02UndatedWhat Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
06UndatedWe read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
07UndatedSince ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
08UndatedTradition 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
09UndatedCanonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacketHarold Bloom / quote ↗
10UndatedAt our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
11UndatedTo deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
12UndatedI 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
13UndatedA play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
14Undated[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
15UndatedConsciousness 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.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
18UndatedReading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
20UndatedThe second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
21UndatedWhat we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
22UndatedCriticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.Harold Bloom / quote ↗
