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

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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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Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
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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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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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I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
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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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I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
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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.
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Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
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I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
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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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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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A superb and dreadfully moving account of the glory and subsequent murder by the Romanians of the Jewish city in Odessa. . . . Odessa is both celebration and lament and equally impressive as both.
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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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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.
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Shakespeare is universal.
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I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
Harold Bloom
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Literature is achieved anxiety.
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Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.
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There is no method except yourself.
Harold Bloom