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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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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
Enough
Milton
Even
Text
Every
Shakespeare
Crucial
Poem
Totally
Chaucer
Strong
Precursor
Ever
Exclude

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The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.
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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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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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The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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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.
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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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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.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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Information is endlessly available to us where shall wisdom be found?
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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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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmas/riddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
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I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
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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.
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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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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.
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