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Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

Harold Bloom

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Harold Bloom
Age: 89 †
Born: 1930
Born: July 11
Died: 2019
Died: October 14
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Professor
Writer
New York City
New York
Harold Irving Bloom
Sympathy
Admit
University
Stalinism
Totally
Stalin
Criticism
Universities
Goes
Phase
Without
Entered
Phases

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There is no method except yourself.
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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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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.
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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
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... 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.
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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.
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
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Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.
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What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that you make yourself a holy people - is nowhere present in Hebrew tradition before the end of the first or the beginning of the second century of the Common Era.
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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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You know, I don't want to be offensive. But 'Infinite Jest' [regarded by many as Wallace's masterpiece] is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it. He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.
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I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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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.
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
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