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Harold Bloom Quotes

Harold Bloom is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the canon wars of the early 1990s.



✵ 11. July 1930 – 14. October 2019
Harold Bloom photo

Works

How to Read and Why
Harold Bloom: 13 quotes0 likes

Famous Harold Bloom Quotes

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J. K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”

Harold Bloom

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

Harold Bloom book How to Read and Why

Source: How to Read and Why

Harold Bloom Quotes

“Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable.”

Harold Bloom

The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 142.

“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats.”

Harold Bloom

Interview in Criticism in Society (1987), edited by Imre Salusinski.

“Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation.”

Harold Bloom

The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 142.

“Hamlet, Kiekegaard, 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.”

Harold Bloom

Jesus and Yahweh: the names divine (2005), p 10.

“The outward limit of human achievement.”

Harold Bloom

Of William Shakespeare's plays.
As quoted in The Economist, October 26th 2019, page 85.

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