"Dark influences from the American past congregate among……" — Harold Bloom
"Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)"
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Harold Bloom
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66 Quotes by Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom has 66 quotes on this site.
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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a…
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All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of…
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There is no method except yourself.
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Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is…
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Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a…
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Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
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We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the…
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I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the…
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At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
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Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature…
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But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told…
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Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even…
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