Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Harold Bloom

American Literary Critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University

"A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics."

"A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality."

"Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness."

"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."

"Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties."

"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."

"All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home."

"All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life."

"All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves."

"Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth."

"At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy."

"As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what to read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of rereading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical."

"Bad writing is all the same; good writing is a scandalous diversity."

"American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ?s love for each of them."

"Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett?s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett?s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare?s Hamlet."

"Brecht was a cynical bohemian bogey of the middle classes, but also much more than a mere provocateur. He developed and dramatized his political knowledge in remarkable ways, and was an outspoken, radical opponent of the war, its nationalism and its capitalism"

"At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately."

"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."

"Beckett: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

"Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one."

"Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden."

"Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands."

"Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value."

"Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. ? From the book jacket"

"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."

"Contrary to what some say Parisians, the text is not there to give pleasure, but the high displeasure or harder pleasure a smaller text will not."

"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."

"Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)"

"Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing."

"Don?t be looking for trifles, SeĀ¤or Don Quixote, or expect things to be impossibly perfect. Are not a thousand comedies performed almost every day that are full of inaccuracies and absurdities, yet they run their course and are received not only with applause but with admiration and all the rest?"

"Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks."

"Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield."

"Exist In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read."

"Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable."

"Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths."

"For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything."

"For more than half a century I have tried to confront greatness directly, hardly a fashionable stance, but I see no other justification for literary criticism in the shadows of our Evening Land. Over time the strong poets settle these matters for themselves, and precursors remain alive in their progeny. Readers in our flooded landscape use their own perceptiveness. But an advance can be of some help. If you believe that the canon in time will select itself, you still can follow a critical impulse to hasten the process, as I did with the later Stevens, Ashbury, and, more recently, Henri Cole."

"Frye?s influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence."

"Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called aesthetic dignity. One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired."

"Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet."

"Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self."

"Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes"

"He can?t think, he can?t write. There?s no discernible talent."

"He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies."

"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."

"Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it."

"How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do."

"How to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do."

"I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough."

"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."