Harold Bloom Quotes

• If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretensions, let them abandon the academy and go out there and work politically and economically and in a humanitarian spirit.

  Harold Bloom

• If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people.

  Harold Bloom

• I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

  Harold Bloom

• I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

  Harold Bloom

• I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

  Harold Bloom

• 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

• I don’t believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

  Harold Bloom

• Criticism starts – it has to start – with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

  Harold Bloom

• 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

• But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I’m told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society… but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

  Harold Bloom

• 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

•  Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

  Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom (32)

Birth:	11th July, 1930
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Professor, Writer

About

Harold Bloom was born in Bronx, New York, USA. He is an American literary critic, writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He has written more than 20 books of literary criticism. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He received a B.A. degree from Cornell in 1951. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1955. From 1988 to 2004, he was Berg Professor of English at New York University. He has written several books include: The Anxiety of Influence, A map of misreading, Kabbalah And Criticism, The Flight to Lucifer, The American Religion, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, How to read and why, Modern Critical Interpretations, and The Daemon Knows.

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Today's Anniversary - 17th April

Births

• 1959 - Sean Bean
• 1964 - Maynard James Keenan
• 1918 - William Franklin Beedle Jr.
• 1897 - Thornton Wilder
• 1880 - Leonard Woolley

Deaths

• 1988 - Louise Nevelson
• 1893 - Lucy Larcom
• 1835 - William Henry Ireland
• 1696 - Marie de Rabutin Chantal
• 1785 - William Whitehead