Quotes by Harold Bloom

About Harold Bloom:

Harold Bloom is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than 20 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Harold Bloom

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

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

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

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 ...

Harold Bloom

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.

Harold Bloom

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

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 pleasur...

Harold Bloom

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

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

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.

Harold Bloom

If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many peopl...

Harold Bloom

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

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

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.

Harold Bloom

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

Harold Bloom

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Harold Bloom

Author Bio

  • NameHarold Bloom
  • DescriptionAmerican literary critic and scholar
  • BornJuly 11, 1930
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionLiterary Historian; Writer; Professor
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program