Harold Bloom Quotes

All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home.

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

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.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther's outburst "Death to the Law!" which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became "Death to the Jews!" The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Proust . . . Shakespeare

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.

Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

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.

If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

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.

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.

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer.
We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
INTERVIEWER: It's always interminable?
BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

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.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

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

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.

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

One doesn't want to read badly any more than live badly, since time will not relent. I don't know that we owe God or nature a death, but nature will collect anyway, and we certainly owe mediocrity nothing, whatever collectivity it purports to advance or at least represent.

American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ's love for each of them.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

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.

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

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.

Shakespeare is universal.

Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.

Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism

Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

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

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa ... Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.

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.

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.

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.
INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits?
BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence.

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be attained only when the protagonist can separate his genius for expanding consciousness from his own passion for theatricality.

If Hamlet indeed thought not too much but too wisely, then Borges' Homer (who is also
Shakespeare) has thought not too well, but too endlessly. Partly Borges is satirizing Back to Methuselah, but he is also savaging
his own literary idealism. Without rivalry and polemic between the Immortals there is, paradoxically, no life, and literature dies .

For Borges, all theology is a division of fantastic literature. In "The Immortal" he observes with superb irony that despite their
professed belief in immortality, Jews, Christians, and Moslems venerate only this world because they truly believe only in it and bind future states to it only as rewards or punishments.

Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.

Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

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.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

There is no method except yourself.

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. 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, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality. W

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

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.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

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.

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.

For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny. Readers in our flooded landscape use their own perceptiveness. But an advance can be of some help. If you believe that the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process, as I did with the later Stevens, Ashbury, and, more recently, Henri Cole.

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.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.]

Real reading is a lonely activity.

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.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

But I can't understand a Yahweh , or a God , who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia .

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.