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b941a28 Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God. poetry religion wallace-stevens weather Harold Bloom
91ef39d Reading well is one of the great pleasures experience great healing pleasures solitude Harold Bloom
836f9ed Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful. humility maturation Harold Bloom
37db0af Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider. leadership subtlety timing Harold Bloom
f90702c 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. continuity innovation Harold Bloom
56f619b Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence. Harold Bloom
31b2e3a Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form. love passion Harold Bloom
1079baf Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human. inspiration revelation Harold Bloom
bb62454 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. conventional-wisdom idolatry intimacy-with-god materialism resilience worship Harold Bloom
41fc25a A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality culture depravity heritage Harold Bloom
f2f6906 What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition. inspiration vision Harold Bloom
b842b9f Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport"." emotion intensity transcendence worship Harold Bloom
9e971a8 According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire. iago shakespeare-criticism Harold Bloom
4bb9ea9 What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther's outburst "Death to the Law!" which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became "Death to the Jews!" The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple." Harold Bloom
7a533dc We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice. literature writing Harold Bloom
7e8e11b Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy." Harold Bloom
d633b72 Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Harold Bloom
2ed350e The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William. Harold Bloom
07223fa Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds. Harold Bloom
ab95c45 Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance. Harold Bloom
8b21542 Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty. distinctiveness openness style Harold Bloom
ecbdab8 Every poet begins (however 'unconsciously') by rebelling more strongly against the fear of death than all other men and women do. poetry Harold Bloom
77278f3 To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also." -- literary-criticism the-iceman-cometh tragedy Harold Bloom
f5a34f9 Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. conventional-wisdom legacy literature self-perception Harold Bloom
ee5f42e Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth. frustrations obstacles pessimism Harold Bloom
bfc54e3 Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers. legacy perseverance Harold Bloom
ad85c00 He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies. Harold Bloom
7b8d487 Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing. discipleship idolatry vocation work worship Harold Bloom
b93f41a The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. Harold Bloom
95ff34c Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes continuity politics reading timelessness Harold Bloom
b60036d The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. 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, that solitude whose final form is one's conf.. Harold Bloom
4ced2e9 At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately. Harold Bloom
341afff Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valeer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not mer.. literature Harold Bloom
2c30a51 Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value. stewardship Harold Bloom
d537584 Don't be looking for trifles, Senor Don Quixote, or expect things to be impossibly perfect. Are not a thousand comedies performed almost every day that are full of inaccuracies and absurdities, yet they run their course and are received not only with applause but with admiration and all the rest? Harold Bloom
5075e35 The democratic age mourns the value of human beings. mortality Harold Bloom
767590c Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue." inspiration maturation reading rhetoric vocabulary word-choice Harold Bloom
37e8add We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life. literature loss reading relationships words Harold Bloom
ad2da92 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 Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One" Harold Bloom
f3612d5 The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them. Harold Bloom
ada172e One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies. bias conventional-wisdom culture perspective reading Harold Bloom
6f72ecb I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments. liberality openness optimism Harold Bloom
545cd59 Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. culture heritage legacy originally Harold Bloom
b7378e7 The inventor knows HOW to borrow. communication evangelism heritage innovation legacy Harold Bloom
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