Harold Bloom Quotes

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.

~ Harold Bloom

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

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

~ Harold Bloom

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

~ Harold Bloom

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for transport.

~ Harold Bloom

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.

~ Harold Bloom

What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition.

~ Harold Bloom

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

~ Harold Bloom

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

~ Harold Bloom

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

~ Harold Bloom

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion.

~ Harold Bloom

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

~ Harold Bloom

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

~ Harold Bloom

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory pipe dreams is right also.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom

[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.

~ Harold Bloom

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

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

~ Harold Bloom

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom

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.

~ Harold Bloom