Harold Bloom Quotes
I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.
(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.
One reads for oneself and for strangers.
You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.
Originality must compound with inheritance.
The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.
King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.
Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.
Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.
Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.
Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.
Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.
Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.
Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.
Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.
The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.
When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation.
All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.
Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.
It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.
Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.
Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.
The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.
Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.
Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket
To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also.
I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
