Like "sweeping leaves on a windy day"

I want to know the difference between "anxious expectations" and "influence," or rather as Bloom writes regarding the founder of contemporary literary anxieties, "Shakespeare employs the word influence in two senses: an astral influx, and inspiration." (52) Does this sense of astral influx involve divine intervention, what Stevens' would refer to as utter belief in a supreme fiction? Today friend of mine dropped by after work and we chatted for a solid two hours about this and that and I think I mostly talked about what we're learning in this class. No, I didn't bring up Wallace Stevens but we first talked about writing stream-of-consciousness, then about how the invention of the backspace-key on a PC is a plague (imagine an old, gold parchment rich with brilliant typos, or what about all the ideas untyped), then about how typewriters are the shizzznit (especially in Finding Forrester [see the video in one of my older blogs, or better yet watch the movie]), and then settled for some time discussing our beliefs in God. I told him, "I believe in God" but was emphatic that "he doesn't have any influence down here with us." My buddy then reminded me of jinxes. I thought of "you owe me a soda" but he was talking about, basically, how karma is arguably divine intervention. Point taken. We talked about a lot. He said he really didn't know what he believed, that maybe he was agnostic. I said he should be Gnostic instead because he's a pretty open-minded guy. I mentioned it because I prefer "knowing" to "not knowing." Knowledge is confidence in belief (or acquiescence to suspension of disbelief), I think. Yeah, sure why not?, that's what I think. Well, at least, that's what I think I think which gets me thinking of Bloom again when he is "speaking of the poet-in-a-poet, I mean precisely his daimon, his potential immortality as a poet, and so in effect his divinity." (12) This inner-daimon is an ever-morphing meta-poet who is a warped, alter egotistical, misread dude whose ephemeral consciousness composes and sculpts the bulk of the "materia poetica" (37).

This gets me back to thinking about us talking about early poets and old Greek gods, which in today's world are largely part of the realm of Gnostic beliefs. We talked about how the sky is simple, and how the moon is simple, and if they're so simple then why can't we complicate them. Well, as he said, "there is not an original idea." I agreed, and that's why I believe in Greek mythology because, one, there are already back stories for the sky and moon and ocean and the sun all sorts of stuff and, two, why not for the fun of it? It's a starting point; a starting point which, if my inner-genius daimon-dude takes notice, I'll have to work my way away from to become a strong poet. Gotta start fresh, I suppose, and find my own importances in the world. "Shakespeare the inventor would be admirable," Bloom says, "but few understand any more what Dr. Johnson meant by 'the essence of poetry is invention.'" (42) I understand viewing from the outside in, and if it were visa-verse then I'd actually have some pundit-worthy voice and style.
Hmm, got side-tracked, I guess the difference for now between anxious expectations and influence looks something like this analogy:
Anxious expectations : Influence : : Self-induced inspiration : Astral influx
Something like that, but please by all means correct me if I'm wrong, but here's something that maybe makes more sense:
Composing poetry is like "sweeping leaves on a windy day" (influenced and misread from The Wire).