Harold Bloom

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 (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and writer. He was Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, a former Professor of English at New York University, and the author of over twenty-five books.

Quotes

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

• I must say these Oxfordians are very virulent and, forgive me for saying it, very crazy people indeed.
  • Interview with In Depth for CSPAN2 (May 3, 2003), quoted in Katherine Chiljan, 'Bloom Blooper', The Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Spring 2003), p. 8

• Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation.
  • The Anatomy of Influence (2011), p. 142.

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

• The outward limit of human achievement.
  • Of William Shakespeare's plays.
  • As quoted in The Economist, October 26, 2019, p. 85.

Quotes about Harold Bloom

• Bloom is very interested in the powerful "characters" which are thrown up in the process. He celebrates Goethe's "unique and overwhelming personality", Montaigne's "highly original personality" and various critics' "vehement and colorful personalities". In this he takes his cue from Johnson, who reinvested the art of biographical criticism. For Bloom lacks Johnson's restraint; instead he is imbued with a strain of neo-romantic fervour which allows him to speak continually of the "sublime" and to invoke the principles of "strangeness" and "originality" as the canonical qualities of great writing. He is also preoccupied by the actual characters within various fictions and imagines, for example, Falstaff and the Wife of Bath in some titanic confrontation. He is not very far here from Hazlitt or Lamb, but he is a Romantic essayist who has also been touched by Pater's aestheticism. It is hard, however, to think of a better tradition for any literary critic.
  • Peter Ackroyd, 'The prophet of Bloomsbury', The Times (January 26, 1995), p. 37
  • A review of The Western Canon

• as Harold Bloom said, “You want novelty? Read the classics.”
  • Angélica Gorodischer Interview (2013)

• Like a literary Lear, Harold Bloom stands amid the storm, lamenting and fulminating as he fights to protect the kingdom of letters against what he calls the "rabblement of lemmings", the multicultural ideologues and political doctrinaires who assail it from all sides... His primary target is what he calls "The School of Resentment", the "rabblement" of "feminists, Afro-centrists, Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists or Deconstructors" who would bend literature to ideology or pull it apart in the name of social justice. But he has equal scorn for right-leaning critics who defend the Western canon on the basis of its moral authority.
  • Ben Macintyre, 'When a good read is censored by apostles of flawed ideologies', The Times (October 3, 1994), p. 7

• Harold Bloom’s theory is that all poets are in competition with their forebears, and that in paying homage to them they really distort them. I think the theory itself is flawed; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes homage is simply homage.
  • Alicia Ostriker Interview