Quotes From "The Western Canon: The Books And School Of The Ages" By Harold Bloom

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider. Harold Bloom

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life. Harold Bloom

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment. Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character — WH Auden Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes Harold Bloom

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. Harold Bloom

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life. Harold Bloom

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice. Harold Bloom

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it. Harold Bloom

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un- Shakespearian burden. Harold Bloom

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing. Harold Bloom

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily. Harold Bloom

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality Harold Bloom

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human. Harold Bloom

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful. Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern. Harold Bloom

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, "one that expects no liberation from liberation. Harold Bloom

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home. Harold Bloom

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty. Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge. Harold Bloom

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport". Harold Bloom

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers. Harold Bloom

What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition. Harold Bloom

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters. Harold Bloom

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth. Harold Bloom

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value. Harold Bloom

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. Harold Bloom

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. — From the book jacket Harold Bloom

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

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. . Harold Bloom

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings. Harold Bloom