Quotes from Harold Bloom

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

The 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.

We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary, particularly now that so many of the institutional purveyors of literature happily have joined in proclaiming its death. A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer (earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran.

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

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

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.

Since 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.

Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. 

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.

Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a considerare il leggere come un vizio, ma va concesso che non si tratta neppure di una virtù.

Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.

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

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.

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.

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.

Who anyway can define the borderline between gnosis and poetic knowledge? The two modes are not identical, and yet they interpenetrate one another. Are we to call the gnosis of Novalis, Blake, and Shelley a knowledge that is not poetic? In domesticating the Sufis in our imagination, Corbin renders Ibn 1 Arabi and Suhrawardi as a Blakl· and a Shelley whose precursor is not Milton but the Koran.

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.

He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.