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
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you,... - Pablo Neruda
  2. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. - Pablo Neruda
  3. We love the things we love for what they are. - Robert Frost
  4. I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart) I am never without it (anywhereI go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) I fear no fate (for you are my fate, my... - E.e. Cummings
  5. Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. - Plato
More Quotes By Harold Bloom
  1. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.
  2. Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
  3. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
  4. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
  5. Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.
Related Topics