Found originally in Ezekiel, the covering cherub was adapted for use by, among others, both Milton and William Blake. In the Blakean vision, the covering cherub was a composite but always negative figure of truth's guardian turned destructive,^[1] of a cruel and hardened Selfhood;^[2] and it was from Blake that in 1967 Harold Bloom derived his concept of the covering cherub as a literary/cultural barrier. Apparently, a waking nightmare he experienced gave rise first to his poem on the subject, "The Covering Cherub", and eventually to his book The Anxiety of Influence.^[3]

For Bloom, "the Covering Cherub then is a demon of continuity...cultural history, the dead poets, the embarrassments of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more".^[4] Bloom considered the artistic struggle in Freudian terms, as a filial contest with a father figure carrying cultural authority^[5] – an Oedipal conflict with a superego either originally modelled on a cultural hero^[6] or influenced subsequently by such an ideal model.^[7]

Though initially referencing a patriarchal father/son interaction, the concept of the covering cherub has also been applied to works by women writers such as Angela Carter^[8] and Virginia Woolf.^[9]

Some critics have seen Bloom's central image as too open-ended to serve as an analytical tool, a vague series of analogies only tenuously working as Bloom desired.^[10]

• Angelus novus