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6c47ded Real reading is a lonely activity. Harold Bloom
070fa4f 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. reading poetry oscar-wilde Harold Bloom
1603601 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
cf4f8f5 We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own. Harold Bloom
c74cba7 the representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric or narrative. I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough. Harold Bloom
7851b8e 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. Harold Bloom
df37efd 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. literature canon anxiety Harold Bloom
bdef74e 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. literature reading humanity Harold Bloom
18eec1d 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. Harold Bloom
d9481e6 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
cb9c46e Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order. Harold Bloom
a86427c 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. reading western-canon Harold Bloom
bcf27e6 All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life. idealism disillusionment evangelism Harold Bloom
e66bd79 Leggiamo per porre rimedio alla nostra solitudine, anche se poi, di fatto, la nostra solitudine cresce parallelamente all'aumentare e all'approfondirsi delle nostre letture. Non riuscirei proprio a considerare il leggere come un vizio, ma va concesso che non si tratta neppure di una virtu. solitudine vizio virtù lettura Harold Bloom
b944871 The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. . . . The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature. We do not live by the ethics of the , or by the politics of Plato. Those who teach interpretation have more in common with the Sophists than with Socrates. What can we expect Shakespeare to do.. Harold Bloom
a3cbc8b 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 w.. irony ideology Harold Bloom
f091e65 Originality must compound with inheritance. identity grace-of-god heritage innovation legacy parenthood Harold Bloom
01e5ab2 At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy. individuality Harold Bloom
e7441ba We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it? Harold Bloom
b429ee9 Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God. wallace-stevens weather Harold Bloom
4ba5666 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. poetry literary-criticism Harold Bloom
b217bcb We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately." Harold Bloom
2b18cc7 Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence. Harold Bloom
4679ca1 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. shakespeare Harold Bloom
1201371 The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks. worship continuity discipleship Harold Bloom
954d97f Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. thought-life Harold Bloom
22f6ad1 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. poetry-life Harold Bloom
df53747 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. lemmings critics Harold Bloom
aa7bf9f There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us, and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life. Harold Bloom
811ea3e One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength. writing word-choice Harold Bloom
df76269 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. Harold Bloom
3a30084 Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment. reading Harold Bloom
5793eb1 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 Auer.. Harold Bloom
514e7f0 Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy. Harold Bloom
d49068d Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it. literature worship heritage legacy Harold Bloom
fd16481 Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet. Harold Bloom
975545e Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks. word-choice conventional-wisdom innovation conformity Harold Bloom
b94bc82 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. reading thought-life Harold Bloom
ef38d42 We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. Harold Bloom
8102d8e Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate. Harold Bloom
9df0af8 seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall. Harold Bloom
d51a3f6 All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home." variety continuity familiarity innovation communication Harold Bloom
ed86e2d We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. Harold Bloom
35f6c04 Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and otherness devalued. Harold Bloom
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