A collection of quotes and thoughts by Harold Bloom on western-canon, books, hamlet, read, why, obituary, true, poem, love, passion, criticism, cry, believe and myth.
59 Useful Quotes By Harold Bloom On Strength, Change, Psychology And More
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Famous As:
Literary historian, Writer, Professor, Literary critic, Journalist
Harold Bloom is an eminent American literary critic and author. He is also a Sterling Professor of ‘Humanities' at ‘Yale University’. He has also written more than forty books that express his thoughts and opinions on vast range of topics including religion, literary criticism and other novels. Besides being an author, he has also been an editor and has edited several anthologies for Chelsea House publishing which revolve around literary and philosophical figures. His books and writings have been translated in approximately 40 other languages. In early 1990s, Bloom gained public recognition in the United States as a commentator during the canon wars. Following is a corpus of some famous thoughts, opinions and viewpoints that the distinguished critic has shared through his writings, interviews, public utterances, works, books and life. Go through the quotes and sayings by Harold Bloom on death, school thinking, success, progress, therapy, fails, rival, encouragement, inheritance, anxiety, live, reading, sympathy etc and get inspired.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
Harold Bloom
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.
Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Harold Bloom
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
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.
Harold Bloom
We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?
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.
Harold Bloom
Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.
Harold Bloom
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yield to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow.
Harold Bloom
Not a moment passes these days without fresh rushes of academic lemmings off the cliffs they proclaim the political responsibilities of the critic, but eventually all this moralizing will subside.
The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
Harold Bloom
If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.
Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.
To condemn Wordsworth for not writing verse of political and social protest, or for having forsaken the revolution, is to cross the final divide between academic arrogance and moral smugness.
Harold Bloom
There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.
To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude.
Harold Bloom
One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.
Harold Bloom
He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.
Harold Bloom
A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality
Harold Bloom
Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.
Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.
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
Originality must compound with inheritance.
Harold Bloom
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
Harold Bloom
A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.]
Harold Bloom
Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.
 Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God. )
 Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God. )
