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I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

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
Believe
Genre
Never
Believed
Critics
Criticism
Exist
Poet
Rival
Literature
Rivals
Doe
Critic

More quotes by Harold Bloom

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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.
Harold Bloom
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Harold Bloom
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In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
Harold Bloom
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The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
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I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
Harold Bloom
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What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
Harold Bloom
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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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No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
Harold Bloom
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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
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One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.
Harold Bloom
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Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves... he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.
Harold Bloom
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
Harold Bloom
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No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.
Harold Bloom
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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.
Harold Bloom
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In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
Harold Bloom