harold Bloom has called the “anxiety” of influence’, thereby refuting Bloom's concept of Dantean benevolence.

The present chapter will then examine how inversions of the kind which led Keats to abandon Hyperion might also be located within Boccaccio's Filostrato. This, of course, is not to say that Boccaccio's inversions are all deliberate – Keats did not even notice his Miltonic inclination until he was some way into his poem – although some of them are so similar in nature to particular Petrarchan lyrics that they merit close inspection.