Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloomis 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth11 July 1930
CountryUnited States of America
Harold Bloom quotes about
I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time.
I'm talking in the millions. I can't tell you one, two, three or 10. I'm just saying that it's in the millions.
I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read,
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike -- and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two -- are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
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.
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.
Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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.
There is no method except yourself.
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
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.
To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.