Harold Bloom Quotes - Page 3

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• No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

  Harold Bloom

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• 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

  Falling In Love, Real, Reading

  "Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1". Interview with Antonio Weiss in The Paris Review, Issue 118, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1991.

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• Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.

  Harold Bloom

  Jesus, Irony, Repetition

  Harold Bloom (2005). “Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine”, Riverhead Books (Hardcover)

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• In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.

  Harold Bloom

  Vocabulary, Giving, Psychology

  "Beyond a Common Joy: An Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy". Book by Paul A. Olson, 2008.

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• Literature is achieved anxiety.

  Harold Bloom

  Anxiety, Literature

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

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Aggravation, Progress

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• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Jesus, Believe, Character

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

  Harold Bloom

  People, Enough, Naive

  "Shakespeare -- Mr. Personality" by Melissa Levine, www.sfgate.com. November 15, 1998.

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• Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

  Harold Bloom

  Succeed, Sometimes, Failing

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• Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

  Harold Bloom

  Personality, Invention

  "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human". Book by Harold Bloom, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1998.

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• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Love, Blessing, Space

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• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Essence, People, Eras

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• The world gets older, without getting either better or worse and so does literature. But I do think that the drab current phenomenon that passes for literary studies in the university will finally provide its own corrective.

  Harold Bloom

  Thinking, Doe, Literature

  "Harold Bloom, The Art of Criticism No. 1". Interview with Antonio Weiss. Issue 118, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1991.

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

  Harold Bloom

  United States, Study, States

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

  Harold Bloom

  Reading, Joy, Has Beens

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• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Responsibility, Political, Lemmings

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology.

  Harold Bloom

  Philosophical, School, Thinking

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• The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.

  Harold Bloom

  Morality, Pleasure, Easier

  Source: theuntranslated.wordpress.com

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

  Harold Bloom

  Book, Reading, Matter

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

  Harold Bloom

  Strong, Enough, Milton

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

  Harold Bloom

  Men, Southern, Religion

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

  Harold Bloom

  Individuality, Needs, Poetic

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Harold Bloom

  Demon, Poet, Threshold

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

  Harold Bloom

  Successful, Thinking, Greek

  "Divine (mis)readings". Interview with Harvey Blume, archive.boston.com. November 13, 2005.

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• 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

  Teacher, Thinking, Trying

  Harold Bloom, Robert Moynihan (1986). “A Recent imagining: interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man”

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