Harold Bloom Quotes

I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet...

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps a...

[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineff...

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profound...

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classro...

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which w...

What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us ...

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not...

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we eit...

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for ...

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

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 oc...

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest....

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between...

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry i...

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We fee...

Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say p...

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myse...

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity t...

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is ri...

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be...

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me tw...

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sym...

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will...

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been in...

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my ...

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those ...

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea ...

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea...

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of p...

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the ...

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems t...