Quotes from Harold Bloom

Poets and critics alike seek to convert opinion into knowledge, but this means opinion in the legal and not the public sense. What is it you know when you recognize a voice?

Whitman's art: to promise absolute self-revelation and give us fresh gestures of evasion, hesitation, concealment. Better thus, though Walt proclaimed: "I swear I dare not shirk any part of myself." Stevens learned from Whitman "the intricate evasions of as.

I have received many nasty letters from neo-conservatives, who denounce me because I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions.

Knowledge of what? If, as Epicurus insisted, the what is unknowable, Walt's knowledge is a personal gnosis, in which the knower himself is known by whatever can be known.

Clarissa Harlowe is a larger form than all the heroines of the Protestant will descended from her: Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot; Hawthorne's Hester Prynne; George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke; Thomas Hardy's Sue Bridehead; Henry James's Isabel Archer, Milly Theale; D. H. Lawrence's Ursula Brangwen; E. M. Forster's Margaret Schlegel; and Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe.

cannot, with Nietzsche and with Pater, believe that life can only be appreciated as an aesthetic phenomenon. But I wish to believe that, and perhaps Judaic tradition blocks me from it. Wisdom needs to be added to aesthetic splendor and cognitive power as the three stigmata or criteria of knowledge or value. But where except in Shakespeare are all three to be discovered consistently?

Saint-Beuve, para mí el más interesante de los críticos franceses, nos enseñó a hacernos una pregunta crucial acerca de cualquier escritor al que leemos a fondo: ¿Qué piensa el autor de nosotros?

What matters most (and it is the central point of this book) is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call poetic misprision.

Podemos ler só para passar o tempo ou movidos por uma necessidade declarada, mas chegará o momento em que iremos ler lutando contra o tempo.

The elliptical mode in her poetry recalls late Shakespeare but is more extreme. A daemonic drive to negate precursors while maintaining their standards of excellence distinguishes her from some recent poetical ideologues of the feminist persuasion, whether in verse or prose. They claim Dickinson as ancestor, yet they do her wrong, she being so majestical, to offer her the show of violence.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.

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

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

Shakespeare is universal.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Strong students, like strong writers, will find the sustenance they must have. And strong students, like strong writers, will rise in the most unexpected places and times, to wrestle with the internalized violence pressed upon them by their teachers and precursors.

The Anxiety of Influence

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

[Poems] are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

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.