Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless,… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“I treasure ruefully some memories of W.H. Auden that go back to the middle 1960s, when he arrived in New Haven to… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike - and I don't think there really is a distinction between the… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
“You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.” — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me. — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we… — Harold Bloom Copy Share Image
